If things were guaranteed you might not be able to live life with surprises, with mysteries; then life and death would be simply mechanical happenings and you would be just a machine. Your always being available to life and to death makes you a living being; you are not a machine. And to be mechanical in your behavior is to reduce yourself from your dignity. That which is going, say good-bye to it, and that which is coming, welcome it with deep love and deep gratitude.
But most of the people have chosen not to live. Of course they cannot choose not to die; that is beyond them. But they can choose not to live, by living in a lukewarm way. Most of the people have given their living into others’ hands; others are living on their behalf.
Slade’s Law says: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man; he will always find an easier way to do it.
And life is certainly one of the most simple and at the same time, complex phenomena. People have distributed it: others are living for them; they are living for others. Parents are living for children. I have always felt amazed when somebody has said to me, “I am living for my wife,” or “I am living for my husband,” or “I am living for my children.” Nobody can live for anybody else. This is a simple mind trick to befool you; you can live only for yourself. Life on behalf of somebody else is just not possible.
That’s why there are millions of people in the world, but the quantity of life is very small. Five billion human beings, and the life is almost non-existent: there is no song, no dance; there is no joy, no love. On the contrary, people are putting their whole energy into creating more destructive forces. Anybody watching from another planet is bound to think that the planet earth has gone crazy. But it is not new, this craziness is very ancient; it has always been so.
One of the great thinkers, and a scientific thinker, Arthur Koestler, is of the opinion – very firm opinion – that from the very beginning something has gone wrong as far as the human mind is concerned. And unless that wrong is corrected, people are going to continue fighting, destroying each other – any excuse is enough and people are ready to kill. My own feeling is that people are ready to kill because they don’t know how to live. If they know how to live, they will respect life, they will have a reverence for life, and killing will become impossible. War will be an impossibility for any intelligent human beings.
Our wars prove nothing else except our stupidity. What are we proving by war? Whom are we trying to conquer? It is our earth and it is one. All demarcations and lines are drawn by us; they are not on the map.
When the first Russian astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, came back from the moon – he was the first man to have such a close look at the moon, and the first man to have such a faraway look at the earth – he said he was amazed that in that moment he could not conceive some part of the earth as Russia, some part America, some part India, some part China; there were no parts. And the whole earth is as luminous as the moon – it needs only distance to see the luminosity, because the sun’s rays are being reflected back.