[Please note that in this audio meditation Pir Vilayat is speaking alternately in English and in German. The corresponding transcript is in English only.]

Let’s say the emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual found its fulfillment in the teachings of Prigogine the physicist who died a few years ago in Belgium. Perhaps you know about it. If you are a physicist of course you do know.

He said if a system is in a state of equilibrium, then there can be no change.

And so the human being is a dissipative structure.

And that is when one frees oneself from determination, from things being determined, from being determined.

Freedom from conditioning. And that is what Buddha’s talking about, that’s what he had in mind.

So for a system to change, one has to dislocate it and assemble it again in a new way.

According to a new order.

So I could describe this, perhaps you know that word entropy? So for example, you could illustrate it if you have books on a shelf that are ordered according to the alphabetical name of the author.

And then you think, well yes and first of all entropy means you take them out and you don’t put them back in in place.

So that happens in our lives.

Disorder. And the trouble is that to get order out of disorder we have to work.

To reverse the disorder. But maybe you think, that wasn’t a good idea to have them in an alphabetical list.

It would be much better to organize them according to subject.

So then in that case, you might just as well throw all the books out of the library and start again.

And that is what is meant by disassembling your being and starting anew.

And so Prigogine says that creativity is reversing entropy.

In fact, you can use entropy, you see, the beauty of entropy is that it opens a door towards randomness.

And so, you see, God proceeds by trial and error. It seems rather insulting to God to say that He can make mistakes.

But if you watch the way that animals evolve, that species evolve, you’ll see that sometimes there are deadends and that something else happens.

So trial and error. And so we learn, we evolve by trial and error.

And as I said, when I was a child, I said to Murshid, perhaps one should never do anything, because if one does something, it could be a mistake.

And then Pir o Murshid said, well, you have to do it all the same because that is how you learn.

And then I said, well, it means a lot of suffering for people.

And then he said, well then you’ll have to learn quickly.

Okay. So that’s the thrust into existence.

And Buddha does exactly the opposite; no involvement in evolution. A vertical ascent into transcendence.