Weblog von Hans-Wolfgang

Sexual desire is the most powerful force in our lives. When repressed or expressed poorly, it can create difficulty. However, when sex is embraced in a mutually loving and sexually fulfilling relationship, it can take you to the heights of ecstasy and erotic passion. The most important thing to understand in life is that life is a paradox; life exists through being paradoxical. Life is not logical: it is paradoxical. It exists between birth and death, it exists between night and day, it exists between hate and love, and it exists between man and woman. It exists between the positive electricity and the negative electricity; it exists between yin and yang, between Shiva and Shakti. Just look around, look in, look out, and you will find the paradox everywhere. If life was logical, then there would have been no paradox. But life is not logical and cannot be logical. Just think of a world where only love exists and no hate -- then love will not be possible; it will disappear with hate. Think of a world where only darkness exists and no light, or light exists and no darkness... it is impossible. Where only birth exists and no death -- it would have been very logical, but it would have been very boring too. Life is dialectical, not logical. It is a movement between polarities. Those polarities are not really opposite, although they look opposite -- they are complementaries also. Hate and love are not two things; in fact it is one thing: lovehate; it is one thing: birthdeath; it is one thing: daynight; it is one thing: manwoman. It is like the peaks of the Himalayas and the valleys: the peaks cannot exist without the valleys, and the valleys cannot exist without the peaks, they are both together. And this paradox will be found on every plane, everywhere. Passionate love and cool aloofness is the paradox. The same paradox that exists between birth and death, love and hate, it is the same paradox. Only the passionately involved man knows what cool aloofness is. You will be surprised, because you have been told just the opposite up to now. You have been told that Buddha is cool, detached, far away, that the worldly man is passionate and the saintly is dispassionate, that the worldly man lives a hot life and the monk moves into a monastery and lives a cold life. That has been so up to now, but both have remained lopsided. The worldly man knows only one part of the polarity. That is his misery. He knows only heat and the monk knows only coldness.

Buddha says: NOTHING BINDS YOU. YOU ARE FREE.

This simple sutra is enough. If you can practice only these two things -- reflection and watchfulness -- nothing else is needed. You ARE free, nothing binds you. You are really freedom; nothing can ever bind you. All bondage is imaginary. You think you are in bondage; hence you are in bondage. It is your thought.

Harvey Pincus, the passionate playboy of Prospect Park, oblivious of human limitations, speeded up when he should have slowed down. To his surprise and dismay, he awoke three days later in Bellevue Hospital where he was placed on a strict diet of raw eggs and oysters with wheat germ, garnished with ginseng and soybean sprouts. A week later, his physical desires returned and, after having been rebuffed by Bellevue nurses of various shapes, sizes, ages and national origins, he demanded to be released forthwith so that he might resume his "al fresco" prowling in the Prospect Park perimeter. Pincus was soon confronted by Dr. Siegel, the hospital's staff psychiatrist. "Before we release you, you will have to take a Rorschach test," explained the medic. "What is that?" asked Pincus suspiciously. "A kind of personality gauge. I will just show you some inkblots and you tell me what each one suggests to you." "So go ahead and test." Dr. Siegel handed him the first blot. "What does this bring to mind?" "That's easy," replied Pincus instantly, his eyes lighting with pleasure. "It is a girl's hips." "And this?" asked the psychiatrist, handing him another inkblot. "A woman's breast. Very nice, too." "Hmm -- how about this one?" "Wow, Doctor, what a gorgeous pair of legs!" Siegel had already reached an obvious conclusion about his patient's proclivities, but he continued with a half-dozen more inkblots just to make sure. When Pincus continued to respond as though all the "pictures" were sexual symbols, right up to the last blot, the doctor leaned back in his chair and rendered his diagnosis. "My dear fellow," he began, somewhat severely, "in case nobody ever told you, you have an abnormal fixation on sex." "What does that mean, if I may be so bold to inquire?" "It means, sir," Siegel explained bluntly, "that you have a filthy mind." "Well, look who's talking!" Pincus yelled, outraged. "YOU are showing me all those dirty pictures and I'VE got a filthy mind!"

Lao Tzu says:

THE GREATEST SKILL APPEARS LIKE CLUMSINESS,

THE GREATEST ELOQUENCE SEEMS LIKE STUTTERING.

The greatest skill -- why does it seem like clumsiness? Because the man of the greatest skill is not self-conscious about it.

Have you seen Picasso's paintings? He is one of the greatest painters ever and to those who have seen his paintings the idea immediately comes that they look like children's paintings. That is the greatest skill -- it looks like clumsiness, but you don't know. Try a Picasso painting yourself, then you will know. It is more difficult than great classical painters.

A Michelangelo is absolutely perfect but not total; Picasso is more total. A Michelangelo creates beauty which is not of this world or of another world, it is just abstract. Picasso paints the real. If the real is ugly, then in Picasso's painting it is there. The beauty is there, the ugliness is there, the wisdom is there, the foolishness is there -- life is a totality.

