25 Aug You can divide the humanity of the past into those who are spiritual and those who are materialists (OSHO)
Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into those who are spiritual and those who are materialists. But nobody has bothered to look at the reality of the human being. We are both together. We are neither just spirituality–not just consciousness–nor are we just matter. We are a tremendous harmony between matter and consciousness. Or perhaps matter and consciousness are not two things but only two aspects of one reality: Matter is the outside of consciousness, and consciousness is the interiority of matter. But there has not been a single philosopher, sage, or religious mystic in the past who has declared this unity; they were all in favor of dividing the human being, calling one side real and the other side unreal. This has created an atmosphere of schizophrenia all over the earth.
You cannot live just as a body. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone”–but this is only half the truth. You need consciousness, you cannot live by bread alone, true–but you cannot live without bread, either. You have both dimensions to your being, and both dimensions have to be fulfilled, to be given equal opportunity for growth. But the past has been either in favor of one and against the other, or in favor of the other and against the first. Man as a totality has not been accepted.
This has created misery, anguish, and a tremendous darkness; a night that has lasted for thousands of years and seems to have no end. If you only listen to the body, you condemn yourself to a meaningless existence. And if you don’t listen to the body, you suffer–you are hungry, you are poor, you are thirsty. If you listen only to consciousness, your growth will be lopsided. Your consciousness will grow, but your body will shrink and the balance will be lost. And in the balance is your health, in the balance is your wholeness, in the balance is your joy, your song, your dance.
The materialist has chosen to listen to the body and has become completely deaf as far as the reality of consciousness is concerned. The ultimate result is great science, great technology–an affluent society, a richness of things that are mundane, worldly. And amidst all this abundance there is a poor human being without a soul, completely lost–not knowing who he is, not knowing why he is, feeling almost like an accident or a freak of nature.
Unless consciousness grows along with the richness of the material world, the body becomes too heavy and the soul becomes too weak. You are burdened by your own inventions, your own discoveries. Rather than creating a beautiful life for you, they create a life that is felt by intelligent people to be not worth living.
The East in the past has chosen consciousness and has condemned matter and everything material, the body included, as maya. They have called it illusory, a mirage in a desert that only appears to exist but has no reality in itself. The East has created a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Patanjali, a Kabir, a Farid, a Raidas–a long line of people with great consciousness, with great awareness. But it has also created millions of poor people, hungry, starving, dying like dogs–with not enough food, no pure water to drink, not enough clothes, not enough shelter.
A strange situation. . . . In the developed countries every six months they have to drown millions and millions of dollars’ worth of foodstuffs in the ocean, because it is surplus. They don’t want to overload their warehouses, they don’t want to lower their prices and destroy their economic structure. On the one hand, in Ethiopia a thousand people are dying every day, and on the other hand the European Common Market is destroying so much food that the cost of destroying it is in the millions of dollars. That is not the cost of the food; it is the cost of taking it and throwing it into the ocean. Who is responsible for this situation?
The richest man in the West is searching for his soul and finding himself hollow–without any love, only lust; without any prayer. He has no sense of spirituality, no feeling for other human beings, no reverence for life, for birds, for trees, for animals. Destruction is so easy–Hiroshima and Nagasaki would never have happened if people were not thought to be just things. So many nuclear weapons would not have been piled up if the human being had been considered to be a hidden god, a hidden splendor–not to be destroyed but to be discovered, not to be destroyed but to be brought into the light, with the body as a temple for the spirit. But if a human being is just matter–just chemistry, physics, a skeleton covered with skin–then with death everything dies, nothing remains. That’s why it becomes possible for an Adolf Hitler to kill six million people–if people are just matter, th0ere is no question of even thinking twice.
The West, in its pursuit of material abundance, lost its soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it cannot find its own humanity. All the success of science proves to be of no use–because the house is full of things, but the master of the house is missing. In the East, the end result of centuries of considering matter to be illusory and only consciousness to be real has been that the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you.
Zorba the Buddha is the answer. It is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, everything that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being–the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.
The whole of existence is both material and spiritual–or perhaps just one energy expressing itself in two ways, as matter and as consciousness. When energy is purified, it expresses itself as consciousness; when energy is crude, unpurified, dense, it appears as matter. But the whole of existence is nothing but an energy field. This is my experience, it is not my philosophy. And it is supported by modern physics and its research: Existence is energy.
We can allow ourselves to have both the worlds together. We need not renounce this world to get the other world; neither have we to deny the other world to enjoy this world. In fact, to have only one world while you are capable of having both is to be unnecessarily poor.
Zorba the Buddha is the richest possibility. We will live our nature to its utmost and we will sing songs of this earth. We will not betray the earth, and we will not betray the sky either. We will claim all that this earth has–all the flowers, all the pleasures–and we will also claim all the stars of the sky. We will claim the whole existence as our home.
The Book of Understanding
Osho
