CHAPTER 7: DROPPING OUT OF THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB

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‌DROPPING OUT OF THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB‌

A very intricate, complex thing has to be understood: If you are not in love, you are lonely. If you are in love, really in love, you become alone.

Loneliness is sadness; aloneness is not sadness. Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness. You need someone and the needed one is not available. Loneliness is darkness, with no light in it. A dark house, waiting and waiting for someone to come and kindle the light.

Aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete. Nobody is needed, you are enough. And this happens in love. Lovers become alone. Through love you touch your inner completeness. Love makes you complete. Lovers share each other, but that is not their need, that is their overflowing energy.

Two persons who have been feeling lonely can make a contract, can come together. They are not lovers, remember. They remain lonely but now, because of the presence of the other, they don’t feel the loneliness, that’s all. They somehow deceive themselves. Their love is nothing but a deception to deceive themselves: “I am not lonely, somebody else is there.”

Because two lonely persons are meeting, their loneliness basically is doubled, or even multiplied. That’s what happens ordinarily. You feel lonely when you are alone, and when you are in relationship you feel miserable. This is an everyday observation. When people are not in a relationship they feel lonely, and they are searching for somebody to be related to. When they are related to somebody, then the misery starts; then they feel it was better to be alone—this is too much.

What happens? Two lonely people meet—that means two gloomy, sad, miserable people meet—and the misery is multiplied. How can two uglinesses become beautiful? How can two lonelinesses coming together bring a sense of

completion, totality? Not possible. They exploit each other, they somehow try to deceive themselves through being related to each other, but that deception doesn’t go far. By the time the honeymoon is finished, the marriage is also finished. It is just a temporary illusion.

Real love is not a search to combat loneliness. Real love is to transform loneliness into aloneness, to help the other. If you love a person, you help that person to be alone. You don’t try to fill him or her. You don’t try to complete the other in some way by your presence. You help the other to be alone, to be so full out of her or his own being that you will not be needed.

When a person is totally free, then out of that freedom sharing is possible. Then he gives much, but not as a need; he gives much, but not as a bargain. He gives much because he has much. He gives because he enjoys giving.

Lovers are alone, and a real lover never destroys your aloneness. He will always be totally respectful toward your individuality, toward your aloneness. It is sacred. He will not interfere in it, he will not try to intrude on that space.

But ordinarily, lovers, so-called lovers, are very much afraid of the other’s aloneness, independence. They are very much afraid, because they think if the other is independent then they will not be needed, then they will be discarded. So the woman goes on trying to manage things so that her husband or boyfriend remains dependent. He should be always in need of her, so that she can remain valuable. And the man goes on trying in every way to manage the same, so that he remains valuable. The result is a bargain, not love, and there is continuous conflict, struggle. The struggle is based in the fact that everybody needs freedom.

Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love. It must be something else. Love and freedom go together, they are two wings of the same bird. Whenever you see that your love is going against your freedom, then you are doing something else in the name of love.

Let this be your criterion: freedom is the criterion; love gives you freedom, makes you free, liberates you. And once you are totally yourself, you feel grateful to the person who has helped you. That gratefulness is almost religious.

You feel in the other person something divine. He has made you free, she has made you free, and love has not become possessiveness.

When love deteriorates it becomes possessiveness, jealousy, struggle for power, politics, domination, manipulation—a thousand and one things, all ugly. When love soars high, to the purest sky, it is freedom, total freedom.

If you are in love, the love I am talking about, your very love will help the other to be integrated. Your very love will become a cementing force for the other. In your love the other will come together as a whole, unique and individual, because your love will give freedom. Under the shade of your love, under the protection of your love, the other will start growing.

All growth needs love, but unconditional love. If love has conditions then growth cannot be total, because those conditions will come in the way.

Love unconditionally, don’t ask anything in return. Much comes back to you on its own—that’s another thing—but don’t be a beggar. In love, be an emperor. Just give it and see what happens: a thousandfold it comes back. But one has to learn the knack. Otherwise one remains a miser; one gives a little and waits for something to come back, and that waiting and expectation destroys the whole beauty of it.

