CHAPTER 12
Balancing the rational and the irrational
21 October 1971 pm in
Question 4
WHAT FACTORS DO YOU ATTRIBUTE THE WESTERN YOUTH REVOLT TO, AND WHY ARE SO MANY YOUNG PEOPLE FROM THE WEST NOW BECOMING INTERESTED IN EASTERN RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY?
Mind is a very contradictory thing. It works in polar opposites. But our logical way of thinking always chooses one part and denies the other. So logic proceeds in a non-contradictory way, and mind works in a contradictory way. Mind works in opposites, and logic works linearly.
For example, the mind has two possibilities: to be angry or to be silent. If you can be angry it does not mean that at the other extreme you cannot also be non-angry. If you can be disturbed it does not mean that you cannot be silent. The mind goes on working in both ways. If you can be loving you can be full of hatred also. One doesn’t deny the other.
But if you are loving you begin to think you are incapable of hate. Then hate goes on accumulating inside and when you reach the peak of your loving, everything shatters. You sink into hate. And not only does the rational mind work like that; society does also.
The West has come to a peak of rational thinking. Now the irrational part of the mind will take revenge. The irrational has been denied expression and in the last fifty years it has been taking its revenge in so many ways: through art, poetry, drama, literature, philosophy, and now, even through living. So the revolt of the young is really a revolt of the irrational part of the mind against too much rationality.
The East can be helpful to those in the West because the East has lived with the other part of the mind: the irrational. It has also reached a peak: a peak of irrationality. Now young people in the East are more interested in communism than in religion, more interested in rational thinking than in irrational living. As I see it, the whole pendulum will turn now. The East will become like the West, and the West will become like the East.
Whenever one part of the mind reaches a peak, you move to the opposite. That is what always happens in history. So in the West now, meditation will be more meaningful. Poetry will gain a new hold and science will decline. Modern-day Western youth will be anti-technological, anti-scientific. This is a natural process, an automatic balancing of the extreme.
We have not yet been able to develop a personality that combines both polarities, that is neither Eastern nor Western. We have always chosen only one part of the mind and the opposite part remains hungry, starved. Then there is bound to be rebellion. Everything that we have worked to develop will be shattered, and the mind will move to the other polarity. This has happened throughout history; this has been the dialectic.
For the West now, meditation will be more meaningful than thinking because meditation means no- thinking. Zen will be more appealing, Buddhism will be more appealing, yoga will be more appealing. These are all irrational attitudes toward life. They do not emphasize conceptualizations, theories, theologies. They emphasize a zest to move deep into existence, not into thinking. As I see it, the more grip technology has on the mind, the more likely it is that the other pole will be coming.
The revolt of young people in the West is very meaningful, very significant. It is a historical point of change, a whole change of consciousness. Now the West cannot continue as it has been. A point of deep crisis has come. The West will have to move in another direction now.
The whole society in the West is affluent now. Individuals have been affluent before, but never the whole society. When a society becomes affluent, riches lose their meaning. They are meaningful only in a poor society. But even in a poor society, when someone becomes really affluent he is bored. The more sensitive a person is, the sooner he becomes bored. A Buddha is just bored. He leaves everything.
The whole attitude of modern youth is one of boredom with an empty affluence. The youth are leaving the society, and they will go on leaving it unless the whole society becomes poor. Then they will not be able to leave. This leaving, this renunciation, can exist only in an affluent society. If it is taken to an extreme, the society will decline. Then technology will not progress, and if this continues the West will become like the East is today.
In the East they are turning to the other extreme. They will create a society just like that of the West. The East is turning to the West and the West is turning to the East, but the disease remains the same. As I see it, the disease is the imbalance, the acceptance of one thing and the denial of the other.
We have never allowed the human mind to flower in its totality. We have always chosen one part against the other, at the cost of the other. This has been the misery. So I am neither for the Eastern way nor the Western way. I am against both, because they are partial attitudes. One should choose
neither the East nor the West; they have both failed. The East has failed by choosing religion and the West is failing by choosing science. Unless both are chosen there is no way out of this vicious circle.
