Sage and Saint

 

 

Sufis make a great distinction between the word 'saint' and the word 'sage'. And there is a great distinction. They are not synonymous. Notwithstanding what your dictionaries say. they are not synonymous.

 

Man can ordinarily have two kinds of character. One is the negative character: the character of the criminal, the character of the anti-social, the character of the rebellious. Another is the positive character: the character of the conventional, orthodox. respectable.

 

The criminal will be punished, will be thrown into prison if caught. The society will try to destroy him because he is a danger to the society. He is disobedient. He is trying to assert himself and the society does not like that. The society exists by destroying individuals; the society can exist only by destroying individuals. The society has more power if there are no individuals around. If there are individuals then the power is less and less and less. If the whole society consists of individuals then there will be no power in the authorities -- there will be no power in the priest or the politician. So the society tries to crush. uproot, destroy the anti-social. the immoral -- the individual who wants to have his own morality, who wants to do his own thing. The society is very murderous about the negative. And naturally, on the other hand, the society respects the positive.

 

If you follow the society, the society honours you. So the one, the negative character, becomes criminal, and the other, the positive character, becomes a respected gentleman. If the criminal goes on moving to the logical extreme, then he will become the devil. And if the gentleman goes on moving to the logical extreme, he will become the saint. The saint is one who is for the society, hence the society is for him. And the evil character is one who is not for the society, is only for himself -- so the society is naturally against him. But there is one thing which is common to both: they are half. This has to be understood. This is one of the most important Sufi ideas: both are half, partial.

 

The saint has only the positive; he is missing the negative. That's why you will find your saints very boring; you will find your saints very flat, dull. You will find that to live with your saints for even twenty-four hours will be a great ordeal. The saint will not have any joy, he will be sad. He will never do anything wrong, he will be always good, but he will not have any song to sing. He will not have any uniqueness about him. He will be just a type, a stereotype. He will not have any unique taste of his own, he will be a conformist. He will be almost dead because the positive is bound to be dead. Unless the negative goes on playing with it, there is no joy. Life is a warp and woof between the positive and the negative. You cannot make the saint whole. Hence Sufis will not say that the saint is holy -- because he is not whole, he is half.

 

Half of him, the negative part, has been repressed, denied. All connections with the negative part have been cut. The negative is thrown into the unconscious dungeon. The saint has tried in every way not to be even aware of its existence. But it exists. There is no way to drop it. The only way to go beyond it is to absorb it, not to drop it. Let me repeat: the only way to go beyond it is to absorb it. But it needs great intelligence, it needs great understanding, wisdom, meditativeness, to transform the poison into elixir.

 

The negative is poisonous, but the poison can become medicinal in the right hands. The saint is a little stupid. You will find saints stupid, mediocre. They were not really intelligent people, otherwise they would have transformed their negative, they would have transformed all that is dangerous into a beautiful flowering. The saint will carry the negative in the unconscious.

 

So if you look through a window into the mind of a saint while he is asleep, you will be surprised. He's doing things which you could not even have thought about him. In dreams the saint will become the negative. There will be a shift, a total shift, from the positive to the negative -- because the negative also needs a little play, a little activity. So you will find that the dreams of the saints are very criminal. That's why saints are very much afraid to sleep. They go on reducing their sleep because it is the only thing where they are without any control. The moment they fall asleep the control is lost. The conscious goes to sleep and the unconscious take possession, and the unconscious is the negative.

 

And they are very much afraid because in the unconscious are repressed sexuality, murderous instincts, anger, rage, hatred -- all kinds of scorpions and snakes and poisonous beings. They all start bubbling up, surfacing. Saints are very much troubled by sleep, because sleep brings one fact home, and brings it home very clearly -- that the unconscious or the negative has not been destroyed, it is still there. Saints have great nightmares.

 

The criminal, the anti-social, the rebellious, the negative personality is also half. The negative people are the ones who become great politicians, sometimes great revolutionaries, and release great negative poison on the world. An Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini or Mao Tse Tung -- these are the negative type people. They are just the opposite of the saint, but in one way almost the same -- they are as half as the saint is. The difference is only one: what the saint has made the unconscious, they have made their conscious, and what they have made their conscious the saint has made the unconscious.

 

Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler are not different from Mahatma Gandhi. The only difference is that what is repressed in Mahatma Gandhi is expressed in Adolf Hitler, and what is expressed in Adolf Hitler is repressed in Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi goes on repressing the negative, Adolf Hitler goes on expressing the negative. Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi are exactly the same type of person. One is just standing on his head doing a sirshasana, a headstand -- but the type is exactly the same. There is no difference. And you will be surprised to know that these great criminals have beautiful dreams, far more beautiful than the saints can ever have, because their repressed positivity comes out in their dreams. In their dreams they become great saints. They do great good things to humanity.

 

These are the two ordinary types of people: the saint and sinner. They go together. In a world where there are no more sinners there will be no more saints. In a world where there are no more saints there will be no more sinners. They are partners in the same business. They exist together, they help each other. Without the one the other cannot even exist, cannot survive. The sinner gives definition to the saint and the saint gives definition to the sinner.

