Chapter 27: Become the Mystery
Asked why he was saying so, he said, “It is impossible to include both women and men without them coming into conflict. The religion will destroy itself from within. If it had remained just confined to males there was a possibility for it to continue at least for five thousand years, because they can understand each other.”
You have to be very alert about it.. I am the first man who makes no difference between initiating men and women, and my feeling is - if I were to reply to Gautam Buddha, I would say, “If it was only males it would last for only five hundred years. Now it is men and women together it can last for eternity.”
When heart and head are together, you are more complete and more whole. Heart is a part, head is a part, but together.if a communion is possible, your strength is not doubled, it is multiplied. How can the head and the heart come to a point of meeting? And it is a multidimensional question:
It is between the woman and the man.
It is between the heart and the head.
It is between the East and the West.
One of the royal poets of England, Rudyard Kipling, has written two famous lines which have become better known than anything else that he wrote. Those lines are, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Nobody has argued against it.and he was the royal poet of the British Empire.
But I disagree absolutely, without any conditions and reservations, because wherever you are standing East and West are meeting. Mumbai is West to Calcutta, Calcutta is East to Mumbai; Tokyo is East to Calcutta, and Calcutta is West to Tokyo. Wherever you are, you cannot say you are in the East or in the West. They are relative terms; they are not fixed territories. Wherever you are, in every man, in every tree, in every bird, East and West are meeting.
Rudyard Kipling is simply talking nonsense! But he has a point in his ridiculous statement - and the point is the same. The West is head-oriented and the East is heart-oriented. It is the same question in different directions: How can they meet? How can there be an intimate love between the head and the heart, not intimate enmity? - it is a contradiction in terms.
They meet in meditation, because in meditation the head is empty and the heart is empty: the head is empty of thoughts and the heart is empty of feelings. When there are two emptinesses you cannot keep them separate, because there is nothing between them to keep them separate. Two zeros become one zero.Two nothingnesses cannot exist separately; they are bound to become one because there is not even a fence between them.
But Rudyard Kipling, although he lived in India almost his whole life, has never heard about meditation. It is meditation in which the head and heart lose each other, melt into each other. It is meditation in which man and woman melt into each other.