Roots of Terrorism

The first step toward a healthy life is to accept one’s state of unhealthiness.

If mankind was only just beginning to be haunted by terrorism, things would be very easy. But mankind has always been haunted by terrorism, hence the matter is very complex. The forms of terrorism have changed – this insanity has been taking on newer and newer colors, newer and newer forms – but in the whole history of mankind, except for a few people who can be counted on the fingers of two hands, all the remaining people have been sick in one way or another. These sicknesses are as old as man himself, and that is why whenever someone has tried to eliminate these sicknesses, these insanities, insane humanity has eliminated the very man himself.

The people who poisoned Socrates and who put Jesus on the cross are proof of it. What Socrates was saying was providing the right diagnosis in order to make man healthy again, but the crowd does not want to accept that it is insane. And any man who wants to become healthy has first to accept this much: that he is not healthy. This is where the difficulty comes in.

There are thousands of madhouses in the world, but there is not a single madman ready to accept that he is mad. Every madman tries to prove that the whole world may be mad, but he is not. The people in whose lives an inner revolution has taken place, who have become transformed, are that very handful of people who have accepted that they were insane, that they were sick, that they were restless.

The first step toward a healthy life is to accept one’s state of unhealthiness.

But if someone says to you that you are beautiful, it feels very good, and if someone says that you are not beautiful, it feels very bad. If someone says to you that you are right, it feels good, it reassures, it consoles. And if someone exposes your wounds to you, that man seems like the enemy.

The causes of man’s unhealthiness are very clear-cut. First of all, man has made unnaturalness the goal of life instead of the natural. Our eyes are focused on the unnatural instead of on the natural. The more unnatural a man becomes, the more we respect him: he is a sadhu, a saint, a great soul, a siddha. Our respect inspires him to become even more unnatural, and our respect becomes a thirst within us to follow him also, to follow in his footsteps, because we see that the whole world is giving this man respect: “I may be wrong, but the whole world cannot be wrong.”

Excerpted from The Diamond Sword – The Diamond Sword (Rediscovering the Forgotten Treasure of Meditation) [Book]