Cactus

Quality

Life has no meaning in itself, you have to bring meaning into it. Life is just raw material, you have to create your meaning out of it.

To create meaning you will have to be a creator. Painters paint, create paintings; poets write, create poetry; dancers create dance… but these are all just fragments. A religious person creates himself; the religious person is the greatest artist there is. All other artists are just finding substitutes and one day or other they will become frustrated. You have written many poems, then one day you realise, “What is the point? Why go on writing?” You have painted, then one day suddenly you realise, “What is the point? For whom? For what?” One day you will die and all will be left and will disappear. So what is the point?

Unless you feel a point of immortality in whatsoever you are doing you cannot be happy, and that point of immortality is felt only when you create immortality within yourself.

Gurdjieff used to say, and very rightly, that man is not born with a soul. All other religions say that man is born with a soul, but Gurdjieff’s saying is tremendously significant – man is not born with a soul. And unless you create it you will not have any soul, you will exist empty and you will die empty.

You will have to create it, that’s the great intelligence is needed.

This statement must have been made by someone who was very unhappy and yet so egoistic that he could not or would not recognise the fact that it is he who is creating his unhappiness. So he says, “Happiness is not being smart enough to know what to worry about.” He is saying that to be happy one has to be ignorant, to be happy one has to be stupid. Then a Buddha is stupid, then a Jesus is stupid, then people who are in madhouses are the only intelligent people in the world.

But this man is trying to save his ego. To be intelligent is arduous, it will need tremendous effort on your part. You will have to destroy much that is rubbish within you, you will have to create almost a fire of consciousness so that what is useless is burned and only that which is pure gold is saved. Very few people are ready to go through that hardship, through that discipline which creates intelligence. People want short-cuts.

To be intelligent is to create your own heaven, is to create your own happiness, otherwise there is none. If you create it, you have it. It is just like breathing: if you breathe you are alive, if you don’t breathe you are not alive. If you create happiness, you are happy; if you don’t create, you are unhappy. Unhappiness needs no creativity on your part. Unhappiness is a negative state, it need not be created. Happiness is not negative, it is a positive state, it has to be created. Absence can be there but the presence has to be created.

Remember it and don’t become victims of such quotes. In the West there are many foolish statements in circulation. These statements may appear to be very penetrating – they are not.

Quality Of Cactus: Be Intelligent