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you feel UTTERLY hopeless, meaningless, a point where you start contemplating suicide, a point where you cannot figure it out -- what to do, what not to do, to be or not to be. One day or other every consciousness has to face the desert, because without passing through the desert you will never really be mature. That is part of the training of every soul. In fact when you start encountering the desert, you start thinking of religion. When things are going good who bothers about religion? Who contemplates? Who meditates? Who prays? When things are not going good then you start thinking that there must be something basically wrong with you.
This is a strange phenomenon -- that whenever a person has all that he needs he encounters the desert. The affluent society encounters the desert. The poor society is still far away from the desert. The affluence brings the desert very close by, because you have all that you were hoping for: you have the woman that you wanted, the house, the money, the prestige, the power. You have all that you had always dreamt about, now there is no more left to dream: the desert has come. Now you suddenly feel a kind of insomnia. You cannot even sleep, the desert is all around.
How to transcend this desert? -- the desert of meaninglessness, the desert of anguish, the desert of absurdity.
JUST AS IT HAD CROSSED EVERY OTHER BARRIER, THE STREAM TRIED TO CROSS THIS ONE TOO...
Naturally. We always react from our past. It has always worked, so we think it is going to work in every situation, but one day a situation arises where your past is simply irrelevant; it doesn't work. That is real crisis... and real opportunity too.
The Chinese word for crisis -- they don't have a word, they have pictures -- the Chinese ideogram for crisis is beautiful. It consists of two small pictures, of two small ideograms: one means danger, the other means opportunity. Crisis is danger AND opportunity; it will depend on you. If you go on reacting out of the past you will be committing suicide. It is dangerous. If you have the intelligence to see that the problem is new so the answer has to be new -- old answers won't do -- if you have
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