Modern research has come to a very significant fact, one of the most significant achieved in this century, and that is that you don’t have one mind, you have two minds. Your brain is divided into two hemispheres: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is joined to the left hand, and the left hemisphere is joined with the right hand — crosswise. The right hemisphere is intuitive, illogical, irrational, poetic, platonic, imaginative, romantic, mythical, religious; and the left hemisphere is logical, rational, mathematical, Aristotelian, scientific, calculative.

These two hemispheres are constantly in conflict — the basic politics of the world are within you, the greatest politics of the world are within you. You may not be aware of it, but once you become aware, the real thing to be done is somewhere between these two minds.

The left hand is concerned with the right hemisphere — intuition, imagination, myth, poetry, religion — and the left hand is very much condemned. The society is of those who are right-handed — right-handed means left hemisphere. Ten percent of children are born left-handed but they are forced to be right-handed. Children who are born left-handed are basically irrational, intuitive, non-mathematical, non-Euclidian. They are dangerous for society so it forces them in every way to become right-handed. It is not just a question of hands, it is a question of inner politics: the left-handed child functions through the right hemisphere. That, society cannot allow, it is dangerous, so he has to be stopped before things go too far.  It is suspected that in the beginning the proportion must have been fifty-fifty —left-handed children fifty percent and right-handed children fifty percent — but the right-handed party has ruled so long that by and by the proportion has fallen to ten percent and ninety percent. Even amongst you here many will be left-handed but you may not be aware of it.  You may write with the right hand and do your work with the right hand but in your childhood you may have been forced to be right-handed…. This is a trick because once you become right-handed your left hemisphere starts functioning….

The left-handed minority is the most oppressed minority in the world, even more than negroes, even more that the poor people. If you understand this division, you will understand many things. With the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the proletariat is always functioning through the right hemisphere of the brain: the poor people are more intuitive. Go to the primitive people, they are more intuitive. The poorer the person, the less intellectual — and that may be the cause of his being poor. Because he is less intellectual he cannot compete in the world of reason. He is less articulate as far as language is concerned, reason is concerned, calculation is concerned — he is almost a fool. That may be the cause of his being poor. The rich person is functioning through the left hemisphere; he is more calculative, arithmetical in everything, cunning, clever, logical — and he plans. That may be the reason why he is rich….

The same applies to men and women. Women are right-hemisphere people, men are left hemisphered.  Men have ruled women for centuries. Now a few women are in revolt, but the amazing thing is that these are the same type of women.   In fact they are just like men — rational, argumentative, Aristotelian. It is possible that one day, just as the communist revolution has succeeded in Russia and China, somewhere, maybe in America, women can succeed and overthrow men.  But by the time the women succeed, the women will no longer be women, they will have become left hemisphered.

Just superficial things change, deep down the same conflict remains. The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else. The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind. A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two persons — and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens. If the bridge is broken — and the bridge is very fragile — then you become two, you behave like two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are very angry, absolutely different. You don’t remember your morning — how can you remember? Another mind was functioning — and the person becomes two persons.

If this bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then integration, then crystallization, arises. What George Gurdjieff used to call the crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right, the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle. If you can understand this basic bifurcation in your tree of life then you can understand all the conflict that goes on around and inside you….

The female mind has a grace, the male mind has efficiency, and of course, in the long run, if there is a constant fight, grace is bound to be defeated — the efficient mind will win, because the world understands the language of mathematics, not of love.  But the moment your efficiency wins over your grace, you have lost something tremendously valuable: you have lost contact with your own being. You may become very efficient, but you will be no more a real person. You will become a machine, a robot-like thing.  Because of this there is constant conflict between man and woman. They cannot remain separate, they have to get into a relationship again and again — but they cannot remain together either. The fight is not outside, the fight is within you. And this is my understanding: unless you have resolved your inner fight between the right and the left hemispheres, you will never be able to be peaceful in love — never, because the inner fight will be reflected outside. If you are fighting inside and you are identified with the left hemisphere, the reason hemisphere, and you are continuously trying to overpower the right hemisphere, you will try to do the same with the woman you fall in love with. If the woman is continuously fighting her own reason inside, she will continuously fight the man she loves.

All relationships — almost all, the exceptions are negligible, can be left out of account — are ugly. In the beginning they are beautiful; in the beginning you don’t show the reality; in the beginning you pretend. Once the relationship settles and you relax, your inner conflict bubbles up and starts being mirrored in your relationship. Then come fights, then come a thousand and one ways of nagging each other, destroying each other. Hence the attraction for homosexuality. Whenever a society becomes too divided between man and woman, homosexuality erupts immediately, because at least a man in love with a man is not that much in conflict. The love relationship may not be very satisfying, may not lead to tremendous bliss and orgasmic moments, but at least it is not so ugly as the relationship between a man and a woman. Women become lesbians whenever the conflict becomes too much, because at least the love relationship between two women is not so deep in conflict. The same meets the same; they can understand each other.

Yes, understanding is possible, but the attraction is lost, the polarity is lost. It is a very great cost. Understanding is possible, but the whole tension, the challenge, is lost. If you choose challenge, then comes conflict, because the real problem is somewhere within you. Unless you have settled, come to a deep harmony between your female and male mind, you will not be able to love.

How to go deep in a relationship,  “First you go deep in meditation. Unless you are resolved within yourself you will create more problems than you already have. If you move in relationship, all your problems will be multiplied. Just watch: the greatest and the most beautiful thing in the world is love, but can you find anything more ugly, more hell-creating?”

“Are there ghosts, fairies, and things like that?” Yes there are — if you move through the right-hemisphere brain there are. If you move through the left-hemisphere brain, there are not. All children are right-hemisphered — they see ghosts and fairies all around, but you go on talking to them and putting them in their places and saying to them, “Nonsense! You are stupid! Where is the fairy? There is nothing, just a shadow.” By the time you convince the child, the helpless child… by and by you convince him and he moves from the right-hemisphered orientation to the left-hemisphered orientation — he has to. He has to live in your world: her has to forget his dreams, he has to forget all myth, he has to forget all poetry, he has to learn mathematics. Of course he becomes efficient in mathematics — and becomes almost crippled and paralyzed in life. Existence goes on getting farther and farther away and he becomes just a commodity in the market, his whole life becomes just rubbish… although, of course, valuable in the eyes of the world.

A sannyasin is one who lives through the imagination, who lives through the dreaming quality of his mind, who lives through poetry, who poeticizes about life, who looks through visions. Then trees are greener than they look to you, then birds are more beautiful, then everything takes on a luminous quality. Ordinary pebbles become diamonds; ordinary rocks are no longer ordinary — nothing is ordinary. If you look from the right hemisphere, everything becomes divine, sacred. Religion is from the right hemisphere.