They are not contradictions. The sleep simply gives you rest. Rest for what? Rest to work tomorrow again. And why are you working? To have a restful night. The whole day you work, so in the night you can rest; and the whole night you rest, so that in the day you can work. And this is how the wheel of the mind goes on moving: this is action in inaction.

What I am doing is totally different from what Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti and Zen are doing. My effort is to make you aware of something beyond mind which is being used as a focus, which is your reality.

This transcendence of the duality of the mind opens the doors to consciousness. And once you are aware that you are consciousness, then your action is minimized. Whatever is absolutely necessary and urgent, you do – not a single bit more nor less. And whatever action you have done, you need a rest to recover your energies. So you allow the resting mind to refuel the active mind, but you are an outsider – you are using a mechanism, you are no longer identified with it.

In different situations there will be different combinations of action and inaction. There may be times when much more action is needed. You will do it, but you will not become the doer. You will make all the efforts, but you will remain absolutely detached.

Whether those efforts succeed or fail will not be your concern – you made them fully, that’s all. Now what happens depends on millions of things in the universe; it is not in your hands, so you don’t bother about success or failure. Your only concern is that whatever you do, you do it fully.

And there may be times when you feel that the mechanism of your mind, the active part, is tired, exhausted; you can go for a long rest, not doing anything, not even speaking. But there is always a balance between the two because now you can see from the outside when the balance is there and when it is not there.

I have said that you have to become inactive, you have to become totally relaxed, and that it needs a certain effort; hence the question has arisen that there seems to be a contradiction. It is always your logic that brings contradictions. Life is very simple; there are no contradictions.

The inactive mind cannot give you total relaxation. It is really in partnership with the active mind. It is a tremendously beautiful mechanism that automatically goes on moving from action to inaction, from day to night, from waking to sleep, and keeps you healthy. But it is not total relaxation, it can only be partial relaxation, because the moment you are rejuvenated, you have to move to action. That is an autonomous process.

When I say that the movement has to happen as a transcendence, in the beginning you will need effort. Use the active mind to make that effort – because it is ready to make any kind of effort – and use the inactive mind to give you a taste of what effortlessness is. It can only give you a taste, but this is the beginning of a revolution.