A rich man has found better food, but the hunger is lost; he cannot really feel the intensity of being hungry. The proportion is always the same. He has found a beautiful bed, but with the bed comes insomnia. He has made better arrangements for sleeping. He cannot fall asleep. He has just changed the arrangement. A beggar is asleep just outside there in the street. Traffic is passing and the beggar is asleep. He has no bed. The place where he is sleeping is uneven, hard and uncomfortable, but he is asleep. The beggar cannot get good food, it is impossible, because he has to beg. But he has a good appetite. The total result is the same. A successful man is not only successful, for with success comes all sorts of calamities. A failure is not just a failure, for with failure comes many sorts of blessings. The total is always the same, but the total has to be penetrated and looked at, a clear perspective is needed. Eyes are needed to look at the total because mind can look only at the fragment. If the mind looks at the morning, it cannot look at the evening; if it looks at the evening, the morning is forgotten. Mind cannot look at the total day, mind is fragmentary. Only a meditative consciousness can look at the whole, from birth to death -- and then the total is always the same. That is why wise men never try to change the arrangement. That is why in the East no revolution has ever happened -- because revolution means changing the arrangement. Look what happened in Soviet Russia. In 1917 the greatest revolution happened on earth. The arrangement was changed. Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky could have learned much from Chuang Tzu. But then there would have been no revolution. What happened? The capitalists disappeared, now nobody was rich, nobody was poor. The old classes were no more. But only names changed. New classes came into being. Before, it was the rich man and the poor man, the capitalist and the proletariat -- now it was the manager and the managed. But the distinction, the gap, remained the same. Nothing had changed. Only now you called the capitalist the manager! Those who have studied the Russian revolution say that this was not a socialist revolution, it was a managerial revolution. The same gap, the same distance, remained between the two classes, and a classless society had not come into being. Chuang Tzu would have laughed. What had you done? The manager had become powerful, the managed had remained powerless.
hans-wolfgang - am Freitag, 21. Juli 2006, 23:31