When you are waiting and expecting, the other feels that you are being manipulative. He may say it or not, but he feels you are manipulating. And wherever you feel the other is trying to manipulate you, you want to rebel against it because it goes against the inner need of the soul, because any demand from the outside dis-integrates you. Any demand from the outside divides you. Any demand from the outside is a crime against you, because your freedom is polluted. Then you are no longer sacred. You are no longer the end, you are being used as a means. And the most immoral act in the world is to use somebody as a means.

Each being is an end unto himself. Love treats you as an end unto yourself.

You are not to be dragged into any expectations.

So there are a few things to be remembered. One is to love, but not as a need

—as a sharing. Love, but don’t expect; give. Love, but remember your love

should not become an imprisonment for the other. Love, but be very careful; you are moving on sacred ground. You are going into the highest, the purest and holiest temple. Be alert! Drop all impurities outside the temple. When you love a person, love the person as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man, because if you love a man as a man your love is going to be very ordinary. Your love is not going to be more than lust. If you love a woman as a woman, your love is not going to soar very high. Love a woman as a goddess, then love becomes worship.

In Tantra, the man who is going to make love to the woman has to worship her for months as a goddess. He has to visualize in the woman the mother-goddess. When the visualization has become total, when no lust arises, when seeing the woman sitting naked before him he simply feels thrilled with a divine energy and no lust arises, the very form of the woman becomes divine, and all thoughts stop and only reverence is felt—only then he is allowed to make love.

It looks a little absurd and paradoxical. When there is no need to make love, then he is allowed to make love. When the woman has become a goddess, then he is allowed to make love because now love can soar high, love can become a climax, a crescendo. Now it will not be of the earth, it will not be of this world; it will not be of two bodies, it will be of two beings. It will be a meeting of two existences. Two souls will meet, merge, and mingle, and both will come out of it tremendously alone.

Aloneness means purity. Aloneness means that you are just yourself and nobody else. Aloneness means that you are pure gold; just gold and nothing else, just you. Love makes you alone. Loneliness will disappear, but aloneness will arise.

Loneliness is a state when you are ill with yourself, bored with yourself, tired of yourself, and you want to go somewhere and to forget yourself in being involved with somebody else. Aloneness is when you are thrilled just by your being. You are blissful just by being yourself. You need not go anywhere. Need has disappeared, you are enough unto yourself. But now, a new thing arises in your being. You have so much that you cannot contain it. You have to share, you have to give. And whoever accepts your gift, you will feel grateful that the person has accepted.

Lovers feel grateful that their love has been accepted. They feel thankful, because they were so full of energy and they needed someone to pour that energy into. When a flower blooms and releases its fragrance to the winds it feels grateful to the winds. The fragrance was growing more and more heavy on the flower, it was becoming almost a burden. It is just as if a woman is pregnant and nine months have passed and the child is not being born, is delaying. Now she is so burdened; she wants to share the child with the world.

That is the meaning of birth. Up to now the woman has been carrying the child within herself, it was nobody else’s but her own. But now it is too much; she cannot contain it. It has to be shared; the child has to be shared with the world. The mother has to drop her miserliness. Once the child is out of the womb, it is no longer only the mother’s; by and by the child will go away, and far away. It will become part of the great world.

The same happens when a cloud comes full of rainwater ready to shower, and when it showers, rains, the cloud feels unburdened and happy and grateful to the thirsty earth because it accepted the rain.

There are two types of love. One is the love that happens when you are feeling lonely: as a need, you go to the other. The other love arises when you are not feeling lonely, but alone. In the first case you go to get something; in the second case you go to give something. A giver is an emperor.

Love that arises out of aloneness is not ordinary love. It has nothing to do with lust, on the contrary it is the greatest transformation of lust into love. And love makes you individual. If it doesn’t make you individual, if it tries to make you a slave, then it is not love; it is hate pretending love. Love of this type kills, destroys the individuality of the other. It makes you less of an individual, it pulls you down. You are not enhanced, you don’t become graceful. You are being pulled into the mud, and everybody who is tangled up in that kind of relationship starts feeling that he is settling with something dirty.

