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 earths 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 dont 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. OSHo..♡♡♡
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 12:46:17 +0000