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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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help. It is better to be alert to what is the case. But immediately when I say "total hopelessness" your mind will say, "This appears pessimistic," because your mind lives through hope, your mind clings to desires, expectations.
You are so miserable right now that you will commit suicide if there is no hope. If really Patanjali is true, what will happen to you? If there is no hope, no future, and you are thrown back to your present, you will commit suicide. There is nothing to live for then. You live for something which will happen somewhere, sometime. It is not going to happen, but the feeling that it may happen helps you to be alive.
That's why I say when you have come to a point where suicide has become a meaningful thing, where life has lost all its meaning, where you can kill yourself, in that moment yoga becomes possible, because you will not be ready to transform yourself unless this intense futility of life has happened to you. You will be ready to transform yourself only when you feel there is no way -- either suicide or sadhana, either commit suicide or transform your being. When only two alternatives are left, only then yoga is chosen, never before. But yoga is not pessimistic. You are optimistic, then yoga will appear to you as pessimistic. It is because of you.
Buddha has been taken in the West as the peak of pessimism because Buddha says life is dukkha, anguish. So western philosophers have been commenting on Buddha, that he is a pessimist. Even a person like Albert Schweitzer, a person we can expect to know certain things, even he is in the confusion. He thinks the whole East is pessimistic. And this is a great criticism for him. The whole East -- Buddha, Patanjali, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, they are all pessimists for him. They appear! They appear because they say your life is meaningless. Not that they say life is meaningless -- life that you know. And unless this life becomes absolutely meaningless, you cannot transcend it. You will cling to it.
And unless you transcend this life, this mode of existence, you will not know what bliss is. But Buddha, Patanjali, they will not talk much about bliss just because they have a deep
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