The Ultimate Polarity: Meditation and Love

“The whole of life consists of polarities: the positive and the negative, birth and death, man and woman, day and night, summer and winter. The whole of life consists of polar opposites. But those polar opposites are not only polar opposites, they are also complementaries. They are helping each other; they are supporting each other.

“They are like the bricks of an arch. In an arch the bricks have to be arranged against each other. They appear to be against each other, but it is through their polar opposition that the arch is built, remains. The strength of the arch is dependent on the polarity of the bricks arranged opposite each other.

This is the ultimate polarity: meditation means the art of being alone, and love means the art of being together. “The whole person is one who knows both and who is capable of moving from one to the other as easily as possible. It is just like breathing in and breathing out – there is no difficulty. They are opposite: when you breathe in there is one process, and when you breathe out the process is just the opposite. But breathing in and breathing out make one full breath.

In meditation you breathe in, in love you breathe out. And with love and meditation together your breath is complete, entire, is whole. “For centuries religions have tried to attain one pole to the exclusion of the other. There are religions of meditation. For example, Jainism, Buddhism – they are meditative religions, they are rooted in meditation. And there are bhakti religions, religions of devotion: Sufism, Hasidism – they are rooted in love. A religion rooted in love needs God as the other to love, to pray to. Without a God the religion of love cannot exist it is inconceivable – you need an object of love. But a religion of meditation can exist without the concept of God; the hypothesis can be discarded.

Hence Buddhism and Jainism don’t believe in any God. There is no need of the other. You just have to know how to be alone, how to be silent, how to be still, how to be utterly calm and quiet within yourself. The other has to be completely dropped, forgotten. Hence these are godless religions.

“When for the first time Western theologians came across Buddhist and Jain literature they were very puzzled: how to call these godless philosophies religions? They could be called philosophies, but how to call them religions? It was inconceivable to them because the Judaic and Christian tradition thinks that to be religious God is the most essential hypothesis. The religious person is one who is God-fearing, and these people say there is no God, hence there is no question of fearing God.

“In the West for thousands of years it has been thought that the person who does not believe in God is an atheist, he is not a religious person. But Buddha is atheistic and religious. It was very strange for Westerners because they were not at all aware that there are religions that are rooted in meditation.