Logic is not the way to life

Question 1:

Milarepa, I am in absolute agreement with you. Do you see the contradiction? Logic has interpreted that which is complementary as contradictory. And logic rules our education, our minds, so whenever we see two complementary things, immediately the idea of contradiction arises. Otherwise, in one interrelated existence, how could there be contradiction?

Complementariness is essential. For example, the day and night are not contradictory; they are complementary to each other. Nor are life and death contradictory; they are complementary to each other. They make one whole, one circle, complete and entire. But seen through the eyes of logic, it is hard to believe that life and death are not contradictory.

It seems obvious that death is the end of life; that is not true. Death is only a beginning of a new life - a refreshment, a rejuvenation. The old body is tired. You need more experiences to become mature. You have to move through many other forms of life, and there are millions of forms of life.

Moving through all these forms of life, learning by and by, step by step, inch by inch, you arrive at humanity. Humanity gives you a new opportunity of transformation, to jump out of the circle of life and death and to become part of the eternal. Those who achieve it have really lived. Those who have missed may have to learn again the old route. Who knows how many lives it takes to recognize that humanity is a point of departure, not only from death, but also from life - life as you know it - to a new immortality, to a life which can be equivalent to godliness.

Logic has created many misunderstandings. It goes on insisting on the duality of things without seeing the interconnecting link.

I am reminded of one incident. Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammadali Jinnah, both were fighting for the freedom of India. There was only one difference between them. That was, Muhammadali Jinnah wanted Pakistan as a separate country, only for Mohammedans - a Moslem state - and Gandhi wanted the whole of India to remain one big and vast country. They fought continuously, and the British empire depended on their agreement. Unless they agreed... the British empire went on saying: "You are not in agreement yourselves, and we don't want to leave the country in a chaos.

If we leave it in a chaos, without any decisive guidelines, there will be tremendous massacres, and the whole responsibility will be ours."

This was their politics. Jinnah was very stubborn. Finally, seeing the situation - either you have to remain slaves or you have to divide the country - Gandhi agreed on the division. India became two countries.

What I want to point out is that they both had become so much attached in fighting with each other, that they were almost intimate friends. Jinnah felt, in Karachi, the capital of Pakistan, very lonely without Gandhi; he lost all interest. And here in New Delhi, Gandhi, who used to say that he was going to live to one hundred and twenty-five years, dropped the idea and said, "I want to die as soon as possible. There is no joy."

On the surface, logic will say that these two persons were contradictory to each other, enemies to each other. But deep down there seems to be an intimacy. Jinnah was the head of his government in Pakistan. Gandhi was nobody; his disciples were running the government. Just one year after he was shot by a Hindu, which no one could have ever thought... It was possible that he might be shot by a Mohammedan, but he was shot by a Hindu. Life has its own way.

It looks strange, but deep down there is a certain connectedness. With Gandhi being alive, the Hindus in India would not be the only power, because there were Mohammedans, there were Jews, there were Christians, there were Jainas, there were Buddhists. And Gandhi wanted to make an absolutely secular state. Jinnah did a good job; he got rid of almost all the Hindus in Pakistan and made a Mohammedan state, a religious state.

Gandhi could not do that. And if Gandhi was alive, then he would prevent anything along those lines. And the strangest thing is that India has the greatest Mohammedan population in the whole world. No other country has... even today, after the division of Pakistan on one side, Bangladesh on another side, India has the biggest Mohammedan population. It is the biggest Mohammedan nation.

So the fear of the Hindus was, "Soon these Mohammedans, who produce children more efficiently and are allowed by the constitution to have religious freedom - and each Mohammedan can marry four women... Soon they will be the majority in the country. Again Hindus will be living under Mohammedan rule."

Gandhi had to be removed. And the moment the news reached all over India that Gandhi had been shot, everybody, without any exception, thought that he must have been killed by a Mohammedan.

I told my father, "I don't think so, because Mohammedans have achieved what they wanted. They wanted a separate country - they have got a separate country. Whatever their demands were, they have been fulfilled. Why should they kill Mahatma Gandhi, who is not in their way at all? He was certainly killed by a Hindu."

And unfortunately that Hindu came from Poona. But the day Gandhi was killed, and the news reached Karachi... That whole year Muhammadali Jinnah had not had guards, security, because he could not think that any Mohammedan could kill him. He had given them a whole country which did not belong to them.

He was sitting in the garden talking to his secretary when the news came on the radio that Gandhi had been assassinated by a Hindu. Suddenly Muhammadali stood up, and his secretary had to support him because he was staggering. He was so much shocked by the very idea: a Hindu killing Mahatma Gandhi! Then what was possible became clear to him - he could also be killed by a Mohammedan.

