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Chapter 2 - Just see it
Life can be lived either with utility as your very style or it can be lived as a playfulness.
Music, love, flowers, stars, poetry, painting, dancing, all belong to the inner world. I am not against knowledge; when you are doing something in the world use your knowledge. There, to use wisdom is foolish; there, sitting in a car and meditating is dangerous. There, you should use all your efficiency, all your knowledge, all your know-how; but you should not be confined to it. You should not become obsessed with it, you should be able to go inside. When the work is over you should be able to close the doors to the outside world and return to the inner. Then dance, sing, meditate, love, live. One should be flexible, liquid.
This misunderstanding, Geetam, is possible with me, but you can see my approach if you don't bring your own mind in. I am not telling you to renounce the world for the simple reason that you can always use your knowledge. Sitting in a cave in the Himalayas you will not be able to use your knowledge. And the outside world is as beautiful as the inside world -- if we can have both, why choose one?
My whole message is that you can eat the cake and have it too, so why go for half?
Knowledge is useful in the outside world, in the inside world it is a hindrance. And the same is true about the inner wisdom: it is of immense joy inside, but don't try to use it outside.
Both things have been done. The West has lived through knowledge only, hence it has lost the inner dimension, it has lost the inner flowering, it has lost contact with its own being. The East has done the reverse: thinking that knowledge is useless it has become non-scientific, non-utilitarian, so its outside world has become shrunken. It is poor, ugly, unscientific.
The West has lost contact with its own soul and the East has lost contact with its own body. And man is a dance of these two complementaries; these two are partners in the dance.
These two are like two wings: you cannot fly into the sky with one wing alone, with one wing you will fall. The West has fallen, the East has fallen; both have proved to be utter failures.
We need a new kind of human being who has both wings: the wings of knowledge, science, technology, and the wings of meditation, enlightenment, love, freedom. When both wings are functioning in a deep synchronicity, in a deep togetherness, in accord and harmony, then only man is complete, total.
Knowledge is not needed for the inner world. About the inner world, you ask: THEN WHAT IS NEEDED TO GUIDE US TO THE ULTIMATE GOAL?
There is no ultimate goal -- let it be clear from the very beginning. There is no goal as such, hence there is no question of there being an ultimate goal. All that is, is immediate -- let me repeat, IMMEDIATE. There is nothing ultimate anywhere; the immediacy itself is the ultimate. And there is no goal; the pilgrimage itself is the goal. Each step is the goal, each moment is the goal.
For that, knowledge is not needed because knowledge is a guidance for goals, for achievements. For that, that goal-less immediate life, innocence is needed not knowledge.
Innocence, like a child, what Dionysius calls a "luminous ignorance" -- exactly that is needed; a luminous ignorance, an enlightened state of not-knowing.
You always think in terms of enlightenment as if it were the ultimate in knowing
-- you are wrong. Enlightenment is the ultimate state of not-knowing; it is luminous ignorance, it is Osho - The Goose is Out
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