A Song Without Words 1

“Beloved Osho:

I seem to recall You once saying that we only have glimpses into existence in proportion to our capacity to absorb and integrate them.
Nietzsche’s insight that, “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil” was part of an understanding that literally droves him insane.
Could You please talk about this? “


The genius of the caliber of Friedrich Nietzsche is always in danger of going mad.
Nobody has ever heard of an idiot going mad. To go mad, first you have to have a mind. A genius is walking on a sword – just a little mistake and he can fall, fall into an eternal darkness of madness.
Nietzsche is perhaps one of the most prolific geniuses the world has ever produced. He had so many insights that finally he had to change his own way of writing. His writing became aphoristic because the insights were crowding in his mind and if he were to write an essay, the other insights might be forgotten, might be lost. He started writing aphoristically, in maxims.
But to have too many insights is dangerous. One can afford only a limited number.
And Nietzsche was confronted with an infinite number of insights. Each insight could have become a philosophy. For example, this insight that when there is love there is no question of good and evil, love is beyond both. That’s all…He could have written a whole system on it, explained it in detail in different contexts.
There are traditional ways of writing, and they have a certain validity about them because you cannot misinterpret them, you cannot misunderstand them. For example, Bertrand Russell, in his famous book Principia Mathematica devotes two hundred and sixty pages to a simple thing. You cannot conceive how a man can manage such a big-sized book, two hundred and sixty pages, just to prove that two plus two are really four. But he has taken every possible consideration, every possible question, every possible implication into account. He has exhausted the subject, he has not left anything for anybody. That is the traditional way of writing - systematic, rational.
But Friedrich Nietzsche had no time. Life is too short and his insights were so many. So he would write simply a maxim, that “Love takes you beyond good and evil. If you love, then don’t bother about good and evil.”
He is right, dangerously right – we will have to look into a few of the implications of his statement.
Ordinarily, for centuries love has been synonymous with good – it takes you beyond bad, beyond evil. Love cannot harm love cannot be violent, love cannot be destructive, love cannot be evil; those are qualities of hate. For thousands of years man has thought love and goodness as synonymous.
But Friedrich Nietzsche is far more right that the long tradition. Nobody has thought about it before him. That is the function of a genius: he brings new light, new glimpses into the world; he opens new windows into existence. But he has not explained it.
I agree with him totally. Good and evil are opposite to each other and they exist together. Just like darkness and light, life and death – all these opposites exist together, you cannot separate them. If you make love synonymous with good. Then the evil will fallow you like a shadow; and that has been happening everywhere around the world, for centuries.
There is a treatise by a psychoanalyst entitled The Intimate Enemy. Is about love: whomsoever you love, you are bound to hate. This will be like a wheel – day comes, night comes; love comes, hate comes.
It is not something unnatural that lovers are continuously fighting, nagging each other. It is part of the game – you have chosen love, you have chosen hate as the other side of the coin. Once in a while things become too much and the hate part asserts itself.
If you watch the life of lovers you will be immensely surprised: before they feel loving towards each other, first they fight. When their fighting part is fulfilled, then their love part comes up – they are simply moving on a mechanical wheel. They are hugging each other and kissing each other and just a few minutes before, they were throwing things at each other.
Before every love-making there is a pillow fight. I don’t know what pillows have done – they are such innocent people, they never do any harm to anybody – but thy unnecessary get caught in between the lovers because it happens that they are on the bed, and handy. After a good fight – saying things against each other, against each other’s family – when this catharsis is over suddenly they are full of love, hugging each other. You cannot believe these are same people. Then why were they doing that drama before? And this happens every day, it is a routine process.
Certainly your love is not what Nietzsche means by love.
He means by love what I mean by love – love not addressed to anybody in particular but just your aroma, your field of energy. Just as the perfume of the rose, surrounds the rose, a loving man is surrounded by love. That love is beyond good and evil; it transcends that intrinsic contradiction of the ordinary love.
But is true that a man like Friedrich Nietzsche, reaching to the very heights of understanding, himself become mad. The reason is not his insight. The reason is that his insight remained only intellectual. He had no foundation in meditation, he never heard of the word. If Friedrich Nietzsche has been born in the East he would have been another Gautam Buddha, nothing less – perhaps more. But in the west, intellect seams to be all. So he came to conclusions logically – beautiful conclusions, and then he tried to live according to those intellectual conclusions for witch there was no meditative foundation.
He fell apart. He had a nervous breakdown. He tried to reach where only meditators are allowed; and naturally he had to fall from those heights, and he suffered multiple fractures. His genius was absolutely certain, but his genius led him into madness; that too is certain.
In the East it has never happened. One should look into it…In the West is has always happened: whenever there was a man of great genius, sooner or later there was a nervous breakdown, as if he had seen so much that he could not absorb it. He had not wings enough, but steel he had taken a long flight into the sky – tired tattered, he fell down.
In the East it has never happened, because we never begin with the insights. First we make certain that you have a foundation. We make your wings stronger. We don’t care about flights, we care about your wings.
You cannot conceive a Gautam Buddha, a Bodhidharma, a Mahakashyap – even to conceive that these people can be mad is impossible. Their sanity is so perfect. And their sanity is rooted in their meditativeness, in their silence, in their peace, in their grounding in their own being. Because they have roots deep down into the earth, they are capable of sending their branches high to have a dialogue with the stars. Their flowers can go high in the sky to release the perfume.