We can change – from one extreme to the other. If you talk about Buddhism in Japan, no young person is ready to listen. They are interested in technology, and you are interested in Zen Buddhism. In India, the new generation is not interested in religion in the least. They are interested in economics, in politics, in technology, engineering, science – in everything except religion. Youth in the West is interested in religion while youth in the East is interested in science. This is just changing the burden from one extreme to another. The same fallacy will still exist.
I am interested in the total mind, in a mind that is neither Eastern nor Western, that is just human – a global mind. It is easy to live with one part of the mind, but if you want to live with both parts you will have to live a very inconsistent life – inconsistent superficially of course. On a deeper layer you will have a consistency, a spiritual harmony.
Man remains spiritually poor unless the opposite polarity is also a part of him. Then he becomes rich. If you are simply an artist and have no scientific mind, your art is bound to be poor. Richness comes only when the opposite is there. If there are only males in the room, the room lacks something. The moment females enter, the room becomes spiritually rich. Now, the polar opposites are both there. The whole becomes greater.
The mind must not be fixed. A mathematician will be richer if he can move into the world of arts. If his mind has the freedom to move away from its main fixations and then back to them again, he will be a richer mathematician. Through the opposite, a cross-breeding happens. You begin to look at things in a different way. Your total perspective will be richer.
A person should have a religious mind along with scientific training, a scientific mind along with religious discipline. I see no inherent impossibility in it. On the contrary, I think the mind will become more alive if it can move from one to the other. To me, meditation means an ability to move deeply in all directions, a freedom from fixations.
For example, if I become too logical then I become incapable of understanding poetry. Logic becomes a fixation. Then when I listen to poetry, my fixation is there. The poetry looks absurd. Not because it is, but because I have a fixation with logic. From the viewpoint of logic, poetry is absurd. On the other hand, if I become fixated on poetry then I begin to think of logic as just a utilitarian thing, with no depth in it. I become closed to it.
This denial of one part by the other has been happening throughout history. Every period, every nation, every part of the world, every culture has always chosen one part and created a personality around it. The personality was poor, lacking much. Neither the East has been rich spiritually nor the West. They cannot be. Richness comes through opposites, through the inner dialectic. To me, neither the East is worth choosing nor the West. A different quality of mind must be chosen. By that quality I mean that one is at rest with oneself, without choosing.
A tree grows. We can cut down all the branches except one and allow the tree to grow only in one direction. It will be a very poor tree, very ugly, and ultimately it is bound to be in deep difficulty
because a single branch cannot grow by itself; it can grow only in a family of branches. A moment is bound to come when the branch will feel it has reached a cul-de-sac. Now it cannot grow anymore. For a tree to really grow it must be allowed to grow in all directions. Only then will the tree be rich, strong.
The human spirit must grow like a tree: in all directions. The concept that we cannot grow in opposite directions must be dropped. Really, we can grow only if we grow in opposite directions. Up until now we have been saying that one must specialize, one must go in one specific direction only. Then something ugly happens. One grows in a specific direction, and he lacks everything. He becomes a branch, not a tree. And even this branch is bound to be poor.
Not only have we been cutting the branches of the mind, but we have been cutting the roots. We allow only one root and only one branch, so a very starved human being has developed all over the world: in the East, in the West, everywhere. Then those in the East are attracted to the West and those in the West to the East, because one is attracted to what one lacks.
Because of the needs of the body, the East has begun to be attracted to the West. Because of the needs of the spirit, the West has begun to be attracted to the East. But even if we change positions, change attitudes, the disease remains the same. It is not a question of changing positions; it is a question of changing the whole perspective.
We have never accepted the whole human being. Somewhere sex is not accepted. Somewhere else, the world is not accepted. Somewhere else, emotion is not accepted. We have never been strong enough to accept everything that is human, without condemnation, and to allow human beings to grow in every direction. The more you grow in opposite directions, the greater will be the growth, the richness, the inner affluence. Our total perspective must change. We must move from the past to the future – not from East to West, not from one present to another present.
The problem is so arduous because our fragmentation has gone so deep: I cannot accept my anger, I cannot accept my sex, I cannot accept my body, I cannot accept my totalitySomething has to
be denied and thrown away. This is evil, this is bad, this is sin.I have to go on cutting branches.
Soon I am not a tree at all, not an alive thing. And the fear is always there that the branches I have denied can come up again, can grow again. I become fearful about everything. Disease sets in: a sadness, a death.
