If God is, then there is no sansara; then we can never accept the mundane life. We can’t be in the marketplace, we can’t attend to our businesses; because we believe in God we’ll become monks and retire to the forests.” That man would like to create his world with the bricks of God. Can you imagine what the consequences would be if, by mistake, worldly people were to go crazy and become monks? From that very day things wouldn’t move an inch; from that day the whole world would be in ruins.

In fact, the man who is a monk has no idea that he is surviving, that his left foot moves forward, because someone, a worldly man, is running a store in the marketplace out there. One foot is rooted there; that’s why the monk’s foot is free to move. The monk’s very life-breath comes from the worldly man. He is under the illusion that he is living on his own, but the fact is, all his nourishment comes from the mundane world. And yet he goes about cursing the worldly man; he goes on telling him, “Renounce the world and become a monk.” He doesn’t realize he is creating a situation for universal suicide this way – a situation even he can’t escape from: he will die as well. He is thinking of using bricks that are all alike.

There are also people who say the opposite. They say, “There’s no God, there’s just this world and nothing else. We only believe in matter.” And, believing only in matter, they also tried to create a world of their own. They too have landed in trouble. Where they have arrived, suicide will happen there as well – because if there is only matter and no God, then everything that lends savor to life, that makes life charming, that gives movement to life, that creates the desire to rise, will be gone.

If one were to believe there is no godliness, that there is nothing but matter, then what meaning is there in life? Then life becomes totally useless. That’s why people like Sartre, Camus, Kafka and others talk so much about meaninglessness in the West. Today, with one voice, all Western philosophers are saying that life is meaningless. What Shakespeare once said has become relevant all of a sudden, and Western thinkers are now reiterating it in the context of life itself: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There cannot be any significance, any meaning, because you have put together only bricks of matter, and of matter alone. Meaning is bound to disappear absolutely. Just as there being only monks would take meaning away from the world, there being worldly people alone would also take meaning away.

It is interesting that the worldly man survives with the help of the enunciated and the renunciate survives with the help of the worldly man – in the same way the left foot is dependent on the right foot and the right foot is dependent on the left foot. On the surface this dependence appears as a contradiction, but deep down it is not. Both feet are part of the same being: one keeps it rooted; the other causes it to move.