I am a peculiar mixture of optimism and pessimism. I do not see total peace and I think this is not even the law of nature. If you study nature, there is friction everywhere. Even in matter there is friction. There is a clash of opposite poles, time and space. They are all opposite poles. Nature, according to Samkhya, tantra and yoga is a mixture of the three gunas: sattwa, representing peace and harmony; rajas, representing aggressiveness, desire, passion and excitement; tamas, representing dullness, lethargy and procrastination. You can find these three gunas in a human being, and you can find them in nature, in all the elements of nature: earth, water, fire, air and ether. You can always find the three gunas.
I do not think that it is possible for sattwa to be predominant and for everybody in the world to become peaceful; nobody would be a criminal; nobody would divorce their husband or wife or cheat on each other. I don’t think that is possible. A balance can be maintained, and the average of sattwa can be increased, but I do not think that it can predominate. There has to be a proportion between the three gunas of 3:2:1 – three people tamasic; two people rajasic; one person sattwic. If you can maintain this combination or ratio, the world becomes a place where one can live within a functioning society. The progress in the political and economic systems will be completely finished if sattwa dominates. It is because of tamoguna and rajoguna that the world is progressing. How many captains can you have in one ship? Everybody has got to be crew. One wise man is enough.
Yoga will do a lot of work in the realm of self-enquiry. It will improve the quality of the mind and make you more conscious, but you must remember that in the womb of nature we were not conceived at one and the same moment. Though we live on this planet Earth together, I am somewhere and you are somewhere else from the point of evolution. My class and your class are entirely different. We are eighty people here, and therefore we have eighty score cards to be marked; no two people move together. Somebody will be attaining nirvana, beatitude, oneness with God; somebody else will be thinking about how to snatch your watch. It is a beautiful world!
I have been thinking about it. Once upon a time I was also 20, 25 years old; I was also an idealist. I was also thinking of a world with purity and peace, because my teachers were Christian sisters. They used to teach love, compassion, faith and goodness, but when I became entangled with the realities of life, I found there is no use breaking this shell. We have to accept the law of nature, and at the same time, do a little bit of brushing here and there. Let a criminal plot to take away my watch, but at the same time, in his personal life, he should do some meditation so that in his next incarnation he will be better.
5 February 1983, Wilmslow, Manchester