"The front of the mind is active, and the back of the mind is inactive. The front of the mind thinks;, the back of the mind simply lives. The front of the mind is the base of all our activities, of all our achievements, of all our scientific, technological progress. The back of the mind is absolutely silent, and only meditators have known it; others have it but they are unaware of it. Unless you become inactive, so much so that there is not even the subtle activity of thoughts or emotions, you cannot enter the back side of your own mind.

"The front side of your mind is very limited; action has to be limited. Inaction is enormous; it has no limits, it is vast. Action can be defined, reduced to explanations, to theories. But the beauty, the experience of the inactive, stays with you, is beyond words. But it is there whether you know it or not, it does not depend on your knowing, it is always there. I will come to it later on when I am answering your question exactly. Just now I am creating the space in which the question can be answered.

"The second split is between the right side and the left side. Our hands are representative of the right and the left sides, but in a strange way: the left hand represents the right side of the mind, and the right hand represents the left side of the mind. And because we have used only the right hand and the left hand is very secondary, somewhere deep in our minds the right is right and the left is wrong.

"So anything that is wrong we condemn as leftist, and anything that we want to appreciate – the tradition supports it, the orthodoxy is behind it, the masses are absolutely for it – is rightist.

"In India the wife cannot sit at the right side of the man, she has to sit at the left side. She is a condemned being. At the most she can be the left hand, but never the right hand – that is preserved for the man.

"But strangely we were not aware for centuries that the right hand represents the left side of mind; it is joined crisscross."