Love should give you freedom; never settle for less. Love should make you completely free, a wanderer in the sky of freedom, with no roots attached anywhere. Love is not an attachment; lust is.

Meditation and love are the two ways to attain to the individuality I am talking

about. Both are very deeply related. In fact they are both aspects of the same coin: love and meditation. If you meditate, sooner or later you will come upon love. If you meditate deeply, sooner or later you will start feeling a tremendous love arising in you that you have never known before: a new quality to your being, a new door opening. You have become a new flame and you want to share now.

If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. A subtle quality of silence is entering in you. Thoughts are disappearing, gaps appearing, silences. You are touching your own depth.

Love makes you meditative if it is on the right lines. Meditation makes you loving if it is on the right lines.

The darkness of loneliness cannot be fought directly. It is something essential for everyone to understand, that there are a few fundamental things which cannot be changed. This is one of the fundamentals: you cannot fight with darkness directly, with loneliness directly, with the fear of isolation directly. The reason is that all these things do not exist; they are simply absences of something, just as darkness is the absence of light.

You can go on fighting with this darkness your whole life and you will not succeed, but just a small candle is enough to dispel it. You have to work for the light because it is positive, existential; it exists on its own. And once light comes, anything that was its absence automatically disappears.

Loneliness is similar to darkness.

You don’t know your aloneness. You have not experienced your aloneness and its beauty, its tremendous power, its strength. Loneliness and aloneness in the dictionaries are synonymous, but existence does not follow your dictionaries. And nobody has yet tried to make an existential dictionary which will not be contradictory to existence.

Loneliness is an absence, because you don’t know your aloneness. There is

fear. You feel lonely so you want to cling to something, to somebody, to some relationship, just to hold on to the illusion that you are not lonely. But you know you are, hence the pain. On the one hand you are clinging to something that is not for real, which is just a temporary arrangement—a relationship, a friendship. And while you are in the relationship you can create a little illusion to forget your loneliness.

But this is the problem: although you can forget for a moment your loneliness, just the next moment you suddenly become aware that the relationship or the friendship is nothing permanent. Yesterday you did not know this man or this woman, you were strangers. Today you are friends; who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow you may be strangers again, hence the pain.

The illusion gives a certain solace, but it cannot create the reality so that all fear disappears. It represses the fear, so on the surface you feel good—at least you try to feel good. You pretend to feel good to yourself: how wonderful is the relationship, how wonderful is the man or the woman. But behind the illusion— and the illusion is so thin that you can see behind it—there is pain in the heart, because the heart knows perfectly well that tomorrow things may not be the same, and they are not the same.

Your whole life’s experience supports that things go on changing. Nothing remains stable; you cannot cling to anything in a changing world. You wanted to make your friendship something permanent but your wanting is against the law of change, and that law is not going to make exceptions. It simply goes on doing its own thing. It will change, everything will change. Perhaps in the long run you will understand one day that it was good that it did not listen to you, that existence did not bother about you and just went on doing whatever it wanted to do, not according to your desire.

It may take a little time for you to understand. You want this friend to be your friend forever, but tomorrow he turns into an enemy. Or simply, “You get lost!” and he is no longer with you. Somebody else fills the gap who is a far superior being. Then suddenly you realize it was good that the other one got lost; otherwise you would have been stuck with him. But still the lesson never goes so deep that you stop asking for permanence.

You will start asking for permanence with this man, with this woman: now

this should not change. You have not really learned the lesson that change is simply the very fabric of life. You have to understand it and go with it. Don’t create illusions; they are not going to help. And everybody is creating illusions of different kinds.

I used to know one man who said, “I trust only money, nothing else.” I said, “You are making a very significant statement.”

He said, “Everybody changes. You cannot rely on anybody. And as you get older, only your money is yours. Nobody cares, not even your son, not even your wife. If you have money they all care, they all respect you because you have money. If you don’t have money you become a beggar.”

His saying that the only thing in the world to trust is money comes out of a long experience of life, of getting cheated again and again by the people he trusted. And he thought they loved him but they were all around him for the money.

