Q2: How do you place those people who don't have this burden of trying to understand life but are just living in the world? How do you place them?
UG: Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, or you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it's the same thing. Whether one is here in India or in Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one [happiness] without the other [unhappiness]. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interests of the survival of this living organism. There is an extraordinarily alert, and alacritous quality to it [the organism]. The body is rejecting all sensations. Sensations have a limited life; beyond a particular duration the body cannot take them. It is either throwing them out or absorbing them. Otherwise they destroy the body. The eyes are interested in seeing things but not as beauty; the ears hear things but not as music. The body does not reject a noise because it is the barking of a dog or braying of an ass. It just responds to the sound. If you call it a response to the sound, then we get into trouble. So you don't even know that it is a sound. Anything that is harsh, anything that would destroy the sensitivity of the nervous system, the body cuts out. It is like a thermostat. To some extent the body has a way of saving itself from heat, cold, or anything that is inimical to it. It takes care of itself for a short period, and then thought helps you to take the next step to cover yourself, or to move yourself away from the dangerous situation you find yourself in. You will naturally move away from the cement mixer that is making a loud noise and is destroying the sensitivity of your nervous system. The fear that you would be destroyed because the sound is bad, or that you will become a nervous wreck, and so on and so forth, is part of your paranoia.
Q2: Sir, is there a state in which you just receive without reacting?
UG: There is only reaction and you are reacting. If the reaction is not there, it is a different matter. Unfortunately, it seems to be there all the time. That is why you are asking the question. But the response that I am talking about is something which cannot be experienced by you at all. If I say that the response to a stimulus is spontaneous and that it is a pure action, then that action is no action at all in any ordinary sense of the word. It is one unitary movement. It [the response] cannot be separated [from the stimulus]. The moment you separate them [the stimulus and the response] and say that this is the response to that stimulus, you have brought the element of reaction into the picture already. Let us not fool ourselves that there is a spontaneous action, pure action, and all that kind of nonsense.
Q2: I have two questions, Sir. One, assuming that a cat has a computer, though a smaller one, and I have a bigger one, what else is the basic difference....
UG: Your computer is more complex and complicated. Evolution implies the simple becoming complex. They say that the brain power of all the ants in an ant-hill is much more than the brain power of a human being. Whatever that is there in the human body is the result of what has been passed on from one species to another. We use thought not only for our self-aggrandizement but we also use it to destroy, for no reason, other species of life around us. Physical fear is totally different from the fear of losing what you have, the fear of not getting what you want. You call this psychological fear.
So, the simple becomes complex. We don't even know if there is any such thing as evolution. We rule out spiritual evolution. Those who assumed that there is such a thing as spirit or soul or center, or whatever you want to call it, say that it also goes through the evolutionary process and perfects itself. And for that you have to take one birth after another. I don't know how many births there may be, 84 million, or god knows what the figure is.
Q2: Coming back to the question that a cat has a smaller computer and I have a more complex computer....
UG: Basically, they both operate in exactly the same way.
Q2: Looking from the cat's point of view now....
UG: I don't know how the cat looks at it. The cat can look at the king, whoever told the story, but we dare not look at the king, you see. [Laughter]
Q2: Don't put up those restrictions yourself....
UG: I don't know. It is an assumption on our part like any other assumption or speculation about how the cat looks. I say sometimes that when I look at something, it is like a cat or a dog looking at things....
Q2: What is the difference?
UG: I don't see any difference.
Q2: There is none.
UG: There is none.
Q2: There isn't any difference except the differences we create. Then we get into them.
UG: That's what I am saying.
Q2: Yes, I agree with you.
UG: I don't know for sure how a cat looks at me. Outwardly, the cat looks at me and I look at the cat or at anything else the same way. There is not even looking, you see, if it comes to that. Is there a looking without a looker? Is there any seeing without a seer? I don't use those words in a metaphysical sense. Is there a seeing without a seer? There is no seeing even. `What is going on?' — the very question is absurd. We want to know everything, and that's our problem.
Q2: You must create a problem to solve it.
UG: Yes, but you can survive without that knowing.
Q2: That is what I was coming to.
UG: We can survive. All the species have survived for millions of years, and we have evolved out of them. Without them probably we wouldn't be here today. So why this demand to know?
Q1: To know what?
UG: To know that you are happy, that you are bored, that you are not free, that you are enlightened or not enlightened, that you cannot have pleasure all the time — the whole lot. Even the demand to know, "How did you stumble into this?" is the same. You want to know the cause. You want to know what I did or what I did not do. You see, you are trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. You do this for the simple reason that you want `that' to happen to you.
Your background is completely and totally different from my background. Somebody was saying that my background, my life story is very dramatic. But your background is equally dramatic. The impossibility of what is there to express itself is really the problem. What is it that is making it impossible? What prevents the uniqueness, which is the end product of millions and millions of years [of evolution], to express itself? It [the mind] is just two thousand years old. It is too silly to think that it is going to succeed. It is not going to succeed. You don't go about calling yourself unique. I don't go around the world telling everyone that I am a unique man. No, not in that sense. But you are unique. The two uniques don't even bother to compare how unique they are. I have to use that word uniqueness because it is really unique. Even two human bodies are not the same. Now they [the scientists] have come to that conclusion. Unfortunately, all that understanding is the result of the research and experiments in crime laboratories to track down thieves through their finger prints. Not only through prints, but they can track down a man from the smell, or a teeny-weeny bit of his hair. They say that women