(Excerpts from chapter five: ‘Sowing White Seeds,’ Commentary from 15 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall, Rebel Publishing House, 1993).
Life cannot exist without death. Then why hate death? Because it is death that creates the space for life to exist. This is a great insight, that death is the contrast, the background, the blackboard on which life is written with white chalk. Death is the darkness of night on which life starts twinkling like stars. If you destroy the darkness of the night the stars will disappear. That's what happens in the day. The stars are still there - do you think they have disappeared? They are still there, but because there is too much light you cannot see them. They can be seen only in contrast.
The saint is possible only because of the sinner. Hence, Buddha says don't hate the sinner, he makes it possible for the saint to exist. They are two aspects of the same coin.
Seeing this, one is neither attached to good nor detached from bad. One accepts both as part and parcel of life. In that acceptance you can transform things. Only through that acceptance is transformation possible.
And before you can transform suffering you will have to become a witness; that is the third point. First: do not resist evil. Second: know that opposites are not opposites but complementaries, inevitably joined together, so there is no choice - remain choiceless. And the third is: be a witness, because if you are a witness to your suffering you will be able to absorb it. If you become identified with it you cannot absorb it.
The moment you become identified with your suffering you want to discard it, you want to get rid of it, it is so painful. But if you are a witness then suffering loses all thorns, all stings. Then there is suffering, and you are a witness to it. You are just a mirror; it has nothing to do with you. Happiness comes and goes, unhappiness comes and goes, it is a passing show; you are just there, a mirror reflecting it. Life comes and goes, death comes and goes; the mirror is not affected by either. The mirror reflects but remains unaffected; the mirror is not imprinted by either.
A great distance arises when you witness. And only in that witnessing can you become able to transform the baser metal into gold. Only in that witnessing do you become a scientist of the inner, a detached observer. Now you know the opposites are not opposites, so they can be changed into each other. Then it is not a question of destroying evil in the world, but of transforming evil into something beneficial; transforming poison into nectar.
The third sutra. The ordinary mind always throws the responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other who is making you suffer. Your wife is making you suffer, your husband is making you suffer, your parents are making you suffer, your children are making you suffer, or the financial system of the society, capitalism, communism, fascism, the prevalent political ideology, the social structure, or fate, karma, God...you name it.
People have millions of ways to shirk responsibility. But the moment you say somebody else - x, y, z - is making you suffer, then you cannot do anything to change it. What can you do? When the society changes and communism comes and there is a classless world, then everybody will be happy. Before it, it is not possible. How can you be happy in a society which is poor? And how can you be happy in a society which is dominated by the capitalists? How can you be happy with a society which is bureaucratic? How can you be happy with a society which does not allow you freedom?
Excuses and excuses and excuses - excuses just to avoid one single insight that ‘I am responsible for myself. Nobody else is responsible for me; it is absolutely and utterly my responsibility. Whatsoever I am, I am my own creation.’ This is the meaning of the third sutra:
Of course you have a very limited situation, but even in that limited situation you can sing a song. You can either cry tears of helplessness or you can sing a song. Even with chains on your feet you can dance; then even the sound of the chains will have a melody to it.