Self-Realization

Risk

Do you think the people who were trying to reach Everest were not full of doubts? For a hundred years, how many people tried and how many people have lost their lives? Do you know how many people never came back? Not even their dead bodies came back; they got lost, lost forever. But, still, a few courageous people went on and on.

This fact has to be noted down: that no Indian ever tried. This country has lost the spirit of accepting challenges. That’s why this country has lived in slavery for two thousand years, and still it is not much of a freedom because freedom cannot be only political; basically it has to be spiritual. And this country is not spiritually free.

But people went on coming from all over the world, risking, knowing that they may not come back ever, they may be lost. But it is worth it – because in the very risk something is born inside you: the center. It is born only at the risk. That’s the beauty of risk, the gift of risk.

The people who were going to the moon, do you think they were certain they would reach? Do you think they were certain they would be ever back again with their families, with their children, with their wives, with their parents? Nothing was certain. In fact, more likely was that something would go wrong.

One of the most famous sayings of Murphy is: “If anything can go wrong, then it is going to go wrong.”

And there were millions of things which could have gone wrong because it was the first effort to reach the moon. Just a few seconds’ difference and they will miss the moon; they may be lost forever in space. We may not even know whether they are alive or dead.

Now there are efforts to reach farther and farther; sooner or later man will try to reach to the stars. It will be a long journey, but worth taking, worth risking. It is going to be a very strange journey, because according to Albert Einstein when you move with that speed you don’t grow old, you remain exactly of the same age – time stops. When you move with the speed of light…and it is tremendous. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second – only then we can reach the stars. The nearest star will take four years to reach with this speed and four years to come back from; that is the nearest star. The next star will take sixty years to go and sixty years to come back; and then the universe is infinite – then there are millions of stars which will take millions of years to come and go. But people are going to try one day; preparations are on the way, plans are being made.

The person who will go on a journey for such a long time, when he will come back his wife will look like his mother – and he will remain the same. If he had left the earth at the age of forty he would remain forty. This is one of the miracles of speed, that you don’t age. His parents would have died, his children would have become exactly like him as he was – forty years of age. His wife may be eighty years of age, very old, unrecognizable. It is some risk! But this is how man’s spirit grows.