We go on living partial lives that are nearer to death than to life. One must accept the total human potentiality, bringing everything within oneself to a peak without feeling any inconsistency, any contradiction. If you cannot be authentically angry, you cannot be loving. But this has not been the attitude up to now. We have been thinking that a person is more loving if he is incapable of anger.
Question 5
BUT SUPPOSING THE TREE IS GROWING NEXT TO A WALL. ITS BRANCHES CANNOT GROW BECAUSE THE WALL IS THERE. THE WALL MAY BE SOCIETY, ITS EXISTING CONDITIONS. HOW CAN THE TREE GROW WHEN THERE IS A WALL NEXT TO IT?
There are many walls. But those walls have been created by the trees, not by anyone else. The trees have been supporting the walls. It is through their cooperation that the walls exist. The moment the trees are no longer ready to support the walls, they will drop, shatter.
The walls that exist around us are our creation. Because of the attitudes of the human mind, we have created these walls. For example, you teach your child not to be angry by telling him that if he becomes angry he will not be a loving child. Then you create walls around him that tell him he must suppress his anger, without realizing that if he suppresses his anger his capacity to love will be destroyed simultaneously. Anger and love are not incompatible things. They are two branches of the same thing. If you cut one, the other becomes poor, because the same sap runs through every branch.
If you really want to train your child for a better life, you will teach him to be angry authentically. You will not say, “Do not be angry.” You will say, “When you feel angry, be authentically angry, totally angry. Do not feel guilty about the anger.” Rather than telling him not to be angry, train him to be rightly angry. When the right moment is there he should be authentically angry, and he should not be angry at the wrong moment. The same is true for love. When the right moment is there, he should be authentically loving; and if it is the wrong moment for him, he should not be loving.
It is not a question of choosing between anger and love. The question is between right and wrong, authentic and inauthentic. Anger must be expressed. A child, when he is really angry, is beautiful – a sudden flush of energy and life. If you kill the anger, you are killing the life. He will become impotent. For his whole life he will not be able to be alive; he will move like a dead corpse.
We go on creating concepts that create walls. We develop attitudes and ideologies that create walls. These walls are not imposed on us; they are our creations. The moment we become aware, the walls disappear. They exist because of us.
Question 6
BUT SUPPOSE THE TREE, THE PERSON, IS BASICALLY HANDICAPPED? THEN HE CANNOT CHANGE. NOT BECAUSE HE DOESN’T WANT TO, BUT BECAUSE HE CAN’T.
The handicapped are not problems. When the whole society is alive, we can treat them. We can analyze them, help them. They have to be helped; they cannot do anything by themselves. But the society plays a part even in their helplessness.
For example, the son of a prostitute is handicapped because of our moral concepts. He feels a deep guilt for something that he is not at all responsible for. How can he help it that his mother was a prostitute? What can he do about it? But the society goes on behaving differently toward the boy. Until we have a different attitude toward sex, his guilt about being the son of a prostitute will continue.
Because we have made marriage sacred, prostitution is bound to be considered a sin. But prostitution exists because of marriage. It is part of the whole system of marriage.
As the human mind is, a permanent relationship is unnatural. One will continue to live with the same person indefinitely only if the law requires it. It must not be the law. It must not be forced on me
that if I love someone today I must also love this same person tomorrow. It is not a requirement of nature. There is no intrinsic necessity that tomorrow the love will be there. It may be; it may not be. And the more you force it to be there, the more impossible it becomes. Then prostitution enters from the back door. Unless we have a society that allows free relationships, we cannot end prostitution.
If a relationship continues, you feel good about it; your ego feels good. To fulfill your ego – that you are a faithful husband or a satisfying wife – the prostitute has to be condemned. Then the son of the prostitute has to be condemned and it becomes a disease. A sickness is created in him.
But these are exceptional cases. If someone is medically or psychologically ill we have to help him, treat him. But the whole society is not like that. Ninety-nine percent is our creation; one percent is the exception. The one percent is not the problem at all. If the other ninety-nine percent of society changes, even the one percent will be affected by it.
We cannot decide yet to what extent your physiology is determined by your mind. The more we know, the more uncertain we become. Many diseases in the body may be there just because of your mind. Unless one’s mind is free, he cannot know for sure that the disease is originating in the body.
