Birth turns into death. God knows from what kind of foolishness and during what unfortunate times the idea became fixed in the human mind that birth and death are dichotomous, that life and death are two separate things. We want to live; we don’t want to die – but we don’t know that death is already part of life. Once we decide we don’t want to die, it becomes a certainty, that very moment, that our lives will be filled with problems and difficulties.

The whole of mankind has become schizophrenic. Man’s mind is split into parts, into fragments, and there is a reason for this. We have taken the totality of life as if it were made up of parts, and we have pitted each part against the other. Man is the same, but we have created divisions inside him and have also determined that these divisions are contrary to each other. We have done this in all spheres. We tell a person, “Don’t be angry, be forgiving,” without realizing that the difference between anger and forgiveness is again only of degrees – as it is between cold and hot, between childhood and old age. We can say that anger, reduced to the lowest, is forgiveness – there is no dichotomy between them. But all the age-old precepts of mankind teach us, “Get rid of anger and adopt forgiveness” – as if anger and forgiveness are such opposite things that you can drop anger and retain forgiveness. Such a thing can only result in splitting man into fragments and in bringing him trouble.

All of our past belief systems say that sex and brahmacharya, celibacy, are contrary to each other. Nothing can be more erroneous than this. The lowest point of sex is brahmacharya. Sex, dropping downward, decreasing, is brahmacharya. The distance between the two is not one of enmity and contradiction. Remember, in this world there is nothing at all like contradiction. In fact, there can never be anything like contradiction in the world, because if there were, there would be no way to unite the opposites. If birth and death were separate entities, birth would move along its own course and death on its own – nowhere would they meet. Just as two parallel lines don’t meet anywhere, no meeting would ever take place between birth and death.

Birth and death are intertwined, they are two ends of a continuum. When I say this, what I am actually saying is that if man is to be saved from going insane in the near future, we will have to accept life in its totality. We can’t afford any longer to create divisions and to pit one part against the other.

It is so strange that one who says, “Sex is contrary to brahmacharya, so let’s get rid of sex,” will himself be ultimately destroyed in his attempts to get rid of sex. Such a person can never attain brahmacharya. Striving to cut off sex from his life, his mind will remain fixed on sex alone – there is no way he can ever attain brahmacharya. His mind will be in great tension and trouble forever – right there, that’s his death. His life will become too onerous. He will become heavy and won’t be able to live at all – not even for a moment. He will be in great trouble.