Beyond Good and Evil
Performing penance as a monk, experiencing ecstasy in love, engaging in evolutionary land reform, walking for world peace, being imprisoned in France, facing a bullet in America . the many dimensions of my life have led me to ponder one question above all: What is Good and what is Evil? Or, indeed, do Good and Evil exist?
Again and again I have come to the conclusion that there is ignorance, there is ego, there is wisdom, there is humility, but there are no static states of Good and Evil. There are negative and positive, winter and summer, day and night, but for me none of these opposites is necessarily good or bad. Sometimes what appeared to be good turned out to be not so good, and what seemed bad proved to be a blessing in disguise. More often than not, I have been trapped by my own language, which I have inherited from others. I have been imprisoned by concepts, perceptions, and prejudices.
But whenever I have kept flowing, I have found my natural state of being, beyond the chains of mental abstractions. At those times, I have felt like water: no specific color, no particular taste, no solid structure, but natural and fluid. Sometimes water stagnates, but this is overcome when its natural state of motion is resumed; water finds again its own true nature. In the same way, by letting go of attachments to ideologies, places, and people, I have found my own true nature. My life has been a quest for self-realization.
-- Satish Kumar