So many diseases are just a human phenomenon. They do not occur in animals. Animals are more healthy, less diseased, less ugly. There is no reason why man cannot be more alive, more beautiful, more healthy. The training that we have gone through for ten thousand years, this long training of the mind, may be the root cause of it. But when you yourself are part of the same pattern, you cannot even conceive of this.
Many physical diseases exist because of a crippled mind. And we are crippling everybody’s mind! The first seven years of a child’s life are the most significant. If you cripple the mind, after that it becomes more difficult to change it. But we go on crippling, and with a good conscience. The more deeply psychology penetrates into the roots of the mind, the more parents seem to be criminals, but unknowingly, the more the teachers and the educational system seem to be criminals, but unknowingly. They also suffered from the older generation. They are only passing on the disease.
But now a new possibility has opened up. For the first time, particularly in the West, man is free from his day-to-day needs. Now we can experiment with new possibilities for the mind. It was impossible to do this in the past, because bodily needs were such a heavy burden, so unfulfilled. But now the possibility is there. We live on the threshold of a deep revolution, a revolution such as human history has never encountered. A revolution in consciousness is possible now. With more facilities to know and understand, we can change. Much time will be needed, but the possibility is open to us. If we dare, if we have courage, it can become an actuality.
The whole humanity is at stake. Either we will go back to the past or to a new future. It is not a question of a third world war, not a question of communism or capitalism. These problems are out of date now. A new crisis is nearby. Either we will have to decide that we want to have a new consciousness, and work for it, or we will have to fall back, to regress to the old patterns.
To regress is also possible. Whenever a crisis is there, regression is the tendency of the mind. Whenever you face something that you cannot face, you regress. For example, if this house is
suddenly on fire, you will begin to behave like children. When the house is on fire you need more maturity, more understanding, you need to behave in a more aware way, but instead you regress to about the age of five and begin to run around in such a way that you create more danger for yourself.
The sad possibility is that if we try to create a new human being we will face a situation that is altogether new to us and we may regress. There are even prophets who preach regression. They want the past to come back: “A golden age existed in the past. Go back!” But to me, that is suicidal. We must go into the future, however hazardous and difficult it may be.
Life must move to the future. We must find a new mode of existence. I am hopeful that this can happen. And the West has to be the ground of its happening, because the East is nothing but the West of three hundred years ago. Problems of sustenance and survival weigh heavily upon the East, but the West is free of all this.
When young people from the West come to me, I am always aware that they can either progress or regress. And in a way they have been regressing, behaving like children, like primitives. That is not good. Their revolt is good, but they must behave like a new kind of man and not like primitives. They must create within themselves the possibilities for a new consciousness.
Instead, they are just drugging themselves. The primitive mind has always been enchanted with drugs, hypnotized by them. If those who are dropping out of society in the West begin to behave like primitives, it is not a rebellion but a reaction and a regression. They must behave like a new humanity. They must proceed toward a new consciousness that is total, global and accepting of all the inconsistent potentialities in a human being.
The difference between animals and man is that animals have fixed potentialities while man has infinite possibilities. But they are only possibilities. Man can grow, but this growth must be helped. We must open up centers throughout the world where this can happen.
The mind must be trained in a logical, rational way, but it must be simultaneously trained in irrational, non-rational meditation. The reason must be trained, and at the same time the emotions. Reason must not be trained at the cost of the emotions. Doubt must be there, but trust also.
It is easy to be trusting without any doubt, and it is easy to be doubtful without any trust. But these simple formulas will not do now. Now we must create a healthy doubt, a persistent doubt, a skeptical mind that exists simultaneously with a trusting mind. And the inner being must be capable of moving from one to the other: from doubt to trust, and back again. With objective research, one must be doubtful, skeptical, cautious. But there is another dimension adjacent to this where trust gives the clues not doubt. Both are needed.
The problem is how to create the contrary polarities simultaneously. This is what I am interested in. I will go on creating doubt and will go on creating trust. I do not see any inherent inconsistency in it, because for me it is the movement that is important, the movement from one pole to another.
The more we are fixed on one pole, the more difficult it becomes. For example, in the West you have cultivated activity. But you cannot sleep well. When you go to sleep and the mind needs to move from activity to inactivity, it cannot. You go on turning in your bed; the mind goes on being active.
