I have told you about Van Gogh that he always painted his stars as spirals. No other painter in the world has made stars as spirals; naturally even the painters, his own colleagues, told him, “You are not aware of the fact that stars are not spirals.”

But Van Gogh said, “What can I do? My innermost intuition is that they are, and I believe more in my intuition than in my physical eyes.” A hundred years after Van Gogh, just recently, it has been found by science that he was right and everybody else was wrong. Stars only appear not to be spirals because of the distance. And the distance is vast. But now with more accurate instruments, they can see that the stars are spirals.

A strange question arises: How did Van Gogh, a man who was not only thought to be crazy but was forced to live in a madhouse…? And his best paintings are those which he painted in the insane asylum. Seeing that he was a harmless fellow…it doesn’t matter if he paints things which are not according to the common-sense view of things. It harms nobody. You need not agree with him, but to force him to live in a madhouse is going a little too far. He was released from the madhouse – he was only thirty-three – and he committed suicide.

His suicide stands as an indictment of the common humanity and their stubborn insistence that every individual should agree with their conceptions. He wrote a small letter to his brother before committing suicide, saying, “I am not committing suicide out of any depression, I am simply committing suicide because perhaps the society in which I can live as a sane man is yet to come.”

Your question makes it clear that in your mind you go on dividing things into categories: this is love, this is fear, this is anger….

Just for a change, don’t divide.

Whatever arises in you is part of your total individuality.

The division has come into existence because parts of you have been condemned and parts of you have been praised. Naturally, the condemned parts should be repressed – at least should not be allowed to surface – and only the appreciated, the valued, the respectable parts of your being should become your personality. This has created such a split in you that with this split you can neither love nor can you sing nor can you dance. For all that celebration, your whole being is needed.

Let me tell you the truth, with absolute frankness – because it has not been told to you even by courageous people like Gautam Buddha or Jesus Christ, or even Socrates, Pythagoras, Chuang Tzu. They all went a little beyond the crowd, but not far away. They always remained on the boundary line – any moment they could slip back into the crowd.