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Sampu wrote:

CHILD WAITING EARTHBOUND.

CLOUD SPARROW

HIGHER AND HIGHER.

It is a small haiku. It says, CHILD WAITING EARTHBOUND ... a child in the mother's womb is waiting to come to the earth. First one has to get roots into the earth; only then you can spread your branches into the sky like wings. Unless you have roots, you cannot spread your wings into the sky. The deeper the roots, the higher goes the tree ... almost reaching to the stars.

Only one painter in the West, Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch painter, had such tremendous insight -- almost the insight of a mystic, very close to being a buddha. He always painted his trees surpassing the stars. The stars remained underneath the trees, and the trees went beyond the stars. Whenever he was asked, "What are you doing? This is simply insane.

No tree can reach beyond the stars!" ...

The closest star is four light years away -- the closest. You have to understand four light years. Scientists had to find a new measurement; yards and feet and miles would no longer do. This is the measurement for the stars -- the distance is so vast. What is a light year? A light year is: light travels in a single second one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles -- in one second, one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. Now multiply it by sixty, that will be one minute. Multiply it again by sixty, that will be one hour. Multiply it by twenty-four, that will be one day. Multiply it by thirty, that will be one month.

Multiply it by twelve, that will be one year -- one light year! The nearest star is four light years away.

If we can ever in our wildest dreams think of a rocket moving at the same speed as light, which is impossible ... It is impossible because at the speed of light everything becomes light. That very speed turns everything into light, so you cannot have a rocket moving at the speed of light. You and the rocket both will become light.

But just to help you understand: if you move at the speed of light, you will take four years to reach to the closest star -- and there are already four million stars counted in the universe, and this is not the end; this is the end of our instruments. Beyond those four million stars there is still infinity. We can never reach to the boundary line, because there is no boundary line to existence.

Van Gogh was asked again and again, "Are you mad?" But he said, "I have been sitting by the side of the trees, listening where they are going, and I have always heard that the trees are our earth's ambition to reach to the stars. My paintings are not factual, they are poetic. They are the ambitions of the earth to reach to the stars."

He is the only man, a very rare man, who looked at stars not the way we look. He looked at stars as spirals. Nobody had ever looked at stars as spirals. People asked him, "What are you doing?" He said, "What can I do? Whenever I close my eyes I see the stars as spirals."

It took one hundred years, but just now physicists have come to the point that stars are spiral. Van Gogh was right, although he had no instruments, and eyes cannot see it.

He was so much obsessed with the sun ... he wanted to paint the perfect sunset. The whole day he would wait under the sun, watching and watching and watching. And then all the psychedelic colors on the horizon, and the sun setting ... He painted for almost one year, but rejected all those paintings because nothing was coming close to the beauty and the ecstasy and the silence, and the birds returning home, and the sun setting. And those psychedelic colors on the clouds, on the horizon ... never repeated again, always original.

The day he finished his painting to his satisfaction -- he was only thirty-three years old -- he wrote a letter to his brother saying that "My work is done. Now I don't have unnecessarily to be a burden on the earth" -- and he committed suicide.

He painted thousands of paintings, but not a single painting was ever sold, because nobody could understand his paintings. They were so strange, but they were absolutely real to him.

Sampu is saying, "Child waiting in the mother's womb" -- for what? -- earthbound, he wants to get to the earth, to get his roots deep into the earth, because unless you have roots in the earth you cannot rise into the sky, you cannot be a cedar of Lebanon, four hundred feet high. Then you need four-hundred-foot-deep roots. A balance is needed, otherwise the tree will fall.

This is one of my basic and essential approaches, that unless you are deeply rooted in materialism you cannot rise into spirituality.

The East has committed one mistake: it has been trying to reach to the stars without going deeper into the earth, and it has been a complete failure. The West has committed another mistake: it goes on growing the roots into the earth, into matter, and it has forgotten completely about the stars.

Hence my continuous emphasis that every one of you has to be a Zorba the Buddha.

Zorba is the roots in the earth, and the buddha is a longing to fly into ultimate freedom, to reach to the space which is unbounded.

CHILD WAITING EARTHBOUND.

CLOUD SPARROW

HIGHER AND HIGHER.

... And a bird, a cloud sparrow, goes on higher and higher into the sky. Both need a great synthesis.

Our world is suffering because we have not been able to create a synthesis between East and West, between earth and sky, between spirit and matter, between your inner and the outer. Unless this great synthesis is achieved, humanity has no hope.