In order to sleep, you have to take a tranquilizer. But a forced sleep cannot give you much rest; it is just superficial. Deep down, the turmoil goes on. The sleep becomes a nightmare.
The opposite has happened in the East. The East can sleep well, but cannot be active. Even in the morning the Eastern mind feels lethargic, sleepy. For centuries they have been sleeping well and doing nothing else, while you have done much, but you have created unease, a dis-ease. And because of this dis-ease, everything you have done is useless. You cannot even sleep!
That is why my emphasis is to train the mind for activity, for inactivity and, most significant of all, for movement – so that you can move between the two. The mind can be trained to move from one to the other. From any activity, in a single moment I can move to inactivity. I can talk with you for hours and in a single moment I can move to a deep, inner silence with no talking going on. And unless this possibility is created in you, your growth will be stunted.
The future has to allow there to be a deep harmony between inner polarities. Unless this movement between opposites is created, human inquiry is finished. You cannot move ahead. The East is exhausted and the West is exhausted. You can change the perspective of the two but then, within two centuries, the same problem will again come up. If you just exchange one attitude for the other, you begin to move in a circle.
Question 7
BUT HOW CAN ONE KNOW WHAT ARE THE RIGHT GOALS TO ASPIRE TO IN LIFE IF EVERYTHING IS TO BE ACCEPTED?
The very search for goals is part of the rational process. The future exists because of reason. That is why for animals there is no future and no goal. They live, but there is no goal. Reason creates ideals; it creates goals; it creates the future. The real problem is not what is the right goal. The real question is whether to have goals or not.
The new generation is asking whether to have goals or not. The moment you have a goal, you begin to turn away from life. You begin to mold life according to your goals. The present becomes less meaningful. It has to be molded, adjusted to the future.
A goal-oriented mind is reason, and a life-oriented mind is irrationality. So it is not a question of how to have the right goals. The question is how to make it so that reason is not the sole phenomenon of the mind.
Reason has to have goals; it cannot exist without them. But this must not become dictatorial; it must not be the only branch growing. Reason must exist, it is a necessity, but there is an empty part of the human mind that cannot have goals, that can exist just like animals, like children. It can exist only here and now. This empty part, this irrational part, experiences the deeper realms of life, of love, of art. It has no need to go into the future, so it can go deep into the here and now. Reason must be developed, but this part must be developed simultaneously.
There have been scientists with very deeply religious personalities. This can happen in two ways. Either it can be a deep harmony, or it can be just closing one aperture and opening another, without
any harmony. I can be a scientist and then I can leave my scientific world and go to church to pray. Then the scientist is not praying. It is not a harmony really; it is a deep bifurcation. There is no inner dialogue between the scientist and the worshipper. The scientist has not come to church at all. When this man goes back to his lab, the worshipper is not there. There is a deep division between the two; they do not overlap. In such a person you will find a dichotomy not a harmony. He will say things that he himself feels guilty to have said. He will make statements as a scientist that go against his mind as a worshipper.
So many scientists have led schizophrenic lives. A part of them is one thing, and another part is something else. This is not what I mean by harmony. By harmony I mean you are capable of moving from one to the other without ever being closed to either. Then the scientist goes to pray, and the religious man goes to the lab. There is no division, no gap.
Otherwise, you will become two persons. Ordinarily we are many people; we have multi- personalities. We become identified with one, and then we change gears and become something else. This gear changing is not a harmony. It creates a very deep tension in your being. You cannot be at ease with so many identities. An undivided consciousness, capable of moving to the polar opposite, is possible only when we have a concept of the human being as intrinsically one – when there is no denial of opposites.
Doubt is part of a scientist’s work. Trust is also a part. They are two aspects that look at different dimensions of the same thing. So a scientist can pray in his lab; there is nothing wrong in it. Doubt is part of his work, an instrument of his work, and so is trust. There is no inherent dichotomy. When one can move easily, smoothly, from one to the other, even the movement is not felt. You move, but the movement is not felt. Movement is only felt when there is some obstacle. When there is a deep harmony, no movement is felt.
One thing more: when I say “East” and “West” I do not mean that in the West there have been no Eastern minds and in the East there have been no Western minds. I am talking about the main current. Sometime we should write a history of the world in which the world is not divided geographically but psychologically. In it, the East will have many faces from the West and the West will have many faces from the East.