You must remember one fact: a tree grows only proportionately. It can go only to a certain height if it has a certain strength, a depth to his roots.
In Japan there is an old art. I don’t call it “art” but they call it art. I call it murder. But people go to see it from all over the world because there are only a few trees…five hundred years old and six inches height. You can see that although it is just six inches high, the tree is old. Its bark is old, its leaves are old; just its tallness somehow has been prevented.
And the strategy is that in the mud pots in witch those trees are put, there is no bottom. So the gardeners, from generation to generation – because the tree is five hundred years old; many generations of the family that owns the tree have passed – they go on cutting the roots, they don’t allow the roots to grow. The pot has no bottom; otherwise the roots will find their way into the earth. The roots go on becoming older, the trees goes on becoming older. But because the roots cannot spread, cannot go deep into the earth, the tree cannot go high into the sky.
People think this as an art. It is sheer murder, it is a crime against the trees. And the same crime has been committed against man all over the world. Your roots have been cut.
Intellect can have flights, but it has no roots. Once in a while a genius may suffer from is own intelligence, and finally either he will commit suicide – because the tension of his intelligence will become too much, his thoughts will become too many – or he will go mad.
In the West many professors, many philosophers, mathematicians, painters, poets, novelists – all kind of creative people who have genius – have gone mad or have committed suicide. A few have done both. First they went mad, and then when they were thought to be cured and were release from madhouse they committed suicide.
Vincent Van Gogh, one of the great painters of Holland, was for one year in the madhouse. He was released, and the next day committed suicide. And he wrote a letter to his brother in which he mentions, “It is better not to be, then to be mad. And I don’t want to be mad again and I know I cannot avoid it; my mind is again moving in the same directions. All their medicines and tranquilizers can keep me normal in a madhouse, but to leave in a madhouse is not life. At least I will have the satisfaction that although I could not leave my life, I could manage my own death. I was not the master of my life, but I was the master of my death.”
And he was so young, only thirty three years old, but one of the greatest painter the world has produced. His insights were such that people who have been studying his paintings are simply puzzled, they cannot figure out how this man managed. Because one hundred years ago he painted stars as spirals. You don’t see stars as spirals; nobody has ever seen spirals, and in his paintings all his stars are spirals. Even other painters were saying, “Watch out. You are going towards insanity. This is nonsense, nobody has ever seen it. Stars are not spirals. “
Van Gogh said, “What can I do? I see them as spirals.” And after one hundred years, just four weeks before one hundred years had passed, modern physicists came to the conclusion that stars are spirals. Our vision…because they are so far away, that’s why we cannot see that they are spirals.
Now people are puzzled. Van Gogh had the insight, had the genius – without any instruments. It took one hundred years for the scientists to find out, with all kind of sophisticated instruments, that stars are spirals. Van Gogh, with his bare eyes…
But he himself started thinking he must be mad. No, nobody supported his vision; even painters laughed. And this was not only one case, about all his paintings this was the case. He was seeing things which nobody else sees.
A genius is always ahead of his time. The bigger the genius, the farther in the future is his reach in time. Nobody is going to agree with him. He will be thought mad.
And remaining mad was not worthwhile; Van Gogh committed suicide. We forced him to commit suicide.
What harm was he doing? That’s why I say don’t judge people. He was not doing any harm to anybody. The canvas he was painting on was not in any way insulted. The canvas was not reporting to the police station that “This man is making stars into spirals on me.” The colors that he was using had no objection…
But people go on continually judging. Can’t you keep quiet? Perhaps he sees better then you, farther then you. And anyway, he is not doing any harm to anybody.
You will be surprised: in his whole life he could not sell a single painting. Who would purchase it? Only a genius, only a man of insight, only a man of the same category as Van Gogh would purchase one; otherwise, who would purchase his paintings? You will not purchase his paintings, because anybody coming to your house will look at the painting and will think you are mad: “Is this painting? How much have you paid?”
And now only two hundred paintings have somehow survived, in friends’ houses. Each painting is worth a million dollars, and Van Gogh lived hungry because he could not sell them. His brother used to give him enough money for seven days. Four days he was eating, and three days he was fasting – to purchase materials for paintings. This fast I call religion – not the fasts of Jaina monks, those are stupid fasts. This man was pouring his blood on the canvas. He had something more valuable than in own life and he was ready to sacrifice it.
And the same was the case Friedrich Nietzsche. He was condemned by everybody, because if you say love takes you beyond good and evil, that means there is something higher than good. And if it leads you beyond good and evil then you are totally free; then your acts cannot be judge as good or bad.
He was right, but he had no meditative support. He could argue about it, but he could not prove it by his own life. He himself could not love the love he was talking about, that love comes only as a fragrance of meditation – and then certainly there is nothing good, nothing bad.
Love is the highest value. There cannot be anything higher than that.
I feel deeply sad for Friedrich Nietzsche. I don’t feel for the normal human beings, because whether they are in the East or the West makes no difference – they will be the same people. Superficial differences of course will be there. But I feel deeply sad for Friedrich Nietzsche because if he had been in the East he would have raised the consciousness of humanity with his own enlightenment and perhaps, going beyond it. "

Osho