Existence, according to the so-called existentialists who are all following Friedrich Nietzsche – he is the founder – is absolutely unintelligent. They have taken away God, so they think – according to their logic it seems apparently true – that if there is no God, existence also becomes dead, with no intelligence, with no life. God used to be the life, God used to be the consciousness; God used to be the very meaning, the very salt of our being. When God is no longer there, this whole existence becomes soulless; then life becomes just a by-product of matter. So when you die, everything will die, nothing will remain. And there is no question of being good or bad. Existence is absolutely indifferent, it does not care about you. God used to care about you. Once God is removed, a great strangeness starts happening between you and existence. There is no relationship: existence does not care, cannot care because it is not conscious anymore. It is no longer an intelligent universe, it is simply dead matter, just as you are. And the life that you know is only a by-product.

A by-product disappears immediately when the elements that were creating it separate. For example, some religions believe man is made of five elements – earth, air, fire, water, sky – and once these five elements are together, life is produced as a by-product. When these five elements separate in death, life disappears.

To make it clear to you: you ride a bicycle. In the beginning when you are learning, you fall many times. I have also learned, but I have not fallen while learning because first I watched the learners – why they fall. They fall because they don’t have the confidence. In fact, to be on two wheels you need tremendous balance, and if you hesitate… It is just like walking on a tightrope. If you hesitate, just for a moment, those two wheels cannot keep you up on your seat. And those two wheels can remain in balance only at a certain speed, and the learner is bound to move slowly – obviously, that seems to be rational. When you are a learner you should not go at great speed.

I watched all my friends learning to bicycle, and they always said, “Why don’t you learn?”

I said, “First, I am watching. I am watching why you fall, and why after a few days you stop falling.”

And once I got the point, the first time I went as fast as possible! All my friends were puzzled. They said, “We have never seen a learner go that fast. A learner is bound to fall a few times. Then he learns how to balance.”

I said, “I have been watching and I got the clue. The clue is that they are not confident, not alert that a certain speed is needed to keep the bicycle moving. You cannot stop it and sit on top of it without falling, so there is a certain momentum that is needed. So you have to go on pedaling.”

Once I knew exactly where the problem was, I simply went so fast that my whole village wondered, “What will happen to him? – because he does not know…and he is going with such speed!”

It was difficult for me to stop because I was concerned that if I stopped, the cycle would fall. So I had to go to a place where there was a huge bodhi tree near the railway station. It was almost three miles from my house. For three miles I rushed so fast that people gave way, standing to the side. They said, “This is absolute madness!”

But my madness had a method in it. I was going directly to that tree, because I knew that tree had become hollow. So I pushed my bicycle into the hollow tree so the first, the front wheel was inside the tree. Then I could stop, there was no problem of falling.

One villager who was working in his field saw this. He asked me, “This is strange. If there is no tree like this one how are you going to stop?”