So I do not mean that both trends do not exist in the West. I mean that the main current in the West has been toward rational growth, even in religion. That is why the church became so dominant.
Jesus was an irrational man, but Saint Paul had a very scientific mind, a very rational mind. Christianity belongs to Saint Paul, not to Jesus. With such an anarchic man there is no possibility of such a big organization. It is impossible. Jesus was Eastern but Saint Paul was not.
There has been a conflict between science and the church. Both are rational. Both tried to rationalize religious phenomena. The church was bound to be defeated, because religious phenomena themselves are irrational. Reason fails as far as religion is concerned. That is why the church had to be defeated, and science was victorious.
In the East there has been no fight between science and religion because religion has never claimed anything within the realm of reason. The two do not belong to the same category, so there is no fight between them.
Question 8
HOW IS IT THAT RELIGION BECOMES RATIONAL?
This happens not because of the religion itself, but whenever religion has to be systematized, the phenomenon happens. A Buddha or a Jesus is not after any ideal. They live spontaneous lives; they grow in their own way. They grow like wild trees, but then the wild trees become ideals for their followers. The followers begin to have patterns, preferences, truths, condemnations.
Religion has two parts. One, a deeply religious personality who is spontaneous, and two, the followers who create the creed, the dogma, the discipline according to the ideal. Then an ideal exists for Buddhists – “One must be like Buddha” – and suppressions are created. You have to destroy yourself in many ways, because only then can you become the ideal. You have to become an imitation.
To me, this is criminal. A religious personality is beautiful, but a religious creed is just a rational thing. It is just reason encountering a nonrational phenomenon.
Question 9
DIDN’T BUDDHA HAVE A RATIONAL MIND?
He was very rational, but he had very irrational gaps. He was at ease with the irrational also. The concept we have of Buddha is not really of Buddha, but of the traditions that followed. Buddha was an altogether different thing.
Because we cannot do otherwise, we have to go through Buddhists to reach Buddha. They have created a long tradition of two thousand years, and they have made Buddha very rational. He was not so. You cannot be if you are deep into existence. You have to be irrational many times – and Buddha is! But to know this, we have to put aside the whole tradition and encounter Buddha directly. It is very difficult, but it can happen.
If I am talking to a rational person, unconsciously he discards all that is not rational. But if I am talking to a poet, the same sentence and the same words signify something different. A rational man cannot look at the poetry of the words. He can look only at the logic, the argument. A poet sees the words in a different way. The words have a shade of color, a poetry that is not connected at all with any argument.
So the faces of Buddha differ according to the person who is seeing him. Buddha existed in India in a period when the whole country was going through a crisis of everything irrational: the VEDAS, the UPANISHADS, the whole mysticism. The movement against all this was very great, particularly in Bihar where Buddha was.
Buddha was charismatic, hypnotic. People were impressed by him. But the interpretation of Buddha was bound to be rational. If Buddha had lived at another time in history, in a part of the world that was not against mysticism, he would have been seen as a great mystic, not as an intellectual. The face that is known belongs to the history of a particular time.
As I see Buddha, he was not primarily rational. The whole concept of nirvana is mystical. He was even more mystical than the UPANISHADS, because the UPANISHADS, however mystical they look, have their own rationality. They talk about transmigration of the soul. Buddha talked about transmigration without a soul. It is more mystical. The UPANISHADS talk about liberation, but you will be there. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes nonsense. If I cannot be in that ultimate state of existence, then the whole effort is useless, illogical. Buddha said the effort is to be done – and you will not be there. It will just be nothingness. The concept is more mystical.
Question 10
WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT PEOPLE REGRESSING, DO YOU MEAN REGRESSING IN COMPARISON TO SOME IMAGE THAT HAS BEEN CREATED BY THE SOCIETY OF WHAT IS SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE?
Not an image. Something different. When I say they are behaving like children, I mean they are not growing. They are regressing, moving backward. I do not have any image of what they should conform to. I have a concept of growth, not an image to be followed. I do not want people to become adjusted to a particular image at all. What I am saying is only that they are regressing back to the past and not growing toward the future. I have no image of how I want the tree to grow – but it must grow; it must not regress. It is a question of growth or regression, not of any image.