“But,” I told him, “at the moment of death money is not going to be with you. You can have an illusion that at least money is with you, but as your breathing stops, money is no longer with you. You have earned something but it will be left on this side; you cannot carry it beyond death. You will fall into a deep loneliness which you have been hiding behind the facade of money.”

There are people who are after power, but the reason is the same: when they are in power so many people are with them, millions of people are under their domination. They are not alone. They are great political and religious leaders. But power changes. One day you have it, another day it is gone, and suddenly the whole illusion disappears. You are lonely as nobody else is, because others are at least accustomed to being lonely. You are not accustomed, your loneliness hurts you more.

Society has tried to make arrangements so you can forget loneliness. Arranged marriages are just an effort so that you know your wife is with you. All religions resist divorce for the simple reason that if divorce is allowed then the basic purpose marriage was invented for is destroyed. The basic purpose was to give you a companion, a lifelong companion.

But even though a wife will be with you or a husband will be with you for your whole life, that does not mean that love remains the same. In fact, rather than giving you a companion, they give you a burden to carry. You were lonely, already in trouble, and now you have to carry another person who is lonely. And in this life there is no hope, because once love disappears you both are lonely, and both have to tolerate each other. Now it is not a question of being enchanted by each other; at the most you can patiently tolerate each other. Your loneliness has not been changed by the social strategy of marriage.

Religions have tried to make you a member of an organized body of religion so you are always in a crowd. You know that there are millions of Catholics; you are not alone, millions of Catholics are with you. Jesus Christ is your savior. God is with you. Alone you may have been wrong, doubt may have arisen, but millions of people cannot be wrong. A little support, but even that is gone because there are millions who are not Catholics. There are the people who crucified Jesus, there are people who don’t believe in God. And their number is not less than Catholics, it is more. There are other religions with different concepts. It is difficult for an intelligent person not to doubt. You may have millions of people following a certain belief system, but still you cannot be certain that they are with you, that you are not lonely.

God was a device, but all devices have failed. It was a device…. when nothing else is there, at least God is with you. He is always everywhere with you. In the dark night of the soul, he is with you, so don’t be worried. It was good for a childish humanity to be deceived by this concept, but you cannot be deceived. This God who is always everywhere—you don’t see him, you can’t talk to him, you can’t touch him. You don’t have any evidence for his existence except your desire that he should be there. But your desire is not a proof of anything.

God is only a desire of the childish mind. Man has come of age, and God has become meaningless. The hypothesis has lost its grip.

What I am trying to say is that every effort that has been directed toward avoiding loneliness has failed, and will fail, because it is against the fundamentals of life. What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness. What is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness, which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of

being lonely.

Just the word “lonely” immediately reminds you that it is like a wound: something is needed to fill it. There is a gap and it hurts, something needs to be put into that gap. The very word “aloneness” does not have the same sense of a wound, of a gap that has to be filled. Aloneness simply means completeness. You are whole; there is no need of anybody else to complete you.

So try to find your innermost center, where you are always alone, have always been alone. In life, in death, wherever you are you will be alone. But it is so full; it is not empty, it is so full and so complete and so overflowing with all the juices of life, with all the beauties and benedictions of existence that once you have tasted aloneness the pain in the heart will disappear. Instead, a new rhythm of tremendous sweetness, peace, joy, bliss, will be there.

It does not mean that a person who is centered in his aloneness, complete in himself, cannot make friends. In fact, only that person can make friends, because now it is no longer a need, it is just sharing. You have so much you can share.

And when you share, there is no question of clinging. You flow with existence, you flow with life’s change, because it doesn’t matter with whom you share. It can be the same person tomorrow—the same person for your whole life

—or it can be different persons. It is not a contract, it is not a marriage; it is simply out of your fullness that you want to give. So whoever happens to be near you, you give. And giving is such a joy.

Begging is such a misery. Even if you get something through begging, you will remain miserable. It hurts. It hurts your pride, it hurts your integrity. But sharing makes you more centered, more integrated, more proud—but not more egoistic, simply proud that existence has been compassionate to you. It is not ego; it is a totally different phenomenon, a recognition that existence has allowed you something for which millions of people are trying but at the wrong door. You happen to be at the right door.

