| |
said, "Of course, it has to sound better -- because I practiced it the whole night."
If you practice rest the whole day, in the night you will be restless. You will change sides again and again: that is just an exercise the body is doing so that some rest becomes possible. No -- in life you cannot find a man more wrong than Aristotle. Move to the opposite: work hard in the day and you will go into a deeper sleep in the night. Go deeper in sleep, and in the morning you will find you are capable of doing tremendous work, infinite energy you have. Through rest one gains energy; through work one gains rest -- just the opposite.
People come to me and they say, "We have insomnia, we cannot sleep, so tell us some way to relax" -- they are Aristotelian.
I tell them, "There is no need for you to relax. Just go for a walk, a long walk, run madly -- two hours in the morning, two in the evening, and then rest will follow automatically. It always follows! You don't need techniques of relaxation; you need techniques of active meditation, not relaxation. You are already too relaxed; that's what insomnia is showing, that you are already too relaxed -- there is no need."
Life moves through one opposite to another. And Heraclitus says this is the secret, the hidden harmony; this is the hidden harmony. He is very poetic, he has to be. He cannot be philosophic because philosophy means reason. Poetry can be contradictory; poetry can say things which philosophers will be ashamed to say -- poetry is truer to life. And philosophers just go around and around: they never hit the point in the center, they beat around and around the bush. Poetry simply hits directly.
If you want any parallels to Heraclitus in the East, then you will find them in Zen masters, Zen poets, particularly in the poetry known as haiku. One of the great masters of haiku is Basho. Basho and Heraclitus are absolutely close, in a deep embrace; they are almost one. Basho has not written anything in a philosophical way; he has written in small haikus, just three-line, seventeen-syllable haikus, just small pieces. Heraclitus has also written fragments; he has not written a system like Hegel,
|
|
|