Man can look at life in two ways: either through a no or through a yes. Either he can be negative in his approach or positive. These are the two easily available ways for the mind.There is also a third way, but to achieve to the third you have to go through arduous effort of becoming more and more aware. To the sleeping person these two ways are ready-made, available from the very birth. The positive person lives through a kind of optimism. His optimism is shallow, but he is full of hopes. He counts only the roses on the rosebush; he does not look at the thorns, he ignores them. Sooner or later he is bound to be disappointed.
Every child begins with a positive attitude towards life. That is natural because if the child begins with a negative attitude he will not begin at all; he would have died in the mother's womb. He waited for nine months, he passed through the birth canal, which is a painful process, suffocating. There must be deep down an unconscious hope; hence he is patiently waiting for the day when he can see the sun, see the light, be in the world. He is like a seed, very unconscious; he is not aware of it. But every child is born with great hopes, every child is an optimist; he looks through the positive. But life disappoints everyone.
LIFE IS VERY STRANGE, in a way: if you don't get what you want, you are disappointed, naturally; but if you get what you want, then too you are disappointed. Disappointment seems to be the destiny. If you don't get what you want, you suffer -- you have failed. You have not been able to prove yourself, you have not been able to prove your mettle. Others have succeeded, you are a failure. You can't respect yourself. And if you can't respect yourself, you can't respect life. It seems like a curse. You would like to return the ticket to God. If you meet him, your first question will be, "Why have you created me? For what? -- for all these disappointments? Are you a sadist or something, creating so many people and then giving them so much misery?"
And the religious people say, "It is God's play, his Leela." What kind of play is this? God does not seem to be in his right senses. It seems as if he is enjoying the tortures. He seems to be more like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, than like Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus. These people don't seem to be like God, because when all your hopes are turned into hopelessness, when all your desires are frustrated, when nothing comes out of your optimism, naturally you become sour, you become bitter, and pessimism is born.
Pessimism is nothing but the failure of optimistic attitudes. Then you start counting the thorns and ignoring the roses. Then you look always for the darker side. That is the philosophy of pessimism.
Contemplate on these laws of Murphy:
First: If anything can go wrong, it will.
Second: Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
Third: Everything takes longer than you expect.
Fourth: Left to themselves all things go from bad to worse.
Fifth: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
Sixth: Mother Nature is a bitch.
Seventh: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Eighth: If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
Ninth: If you can keep your head when, all around you, others are losing theirs, you just don't understand the situation.
And the tenth: For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution -- and it is always wrong.
Pessimism simply means looking at life negatively, always searching for the flaw, for the loophole, for something negative, and accumulating all those negativities. And when you look at the dark side, always, of course, there are two nights and only one small day sandwiched between the two nights -- dark dark nights.
Optimism ends in pessimism. Every pessimist has been an optimist once -- he is an ex-optimist. He hoped too much and because those hopes were not fulfilled he has become sour, angry, enraged. Now he cannot see the flowers and the stars. He can't see anything beautiful; he goes on looking for the ugly. And when you look for the ugly you will find it on every step. Whatsoever you look for you are bound to find it, remember, because life consists of both -- positivity and negativity -- in the same quantity. Life cannot exist without the other; the other pole is a must.
IT IS JUST LIKE ELECTRICITY. Electricity cannot exist only with one polarity, positive or negative; it has to have both the poles together. It is possible only through the tension that is created between the negative and the positive. But there is a third kind of person -- I call that person the awakened, the enlightened -- who looks at life in its totality, who is neither a pessimist nor an optimist, who simply accepts life as it is; who accepts the night, who accepts the day, who accepts the rose and the thorn, because he understands that life is out of necessity dual, dialectical. And in his awareness grows a synthesis between the polar opposites. The synthesis never grows on the outside, as Karl Marx says.
Karl Marx says life is a dialectical process between thesis and antithesis and it always comes to a synthesis. Then synthesis turns again into a thesis and creates its antithesis. That is utterly wrong. Outside, life is always thesis and antithesis; it never comes to any synthesis.
Synthesis is achieved only in the inner vision of an enlightened being. Synthesis is attained when you have attained to absolute silence. In that silence you are so clear, so transparent, that you can see through and through. Then you know that life needs both: day and night, birth and death. Then there is nothing wrong in death; it is perfectly useful, needed, inevitable. Then a deep acceptance arises in you. Buddha calls that acceptance, Tathata -- suchness. Life is such. You understand it and through that understanding you transcend it. Don't be a pessimist and don't be an optimist. Just watch, be a watcher and attain to the ultimate synthesis where you become a third force rising higher and higher and seeing from above, a bird's-eye view. Deep down everything is in conflict, but it is okay because you understand life cannot exist without it. It is not God's fault. There is no God as a person who can be blamed for it. It is just the nature of things -- tao, dhamma -- that life functions through duality. But consciousness can soar so high that it can transcend all duality and can reach to oneness.
The real meditator is neither pessimist nor optimist. He lives in a kind of suchness, in total "accept-ability."