You are proud of your blissfulness and all that existence has given to you. Fear disappears, darkness disappears, the pain disappears, the desire for the other disappears. You can love a person, and if the person loves somebody else there will not be any jealousy, because you loved out of so much joy. It was not a

clinging, you were not holding the other person in prison. You were not worried that the other person may slip out of your hands, that somebody else may start having a love affair. When you are sharing your joy, you don’t create a prison for anybody. You simply give. You don’t even expect gratitude or thankfulness because you are not giving to get anything, not even gratitude. You are giving because you are so full you have to give.

So I will not tell you to do anything about your loneliness. Look for your aloneness. Forget loneliness, forget darkness, forget pain. These are just the absence of aloneness, and the experience of aloneness will dispel them instantly. And the method is the same: just watch your mind, be aware. Become more and more conscious, so finally you are only conscious of yourself. That is the point where you become aware of aloneness.

And always look to see if anything that you are facing as a problem is a negative thing or a positive thing. If it is a negative thing then don’t fight with it; don’t bother about it at all. Just look for the positive of it, and you will be at the right door. Most of the people in the world miss because they start fighting directly with the negative door. There is no door; there is only darkness, there is only absence. And the more they fight the more they find failure, the more they become dejected, pessimistic, and ultimately they decide that life has no meaning, that it is simply torture. Their mistake is that they entered from the wrong door.

So before you face a problem, just look at it—is it an absence of something? And the truth is that all your problems are the absence of something. Once you have found what they are the absence of, then go after the positive. The moment you find the positive you have found the light, and the darkness is finished.

Why is it I feel fully alive only when I am in love? I tell myself that I should be able to spark myself without the other, but so far no luck. Is this some stupid Waiting for Godot game I am playing with myself? When the last love affair ended I swore to myself I was not going to let the same old deadening process happen, but here I am again feeling half alive, waiting for “him” to come.

One remains in need of the other up to that point, up to that experience, when

one enters into one’s own innermost core. Unless one knows oneself one remains in the need of the other. But the need of the other is very paradoxical; its nature is paradoxical. When you are alone you feel lonely, you feel the other is missed; your life seems to be only half. It loses joy, it loses flow, flowering; it remains undernourished. If you are with the other, then a new problem arises because the other starts encroaching on your space. He starts imposing conditions upon you, he starts demanding things from you, he starts destroying your freedom, and that hurts.

So when you are with somebody, only for a few days when the honeymoon is still there, and the more intelligent you are, the shorter will be the honeymoon, remember. Only for utterly dull people it can be a long affair; for insensitive people it can be a lifelong thing. But if you are intelligent, sensitive, soon you will realize what you have done. The other is destroying your freedom, and suddenly you become aware that you need your freedom because freedom is of immense value. And you decide never again to bother with the other.

Again when you are alone you are free, but something is missing, because your aloneness is not true aloneness; it is only loneliness, it is a negative state. You forget all about freedom. Free you are, but what to do with this freedom? Love is not there, and both are essential needs.

And up to now humanity has lived in such an insane way that you can fulfill only one need: either you can be free, but then you have to drop the idea of love. That’s what monks and nuns of all the religions have been doing: drop the idea of love, you are free; there is nobody to hinder you, there is nobody to interfere with you, nobody to make any demands, nobody to possess you. But then their life becomes cold, almost dead.

You can go to any monastery and look at the monks and the nuns: their life is ugly. It stinks of death; it is not fragrant with life. There is no dance, no joy, no song. All songs have disappeared, all joy is dead. They are paralyzed—how can they dance? They are crippled—how can they dance? There is nothing to dance about. Their energies are stuck, they are no longer flowing. For the flow the other is needed; without the other there is no flow.

So the majority of humanity has decided for love and dropped the idea of freedom. But then people are living like slaves. Man has reduced the woman into

a thing, a commodity, and of course the woman has done the same in her own subtle way: she has made all the husbands henpecked.

I have heard:

In New York a few henpecked husbands joined hands together. They made a club to protest, to fight—Men’s Liberation Movement, or something like that! And of course they chose one of the most henpecked husbands the president of the club.

