The moment you become weak you begin to feel more frustrated, because now you are more easily defeated. And you cannot do anything about it: the weaker you get, the less possibility there is of overcoming the pull of the body and the more you have to fight it.

So the first thing is not to think in terms of division. This division – physical and spiritual, material and mental, consciousness and matter – is just a linguistic fallacy. The whole nonsense is created out of language.

For example, if you say something, I have to say yes or no. We have no neutral attitude. Yes is always absolute; no is also absolute. There is no neutral word in any language. So De Bono has coined a new word, po. He says po should come to be used as a neutral word. It means: “I have heard your point of view. I say neither yes nor no to it.”

Use po, and the whole possibility changes. Po is an artificial word that De Bono took from hypothesis or possibility or poetry. It is a neutral word with no evaluation in it, with no condemnation, no appreciation, no commitment, neither for nor against. If someone is insulting you, just say “po.” Then feel the difference inside you. A single word can make so much difference. When you say “po,” you are saying, “I have heard you. Now I know that this is your attitude toward me. You may be right; you may be wrong. I am not making an evaluation.”

Language creates division. Even great thinkers go on creating things linguistically that are not there. If you ask them, “What is mind?” they say, “It is not matter.” If you ask them, “What is matter?” they say, “It is not mind.” Neither matter nor mind is known. They define matter by mind and define mind by matter. The roots remain unknown. This is absurd, but it is more comforting to us than to say, “I don’t know. Nothing is known about it.”

When we say, “Mind is not matter,” we feel at ease – as if something has been defined. Nothing has been defined. Mind and matter are both unknown, but to say, “I do not know,” would be ego-deflating. The moment we divide, we feel we have become masters of things about which we are absolutely ignorant.

Ninety-nine percent of philosophy is created by language. Different languages create different sorts of philosophies, so if you change the language, the philosophy will change. That is why philosophy is not translatable. Science is always translatable, but philosophy is not. And poetry is even more untranslatable because it depends on a particular freshness of language. The moment you change the language, the flavor is lost; the taste is lost. That taste belongs to a particular arrangement of words, a particular use of words. They cannot be translated.

So the first thing to remember is not to begin with division. Only then do you begin rightly. I do not mean to begin with the concept that “I am one.” I do not mean that. Then again you begin with a concept. Just begin in ignorance, in humble ignorance, with a basis of “I do not know.”