Secondly, when I say they are regressing, I mean they are reacting against a too rational society. Their reaction goes to the other extreme. It contains the same fallacy. Reason must be absorbed, not left out. If you leave it out, you are committing the same error as when irrationality is left out.
The Victorian era created a man who was just a facade, a mask. He was not a living being inside. He was a pattern of behavior, a pattern of mannerisms – more a face and less a being. This was possible because we chose only reason to be the criterion of everything. The irrational, the anarchic, the chaotic, was pushed away, suppressed. Now that the anarchic side is taking revenge, it can do two things: it can be destructive or creative.
If it is destructive then it will be regressive. Then it will take revenge in the same manner – by denying. It will deny the rational part. Then you become just like children: immature. You go backward.
If the anarchic side is creative, it must not commit the same error. It must absorb reason along with the irrational. Then the whole being will grow. Neither one who has denied the irrational nor one who has denied the rational is growing.
You cannot grow unless you grow totally. I am talking about growth. I have no image of what one must grow into.
Question 11
AREN’T A LOT OF THE PROBLEMS OF THE WESTERN MIND THE RESULT OF THE SIN-AND- GUILT IN CHRISTIANITY?
Yes, that is bound to be. The concept of sin creates a very different consciousness around it. This concept is lacking in the Eastern mind. Rather, it is substituted for by the concept of ignorance. In Eastern consciousness the root of all evil is ignorance not sin. Evil is there because you are ignorant. So the problem is not of guilt but of discipline. You have to be more aware, more knowing. In the East, knowledge is transformation – and meditation is the instrument for that transformation.
With Christianity, sin became the center. And it is not only your sin. It is the original sin of humanity. You are burdened with a concept of sin. This creates guilt, tension. That is why Christianity could not really develop meditative techniques. It only developed prayer. What can you do to fight sin? You can be moral and prayerful!
There is nothing like the Ten Commandments in the East. An overly moral concept is not there. So the problems in the East are different from the West. With people who come from the West, guilt is the problem. Deep down they feel guilty. Even those who have revolted feel guilty. It is a psychological problem, concerned more with the mind and less with the being.
First, their guilt has to be released. That is why the West had to develop psychoanalysis and confession. They were not developed in the East because they were never needed. In the West you have to confess. Only then can you get free from the guilt that is deep inside. Or you have to go through psychoanalysis so that the guilt is thrown out. But it is never thrown out permanently, because the concept of sin remains. The guilt will accumulate again. So psychoanalysis and confession can only be a temporary help. You have to confess again and again. They are only temporary helps against something that has been accepted. The root of the disease – the concept of sin – has been accepted.
In the East it it not a question of psychology, it is a question of being. It is not a question of mental health. Rather, it is a question of spiritual growth. You have to grow spiritually, to be more aware of things. You do not have to change your behavior, but to change your consciousness. Then the behavior follows.
Christianity is more concerned with your behavior. But behavior is just peripheral. The question is not what you do; the question is what you are. If you go on changing what you are doing, you are not really changing anything. You remain the same. You can be a saint outwardly and still be the same being inside.
The problem of those coming from the West is because of the guilt they have about their behavior. I have to struggle with them just to make them aware of their deeper problem – which is of the being, not of the psyche. Buddhism and Jainism have also created guilt. Not the same kind of guilt, but guilt in a different way. Jainas in particular have created a very deep feeling of inferiority. Guilt in the Christian sense is not there because there is no question of sin, but there is a deep feeling that unless one goes beyond certain things, one is inferior. This deep inferiority works in the same way as guilt.
Jainas have not created any meditative techniques either. They have only created different formulas: Do that. Do that. Don’t do thisThe whole concept is centered around behavior. A Jaina monk is
ideal as far as his behavior is concerned, but as far as his inner being is concerned he is very poor. He goes on behaving just like a puppet. That is why Jainism has become a dead thing.
Buddhism is not dead in the same way because a different emphasis is there. The ethical part of Buddhism is just a consequence of the meditative part. If behavior has to be changed, it is just as a help to meditation. In itself, it is meaningless. In Christianity and Jainism it is meaningful in itself. If you are doing good, then you are good. For Buddhism this is not the case. You have to be transformed inwardly. Doing good can help, it can become a part, but meditation is the center.