The first meeting happened, but the president never turned up. They were all worried. They rushed to his home and they asked him, “What is the matter? Have you forgotten?”

He said, “No, but my wife won’t allow me. She says, ‘You go out, and I will never allow you back in!’ And that much risk I cannot take.”

The man has reduced the woman to a slave and the woman has reduced the man to a slave. And of course both hate the slavery, both resist it. They are constantly fighting; any small excuse and the fight starts.

But the real fight is somewhere else deep down; the real fight is that they are asking for freedom. They cannot say it so clearly, they may have forgotten completely. For thousands of years this is the way people have lived. They have seen their fathers and mothers living in the same way, they have seen their grandparents living in the same way. This is the way people live; they have accepted it, and their freedom is destroyed.

It is as if we are trying to fly in the sky with one wing. A few people have the wing of love and a few people have the wing of freedom, but both are incapable of flying. Both the wings are needed.

You are asking, “Why is it I feel fully alive only when I am in love?” It is perfectly natural; there is nothing wrong in it. It is how it should be. Love is a natural need; it is like food. If you are hungry, of course you will feel a deep unease. Without love your soul is hungry; love is a soul nourishment. Just as the body needs food, water, air, the soul needs love. But the soul also needs freedom, and it is one of the strangest things that we have not accepted this fact yet.

If you love there is no need to destroy your freedom. They both can exist

together; there is no antagonism between them. It is because of our foolishness that we have created the antagonism. Hence, the monks think the worldly people are fools, and the worldly people deep down know that the monks are fools; they are missing all the joys of life.

A great priest was asked, “What is love?”

The priest said, “A word made up of two vowels, two consonants, and two fools!”

That is their condemnation of love. Because all the religions have condemned love, they have praised freedom very much. In India we call the ultimate experience moksha; moksha means absolute freedom.

You say: “I tell myself that I should be able to spark myself without the other, but so far no luck.” It will remain so, it will not change. You should rather change your conditioning about love and freedom. Love the person, but give the person total freedom. Love the person, but from the very beginning make it clear that you are not selling your freedom.

And if you cannot make it happen in this community, here with me, you cannot make it happen anywhere else. Here we are experimenting with many things, and one of the dimensions of our experiment is to make love and freedom possible together, to support their coexistence together. Love a person but don’t possess, and don’t be possessed. Insist for freedom, and don’t lose love! There is no need. There is no natural enmity between freedom and love; it is a created enmity. Of course for centuries it has been so, so you have become accustomed to it; it has become a conditioned thing.

An old farmer down South could barely speak above a whisper. Leaning on a fence by the side of a country road he was watching a dozen razorbacks in a patch of woodland. Every few minutes the hogs would scramble through a hole in the fence, tear across the road to another patch of woodland, and immediately afterward scurry back again.

“What’s the matter with them hogs anyway?” a passing stranger asked.

“There ain’t nothing the matter with them,” the old farmer whispered

hoarsely. “Them hogs belongs to me and before I lost my voice I used to call them to their feed. After I lost my voice I used to tap on this fence rail with my stick at feeding time.”

He paused and shook his head gravely. “And now,” he added, “them cussed woodpeckers up in them trees has got them poor hogs plumb crazy!”

Just conditioning! That’s what is happening to humanity.

One of the disciples of Pavlov, the pioneer and developer of the theory of the conditioned reflex, was trying an experiment along the same lines. He bought a puppy and decided to condition him to stand up and bark for his food. He held the pup’s food just out of reach, barked a few times, then set it on the floor before him. The idea was that the pup would associate standing up and barking with getting his food and learn to do so when hungry.

This went on for about a week, but the little dog failed to learn. After another week the man gave up the experiment and simply put the food down in front of the dog, but the pup refused to eat it. He was waiting for his master to stand and bark! Now he had become conditioned.

It is only a conditioning, it can be dropped. You just need a little meditativeness. Meditation simply means the process of unconditioning the mind. Whatever the society has done to you has to be undone. When you are unconditioned you will be able to see the beauty of love and freedom together; they are two aspects of the same coin. If you really love the person you will give him or her absolute freedom—that’s a gift of love. And when there is freedom, love responds tremendously. When you give freedom to somebody you have given the greatest gift, and love comes rushing towards you.