And actually he was killed by Mohammedans, but in such a slow way that it did not look like assassination. He was old and sick, and since Mahatma Gandhi had died he never left his bed.

Everybody said, "You should be happy that Gandhi is dead." He said, "I feel very hollow without him.

He was my joy, we were party to a game. Now I am alone. Now there is nobody with whom I can play the old game. Now there is nobody who is exactly my contemporary. My only contemporary was Mahatma Gandhi; he is dead."

He became sick and to his closest disciple, Liyakat Ali Khan, he gave the position of acting head of the country, because he was not able to work. And what Liyakat Ali Khan did... Just now the diary of the doctor who looked after Muhammadali Jinnah has been published. Liyakat Ali Khan moved Muhammadali Jinnah to a remote part of Pakistan where there was no medicine, no hospital - if you asked for any medicine it would take three weeks to reach - no railway lines, no airport, nothing, with the argument that the climate would suit him. Now he was in power.

And only a doctor was given to Jinnah, not even a nurse or a servant to look after him. And the doctor's remembrance is, "It was a political murder done in a very diplomatic way." There would be periods of three weeks when there was no medicine. The doctor would go on giving information that medicine was needed absolutely immediately, and after three weeks the urgent medicine would arrive.

My own feeling is also that Jinnah was killed. And the doctor reports in his book, "To me Jinnah confided a strange secret: 'I have committed a mistake by dividing India and Pakistan.'" This is a very strange thing.

His whole life he fought for Pakistan, and at the end he says, "I committed a great mistake, and now there is no going back. I am too old and Gandhi is not alive. If I had a little health left, I would have flown to New Delhi, to Jawaharlal, and said to him, 'Drop this idea of two countries. It is foolish.'" But with Gandhi he could never agree.

Were they enemies or complementaries? Ordinary historians will say they were enemies - they were not. Jinnah had immense respect for Gandhi, and so was the case with Gandhi. Agreement or non-agreement on political matters was one affair, but love for each other was a totally different thing.

You will not believe that Gandhi had offered Jinnah, "I will make you the first prime minister of India, but let India remain undivided. And you can choose your cabinet. I will not interfere, and I will withdraw Jawaharlal and others who are contenders. They are my people; I can tell them to withdraw, let Jinnah have his government. I trust you; the country will not suffer in your hands, it will prosper in your hands. Your intelligence, your caliber, your character - everything makes it reasonable that you should be the first prime minister of the whole country. Why be the head of a small section of the country when I am offering you the whole continent of India?"

But Jinnah refused. He said, "I never accept anything. I fight for it and I win it. Your idea is good, but it is your idea." They fought their whole lives and both suffered. Gandhi was continually enquiring about Muhammadali Jinnah's health: "How is he? Is he still the same warrior, with the same sharp intelligence?" And the same was true on the other side.

I am just giving you an example from human reality. When your enemy dies, something in you dies too; you are no longer the same. The enemy was also part of your being. You may not have thought about it in that way, that he was complementary to you. On a wider scale the whole existence is complementary. But Aristotle, who created Western logic, could not understand this complementariness. He is thought to be the father of logic - he is not even the uncle, because his whole logic by and by is proving to be wrong.

In the East, we have a totally different logical approach. It is in tune with life. Those who are not accustomed to it will say it is contradictory, it is inconsistent. But those who can understand, they can see the underlying connectedness.

One morning a man asked Gautam Buddha, "Do you believe in God?" And Buddha said, "God?

God does not exist. The question of belief does not arise." And he said it so strongly.

In the afternoon, another man came and he asked, "Does God exist?" And Buddha said, "Yes, absolutely yes. Without God, life would be just dead, unconscious. God is the intelligence of existence."

And in the evening another man came and he said, "I don't know from where to begin. I am not a thinker; I don't know whether God exists or does not exist. I have not yet taken a partisan view.

Would you help me to see the reality?"

Gautam Buddha, listening to him, did not answer, but closed his eyes and went into deep meditation.

The man, seeing the beauty and the grace of Buddha meditating, himself fell... You know that kind of experience: if you are sitting with a few people and one man goes on yawning, soon you start feeling sleepy also. We are not islands, we are connected, so things enter into each of us. And a man of the quality of Buddha, with such tremendous silence, created such an atmosphere that the man fell into that silence; he also closed his eyes.

