Interviewer: Youth in Western Europe, in America are looking for a destination or for a destiny, not for a destiny, but they ask…
Shri Mataji: Seeking for the beyond, yeah.
Interviewer: So doesn’t this also mean that Western philosophy doesn’t offer a proper way for the beyond, for the way there, as more and more get in some case included in Eastern philosophy, if we say in general yoga is Eastern philosophy. Do you see that the high-industrialized western world has a lack of ways to offer to the mental human being?
Shri Mataji: That’s what I was telling the other gentleman also that, you see, the Western civilization is like the tree outside, and the Eastern understanding of the Spirit is like your roots. So there is a continuity, I mean I cannot separate one from another, you need the tree and a tree needs the roots also. Roots must have the tree, you cannot do without it, so both things are complementary to each other. But when there is an imbalance, like a tree grows too much beyond, and it doesn’t reach its source, then there could be a destruction. And that’s what exactly what has happened in the West, that you have overdeveloped yourself, and that overdevelopment has led you to a problem, because you are exhausted the Mother Earth, exhausted your energies, exhausted your brains, everything is at an exhaustion point. So now it’s better to get to the roots. So when you get to the roots you find, you have not reached the source. And where is the source? Source lies within yourself, in the human being himself and that source is to be found out. And that source is the Spirit, which all the great saints, all the great incarnations, in their own traditional way has one after another have expressed and told. But everybody has misunderstood and made a mess out of it. We have organized God, we have organized Christ, we have organized Mohammed Sahib, we have organized everyone, but They are living things, you cannot organize Them.
Interviewer: But if I’m a top manager of Ford, of IBM, am I really the person to do Yoga, doesn’t it mean, if I am one part of this highly industrialized western world, that the Eastern philosophy is offering me any time. Isn’t there an either or?
Shri Mataji: No, you become really dynamic because, you see, you become a witness of the whole play, you see this play. So you become dynamic, there is no pressure, or tension, you become just dynamic, you understand everything in all dimensions. Apart from that you develop a balance, you know how far to go. I mean, you don’t overdevelop something. You develop a proper, what we should say, a balanced development and that’s what is necessary, that we have lost the balance.