 

The sage has a totally different kind of consciousness. It is whole it is not a choice. It is neither positive nor negative, it has absorbed both. It is total acceptance. Whatsoever has been given by God has to be transformed into one unity. Man has not to choose but to accept. And remember, by acceptance I don't mean tolerance. When you tolerate something you have not really accepted it. You say, 'What can be done? It is there, so okay, I will tolerate it. If it cannot be dropped, if it cannot be destroyed, then I will have to tolerate it.' Remember, acceptance is not just tolerance. Acceptance is joyful welcome -- 'What-soever God has given must have some meaning although I may not be able to see the meaning Of it right now. I will have to search for it.' But there is a tacit understanding that whatsoever is given must have some meaning, otherwise it would not have been given in the first place.

 

With this understanding a sage is born. A sage is a holy man because a sage is whole. He does not deny his sexuality, he does not deny his anger, he does not deny anything at all. He accepts everything with deep understanding, gratitude, welcome. And in that very understanding, in that very welcoming attitude, things start changing. A great alchemical change happens. This miracle happens in a sage -- anger becomes compassion. Anger plus understanding is equal to compassion, sex plus meditation is equal to samadhi.

 

There is a part which is carrying all the seeds of meditation, and there is another part which is carrying all the seeds of sexuality. The sinner denies the meditative part and accepts the sexual part; the saint denies the sexual part and accepts the meditative part. But both remain lopsided. The sage accepts both, brings them together -- meditativeness and sexuality -- and watches a great miracle happening in himself, the greatest. As meditativeness and sexuality come close suddenly there is a change -- they become one flame. And that one name has a totally new quality.

 

It is just like when hydrogen and oxygen meet, you have water. Now this is a miracle -- a miracle in the sense that oxygen does not have the qualities of water, neither does hydrogen. But when hydrogen and oxygen come close, get into a loving embrace, become one unity, suddenly a new quality arises in existence which was not in either of the components. You can drink as much oxygen as you want but your thirst will not go. And you can drink as much hydrogen as you want and your thirst will not go. But water is nothing but H20. Then water has something which is not contained in the parts. Something new has happened: the parts have disappeared into something new. A higher synthesis has been arrived at.

 

That's what I mean by organic transformation. Whenever two things meet, if there is a real meeting, a third thing is born. When a man and a woman meet and love, a child is born. Now the child will not have the qualities of the father and will not have the qualities of the mother.

 

The child will have his own qualities, the child will be a unique individual. You cannot just reduce the child to the qualities of the parents. You cannot say, 'This quality comes from this parent, this quality comes from that parent -- and the child is just a sum total of it.' No. If the child is just a sum total of the parents then there is no soul. The child must be something more than the sum total of the parents, only then is there a soul.

 

Water is something more than the sum total of H20.

 

Only when two opposites meet does this organic trans-formation happen. Man and woman meet, then a child is born. A child cannot be born from a meeting of a man with another man, or a woman with another woman. Similars cannot create only opposites.

 

Now meditativeness and love are opposites. Meditativeness needs aloneness, love needs the other. Sexuality and meditation are opposites. Sexuality is a desire, a continuous desire, unfulfilled -- it remains unfulfilled. And meditation is desirelessness. These are opposites. When they meet, suddenly there is a flare-up. Something happens which was not contained in either.

 

The saint is just meditative. He is carrying one part -- hydrogen or oxygen. The sinner is just sexual, he's carrying another part. When the saint and the sinner meet in you, the sage is born. When the polarities meet in you in deep embrace, are lost into each other, lose all definitions, merge, become one, the sage is born in you. The sage is the rarest flowering in existence. The saint is a faraway echo of it, as far away as the sinner.

 

So Sufis say that the sage is not a saint. You can find many saints, that is very easy. Saints are a social phenomenon. But to find a sage is difficult because the sage is as individual as the criminal and as cosmic as the saint. He is both together. In the sage, God and Devil meet and lose all their identities. That is the highest meeting. There is no higher meeting than that. This moment of meeting within you of the sinner and the saint, of the negative and the positive, is the moment of samadhi.

 

The sage is no-mind. The sinner is negative mind, the saint is positive mind, the sage is no-mind. The sinner lives in constant duality. He has to fight with his saint, remember it. The sinner has continuously to fight with his saint, because the saint IS there. The sinner is going to kill somebody and the saint says, 'Don't do this, this is not right.' He has to fight. His fight is as arduous as the fight of the saint. The saint has to fight the sinner. If somebody insults him and a great desire to kill him arises, he has to fight with that desire. He cannot do it, he is a saint, he is a holy man, he is a religious man -- this and that. Both go on fighting. They have to because they live in the duality, and the repressed part goes on taking revenge. It waits for the right moments to assert itself.

 

In the sage there is silence, there is no duality. The sage becomes a silent shrine. There is no longer any conflict, any antagonism. There is no longer any war going on in him. There is utter peace. That's what Sufis call ISLAM. There is utter peace, silence. Those warring elements have disappeared into unity. The marriage has happened.

 

-Osho, "Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 2, #15"