A wise man will be able to see the wisdom in Picasso's paintings but it is child-like -- small children do paintings the way Picasso does them. But don't think that he was not trained; he was trained, disciplined. Then one day he became so perfect that he dropped all training and all discipline -- it was not needed now. Now he could paint like a child.

The greatest poet doesn't bother about grammar; it is for amateurs, the beginners, to bother about grammar. A great poet in fact by and by forgets language itself, he creates his own language. A great poet is unclassifiable, you cannot classify him. Only ordinary poets look at the grammar, the metre, they follow all poetics. They will look perfect to you because you cannot find a single fault in them. A great poet will have many faults because life has many faults; a perfect poet will not have any faults but then his poetry will not be alive. Only a dead body cannot err. 'To err is human,' they say. Taoism says: 'To err is to be alive.' Only life can err. Life has no perfect touch about it, and that's the beauty -- it is childlike. So when a culture reaches to the highest peaks of its being everything becomes childlike: the greatest painter starts playing with the paint.

When you create a fiction you create many problems. If nobody asks any questions it is okay, but if somebody starts asking questions, your fiction is going to be exposed. So there are religions who believe that before God nothing existed, God created everything. Now the question arises, from where? Just out of nothing? And if he could create out of nothing this whole universe, why did he wait so long? Christians say only four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ he created the world. So what was that dodo doing all the time for eternity? Just sitting in his rocking chair? But there is no mention of a rocking chair in any holy scripture. He must have been doing something. Any fiction will create problems. To avoid that, Mormons say God created the world from pre-existing material so he is not producing the world out of nothing. But they forget that you can patch up your fiction from one side; the hole will appear on another side. From where did this pre-existing matter come? Who created it? There must be another God, bigger. But it will lead you into an infinite regress. That bigger God will also create the world and your first God out of pre-existing material. Who created that? Now you will be simply going into stupidity. The Mormons are strange people -- nice, intelligent, and still believing in such stupid things! The leader of the Mormons had seven or eight wives. If God is the creator of this whole world, at least the leader of the Mormons can create a little world out of eight wives -- a big family. And that was their idea, that if all the Mormons marry many women, then sooner or later Mormons will be ruling over the world: just go on creating children. But a strange idea, that God is a material thing.... This does not solve anything, it creates more problems. Other religions have the problem that God is a spiritual being and he creates the world -- but the problem is: a spiritual being, from where does he get all this matter? He is spiritual, just pure spirit. He cannot take out from himself any matter, but he cannot take it out from anywhere else, because that will mean the matter was already in existence. To avoid the difficulty Mormons believe God is a material thing, and now they fall into a bigger ditch: a material thing can create other material things? Matter cannot create matter. And matter cannot be worshipped either. Matter cannot be prayed to. What is the difference between the matter you walk upon and the matter that God is? To avoid one difficulty, they fell into another difficulty.

In Hindi they have a beautiful proverb. In India donkeys are used by the washerman to carry clothes to the river. And then after the washing he again puts the clothes on the donkey and takes them to every house he collected them from in the morning. So the proverb is: "Your life is just like the donkey of a washerman." He is never at the house nor even at the river, always in between, going from the house to the river, going from the river to the house. The washerman's donkey simply means schizophrenia. You are always half in every act, but because the whole humanity is schizophrenic you don't realize it. You love but you hate the same person you love. What has created this hate? It is because you love this woman, and this woman is the gateway to hell. You are bound to hate her too. You make friends in the evening, by the morning you become enemies. You go on moving away and you go on coming together. This goes on continuously -- the washerman's donkey. Is it possible for man to live without God? It is only possible WITHOUT God to live totally, to live meditatively, to live fully. Sigmund Freud's statement is worth remembering. Because he worked his whole life on sex, he thought sex was the root of all problems. But he never understood that it is not sex that is the problem, it is the suppression of sex that is the problem. The priest is the problem, the God is the problem, the holy scriptures are the problem; sex is not the problem. Sex is such a simple thing. All the animals are enjoying sex; none of them go to the couch of a psychoanalyst or to the psychiatrist because he is feeling schizophrenic. They are all living and enjoying, there is no problem. The pagans lived very joyously before religions, particularly Christianity, destroyed them from the earth. They had no idea of any sin. They loved women, they danced, they drank, they played music. Their whole life was sheer joy. But Sigmund Freud has this one statement: "The priests cannot destroy sex." But they have succeeded in poisoning it. They could not succeed in destroying sex, otherwise there would have been no humanity. Sex is there, but they have destroyed the joy in it, they have made it a great sin. So you are committing the sin, and you think the woman is the cause. The reality is totally different; it is God. But as God is only a fiction he cannot do anything. The priest is the representative, the spokesman of God, who goes on creating all kinds of guilt feelings in you. Those guilt feelings don't allow you to live. Everything is wrong, everything is a sin. It is only possible for man to live if he is without God. But this is only half. The fictitious God has to be replaced by an actual experience of truth in meditation; otherwise you will go insane.