Watching it, you start a new force within yourself which is synthesis. You come to a point when you know love and hate are one. This is a great synthesis – the dualism is finished. But with the finishing of dualism your life comes to a static point. You have grown above love and hate, and there will be a kind of compassion – that will be the synthesis. You don’t hate, you don’t love, but you have a certain compassion for both friends and enemies. But compassion again becomes a simple thing.

That’s why the synthesis always turns into a thesis – another beginning. And compassion must have some duality which you can become aware of only when you have achieved compassion.

What is the antithesis of compassion? It is indifference, upeksha. That’s the word Buddha has used. It carries more meaning than “indifference.” It is a kind of no interest, neither this way nor that way…as if the person does not exist at all for you. Compassion will bring you to indifference.

And all these stages you can find in the growth of different people at the point where they got stuck. For example, the Jaina monks are stuck with indifference. That becomes renunciation, not being bothered with the world.

The Hindu has also become stuck with that, thinking that the world is only a dream; it doesn’t matter, you need not be concerned about it. They have grown a little; but at the point of indifference they will start shrinking, they are stuck again. They have to find something between compassion and indifference – the bridge.

There is a bridge, there is always a bridge in every duality, unless you come to a point which has no duality.

That point is the point of enlightenment.

It has no antithesis, so you cannot even call it thesis; and it is not a synthesis. It has dropped all three – the whole triangle. It is something beyond the triangle of evolution. And the beauty is, because it is not part of a triangle, you are not stuck. And from that point growth changes its nature completely: it is no longer dialectical.

Before enlightenment, growth is dialectical: always divided, always finding something which joins it and then again another division and another division. But a point comes – for example between compassion and indifference, the synthesis is equilibrium. The Buddhist word for it is samata.

You are equally balanced, you are neither indifferent nor compassionate, neither leaning to this side nor to that side. Samata can become a point from where the change, the radical change happens in the process of evolution.

Below samata everything is dialectical. You cannot love without hating; they will both go together. One will be conscious, the other will be unconscious; but they are one thing. That’s why you can turn them easily: a small incident, and love becomes hate.

The person you were going to die for, you can kill him! Lovers have killed the same person for whom they would have sacrificed themselves. It is the same energy, but it has turned completely upside down.