Pankaja, there are many things in your question. First, you ask, “When someone like Nietzsche or Gertrude Stein dies — a genius who would probably have
become enlightened if they had met a master — what sort of consciousness do they carry into the next life?
The first thing to be understood is that consciousness has nothing to do with
genius. Everybody can be a Gautam Buddha. Everybody cannot be a Michelangelo,
everybody cannot be a Friedrich Nietzsche.
But everybody can be a Zarathustra, because the spiritual realization is
everybody’s birthright. It is not a talent like painting, or music, or poetry,
or dancing; it is not a genius either. A genius has tremendous intelligence,
but it is still of the mind.
Enlightenment is not of the mind, it is not intellect; it is intelligence of a
totally different order. So, the first thing to remember is that it is not only
people, like Friedrich Nietzsche who have missed the journey towards their own
selves; they were great intellectuals, geniuses unparalleled — but all that
belongs to the mind. And to be a Gautam Buddha, a Lao Tzu, or a Zarathustra is
to get out of the mind, to be in a state of mindlessness. It does not matter
whether you had a big mind or a small mind, a mediocre mind, or a genius; the
point is that you should be out of the mind. The moment you are out of the
mind, you are in yourself.
So the strange thing is that the more a person is intellectual, the farther he
goes away from himself. His intellect takes him to faraway stars. He is a
genius, he may create great poetry, he may create great sculpture. But as far
as you are concerned, you are not to be created, you are already there.
The genius creates, the meditator discovers.
So, don’t make a category of Nietzsche and Stein and Schweitzer separate from
others. In the world of mind, they are far richer than you, but in the world of
no-mind, they are as poor as you are. And that is the space which matters.
Secondly, you ask, “What sort of consciousness do they carry into the next
life?” They don’t have any consciousness to carry into another life. They have
a certain genius, a certain talent, a certain intelligence; they will carry
that intelligence into another life, but they don’t have consciousness.
Consciousness is an altogether different matter. It has nothing to do with
creativity, it has nothing to do with inventiveness, it has nothing to do with
science or art; it has something to do with tremendous silence, peace, a
centering — they don’t have it. So the question of carrying a certain
consciousness into the next life does not arise; they don’t have it in the
first place. What they have, they will carry into the next life. They will
become greater geniuses, they will become better singers, they will become more
talented in their field, but it has nothing to do with meditation or
consciousness. They will remain as unconscious as you are, as anybody else is.
It is as if you all fall asleep here; you will be dreaming. Somebody may have a
very beautiful dream, very nice, very juicy, and somebody may have a nightmare.
But both are dreams. And when they wake up, they will know that the beautiful
dream and the nightmare are not different — they are both dreams. They are
non-existential, mind projections.
When an ordinary man meditates, he comes to the same space of blissfulness as
Nietzsche or Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell. That space of blissfulness
will not be different, will not be richer for Bertrand Russell because he is a
great intellectual. Those values don’t matter outside of the mind; outside of
the mind, they are irrelevant.
This is great and good news because it means a woodcutter or a fisherman can
become Gautam Buddha. An uneducated Jesus, an uneducated Kabir, who doesn’t
show any indication of genius, can still become enlightened, because
enlightenment is not a talent, it is discovering your being. And the being of
everyone is absolutely equal. That is the only place where communism exists —
not in the Soviet Union, not in China.
The only place where communism exists is when somebody becomes a Gautam Buddha,
a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Suddenly all distinctions, talents of the mind,
disappear. There is only pure sky where you cannot make any distinctions of
higher and lower.
And you are asking, “What was it that in their previous lives allowed them to
experience such a huge potential?”
You are growing every moment in whatever you are doing. A warrior will attain a
certain quality of warriorness, a sharpness of the sword, and he will carry
that quality into the next life. A mathematician will carry his mathematical
intelligence to higher peaks in another life. That’s why people are so
different, so unequal, because in their past lives everybody has been doing
different things, accumulating different experiences, molding the mind in a
certain way. Nothing is lost, whatever you are doing will be with you like your
shadow. It will follow you, and it will become bigger and bigger.
If Nietzsche is a great philosopher, he must have been philosophizing in his
past lives — perhaps many, many lives — because such a genius needs a long,
long philosophical past.
But the same is true about everybody. Everybody has a certain talent, developed
or undeveloped; it depends on your decision, on your commitment. Once you are
committed, you have accepted a responsibility to grow in a certain direction.
Even whole races of people have developed in different directions, not only
individuals.