After one hour, Buddha shook him and asked him, "Have you received the answer?" The man touched Gautam Buddha's feet and he said, "I am grateful. There is no question and there is no answer. There is only pure silence in the inner being of man, and that silence goes on spreading into the innermost core of the universe. But there is no question, no answer. Life is very innocent. I am grateful that you showed me the way."

Ananda, who remained always by Gautam Buddha's side to take care of him... he was very much puzzled because he had heard all three answers. In one God does not exist; in one God exists; in another, the question does not arise. When everybody had left, Ananda asked Gautam Buddha, "Don't disturb my sleep. I will not be able to sleep with such kinds of contradictory answers. One expects you to be consistent. If you say yes then go on saying yes, if you say no then that is your answer. But what kind of answer is this?"

Buddha said, "Ananda, I have told you many times: those were not your questions and I was not answering you."

Ananda said, "I know, I have also heard you saying to me all kinds of things. But one thing is certain, I have ears and they hear. I cannot close my ears when you are answering somebody. I have heard all the three answers and they are all contradictory."

Gautam Buddha said, "Just for your sleep's sake... I would like to say to you, the first man who had come to me was an atheist - a confirmed atheist, well-known atheist. He wanted me to say something that supported him. He was not a seeker, he was not really on a quest. I had to shatter his ego. And the same was the case with the other man. He had come with a prejudice and he wanted to be supported in his prejudice. And that would be very unkind, to support anybody's prejudice. I destroyed his prejudice. You simply heard those answers, you did not see what was the undercurrent.

"The undercurrent was the same: to destroy the prejudice, to destroy the belief and to bring those people to real, authentic experience. That's why I did not answer the third man, because he had no prejudice. He was so innocent that to tell him something would have been a crime. So all that I could do was, I went into meditation, and around me in the deep silence of the night... And he was an innocent man; he also fell into silence. He experienced for the first time his own inner peace - no question, no answer. And he was grateful. He touched my feet, saying that I had solved his trouble."

The work of a master is very complex because he is working with so many people of different prejudices, different conditionings - and he has to shatter them all and make people absolutely clean, just as they were born, knowing nothing. But that knowing nothing was such a beautiful flower in the child. It filled him with wonder.

Knowledge kills wonder. Not knowing fills you with mysterious experience.

When the child opens his eyes and sees the birds and the sunrays and the trees and the greenery...

and so many colors. He cannot describe them; he does not know even their names. But he lives almost in paradise. In his innocence is paradise.

Milarepa, my effort here is to make you as innocent as a child. I am teaching no belief system, so the question of contradiction does not arise. No philosophy is my preaching, so contradiction does not arise. My effort is to demolish all the rubbish that you have collected down the ages. If I can remove all that rubbish from your mind and can give you a clean sky, my work is done.

Without knowing, you will know. The mystery, the mysterious, the poetry of life, the music and the dance... all will become available to you.

A truck driver is racing down the freeway at seventy miles per hour when suddenly a face appears level with his left-hand cab window. The driver leans over and sees that a man is standing on the saddle of his motorbike, steering with one foot on the handlebar.

The truck driver rolls down his window, and the biker holds up a cigarette and says, "Have you got a light?"

"I have," says the driver holding out his lighter, "but you'd better be careful or you'll kill yourself."

"No, I won't," replies the biker, "I only smoke three a day."

Logic is not the way to life - it leads away. The path that leads to life consists of a clarity just like that of a mirror: it reflects everything but holds on to nothing.

Aristotle, although considered to be the father of Western logic, was not much of a logician. He has written in his books that women have less teeth than men. And he had two wives; any night he could have counted his wives' teeth. But no, in Greece it was just as in other lands: a prejudice against women, that they must have something less than men, they cannot be first-class citizens on any grounds - even about teeth.

This man gave many ideas which worked up to a point and then flopped, because they were not coming from an enlightened being, they were not coming from a deep meditation. They were just superficial thinking. Today there has come into existence a new logic: non-Aristotelian logic.

Following logic, Euclid made his geometry. Now, because the father figure is falling, Euclid has been losing ground every day. There has come into existence a non-Euclidean geometry.

You can enforce on small children stupid ideas - for example, that two parallel lines never meet.

But nobody asks, "Can you draw two parallel lines? - exactly parallel?" It is impossible. Whatever you create is going to meet - maybe miles away, but parallel lines meet because parallel lines are created by human beings, who cannot do anything with absolute perfection.

Euclid goes on saying, "The definition of a line is that it has length, only length." But can you draw a line which has only length? However thin it is, it will have something more than length. He defines a point as that which has no length, no breadth; can you make a point without length or breadth, howsoever small it is?

Now every concept of Euclid is being questioned. And Euclid is only a logical extension of Aristotle.

Aristotle is not a sage; he is simply a thinker. And a thinker cannot come to conclusions which can be true - only in appearance. Only the sage can see reality as it is. It is Aristotle who divided the world into two: the material and the spiritual.

It is such a coincidence, interesting coincidence, that the spiritual world is called the metaphysical.

And the reason is only that in his book he has chapters, and after the chapter on physics comes the chapter... he does not call it metaphysics, he simply says that there are things which are not confined to the physical world. But because the chapter comes after the chapter on physics - meta means after, metaphysics means after physics - it has taken a strange meaning.

But existence is one. You may divide it arbitrarily for certain purposes, but never for a moment forget that your division is arbitrary. Existence is one solid whole. Matter is nothing but spirit condensed; spirit is matter which has come to blossom - the difference between the seed and the flower.

It is not a difference, because the seed contains the flower and the flower contains many seeds.

So it is a circle, it is not a division. All divisionary ideas are dangerous. The East also has grown its own logic, but it is not Aristotelian. Buddha's logic is a fourfold logic. If you ask him, "Is there God?" he may say, "Perhaps." Perhaps is not an answer. If you ask, "Is there any doubt?" he will say, "Perhaps"; "Are you not certain?" he will say, "Perhaps."

Mahavira extended the idea of "perhaps" to the very extreme. His logic is sevenfold. It is one of the most complicated ideas, but very representative of reality, because he says, "Whatever you say contains only one aspect of reality. What about other aspects? You have to make other statements."

According to him, unless you make seven statements you will not be able to cover the whole reality.

But those seven statements are going to be contradictory to each other.

Ask him, "What about God?" and he says, "God is." And immediately he says, "God is not." And following that, "God is both: is, is not." And he continues, "God is both not: neither is nor is not." And he finalizes, "God is indefinable."

Mahavira could not gather many followers for the simple reason that only very crazy people will accept such a thing. People want definite answers. But existence is a flux, it is not definite; it is changing, it is moving. It has all aspects possible. In some way you can say, "Yes, it is true." And in some way you can say, "It is not true."

In a court, a man was on the witness stand. There had been a murder. Another witness had said that the murder had happened inside the house, and this witness said that the murder happened under the open sky.

The judge was a little puzzled. Both men were trustworthy, of integrity. Then his clerk told him, "Don't be puzzled, both are right. The house was being built, but the roof had not been put on it. So the murder happened in the house, but it happened under the open sky."

If you watch life, you will find so many things which logically don't fit. But that simply means you have not gone deep enough; otherwise they have to fit. They are part of this existence.

Paddy is called as the prime witness in an assault case but gets things a little mixed up in his account of the affair.

"It was Dennis who started it all, your honor," begins Paddy. "He trod on my foot. So I pushed him off and smacked him on the jaw. Just then, his dog ran up and I hit him again."

"Hit the dog?" asks the judge. "No, your honor, I hit Dennis. Then I picked up a stone and threw it at him and it rolled him over and over."

"Threw a stone at Dennis?" asks the judge. "At the dog, your honor. Then he got up and hit me again."

"The dog?" asks the judge. "No, Dennis. And with that he stuck his tail between his legs and ran off."

"Dennis?" asks the judge. "No, the dog," says Paddy. "And when he came back at me, he got me down and pounded me, your honor."

"The dog came back at you?" asks the judge. "No, Dennis, your honor. And he was not hurt at all."

"Who was not hurt?" asks the judge. "The dog, your honor," says Paddy.

The judge scratches his head and fines the dog ten dollars.

After an unfruitful evening at the village dance, Ned begins his long, lonely walk back to the farmhouse. When he is halfway home the rounded, moonlit shapes of the big pumpkins in the fields remind the horny young fellow of so many shapely female asses. Settling down next to one of the pumpkins, he cuts a whole in the side and begins to get physical with it.

Suddenly a voice cries out, "Hey, you! What the hell are you doing with that pumpkin?"

Ned bolts upright, sees the policeman's badge glinting in the moonlight, and thinking quickly blurts out, "Pumpkin? What pumpkin? Oh, Christ, is it midnight already?"

Paddy decides to try life in the army and gets sent to a training camp. One night, he comes back from an exercise covered in cow shit.

"Why are you late back in camp?" snaps the sergeant major.

"Sorry, sir," says Paddy, "but as we crossed that field full of cows my hat blew off, and I had to try on thirty before I found it again."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.