You ask me: “Is this some stupid Waiting for Godot game I am playing with myself?” No.

“When the last love affair ended, I swore to myself I was not going to let the same old deadening process happen, but here I am again feeling half alive, waiting for ‘him’ to come.” But just by making a vow, just by deciding, you cannot change yourself. You have to understand. Love is a basic need, as basic as freedom, so both have to be fulfilled. And a person who is full of love and

free is the most beautiful phenomenon in the world. And when two persons of such beauty meet, their relationship is not a relationship at all. It is a relating. It is a constant, riverlike flow. It is continuously growing towards greater heights.

The ultimate height of love and freedom is the experience of the divine. In it you will find both tremendous love, absolute love, and absolute freedom.

I am always afraid of being alone, because when I am alone I start to wonder who I am. It feels that if I inquire deeper, I will find out that I am not the person who I have believed I was for the past twenty-six years, but a being, present at the moment of birth and maybe also the moment before. For some reason, this scares me completely. It feels like a kind of insanity, and makes me lose myself in outside things in order to feel safer. Who am I, and why the fear?

It is not only your fear, it is everybody’s fear. Because nobody is what he was supposed to be by existence.

The society, the culture, the religion, the education have all been conspiring against innocent children. They have all the powers, the child is helpless and dependent. So whatsoever they want to make out of him, they manage to do it. They don’t allow any child to grow to his natural destiny. Their every effort is to make human beings into utilities.

Who knows, if a child is left on his own to grow, whether he will be of any use to the vested interests or not? The society is not prepared to take the risk. It grabs the child and starts molding him into something that is needed by the society. In a certain sense, it kills the soul of the child and gives him a false identity, so that he never misses his soul, his being.

The false identity is a substitute. But that substitute is useful only in the same crowd which has given it to you. The moment you are alone, the false starts falling apart and the repressed real starts expressing itself.

Hence the fear of being lonely. Nobody wants to be lonely, everybody wants to belong to a crowd—not only one crowd, but many crowds. A person belongs to a religious crowd, a political party, a rotary club, and there are many other

small groups to belong to. One wants to be supported twenty-four hours a day because the false, without support, cannot stand. The moment one is alone, one starts feeling a strange craziness.

That’s what you have been asking about because for twenty-six years you believed yourself to be somebody, and then suddenly in a moment of being alone you start feeling you are not that. It creates fear; then who are you? And twenty- six years of suppression—it will take some time for the real to express itself. The gap between the two has been called by the mystics “the dark night of the soul”—a very appropriate expression. You are no more the false, and you are not yet the real. You are in a limbo, you don’t know who you are.

Particularly in the West—and the questioner comes from the West—the problem is even more complicated. Because they have not developed any methodology to discover the real as soon as possible, so that the dark night of the soul can be shortened. The West knows nothing as far as meditation is concerned. And meditation is only a name for being alone, silent, waiting for the real to assert itself. It is not an act, it is a silent relaxation because whatever you do will come out of your false personality. All your doing for twenty-six years has come out of it; it is an old habit.

Habits die hard.

There was one great mystic in India, Eknath. He was going for a holy pilgrimage with all his disciples. It was almost three to six months’ journey.

One man came to him, fell at his feet, and said, “I know I am not worthy. You know it too, everybody knows me. But I know your compassion is greater than my unworthiness. Please accept me also as one of the members of the group that is going on the holy pilgrimage.”

Eknath said, “You are a thief, and not an ordinary thief, but a master thief. You have never been caught, and everybody knows that you are a thief. I certainly feel like taking you with me, but I also have to think about those fifty other people who are going with me. You will have to give me a promise—and I am not asking for more, just for these three to six months’ time while we are on the pilgrimage: you will not steal. After that, it is up to you. Once we are back home, you are free from the promise.”

The man said, “I am absolutely ready to promise, and I am tremendously grateful for your compassion.”

The other fifty people were suspicious. To trust in a thief…, but they could not say anything to Eknath, he was the master.

The pilgrimage started, and from the very first night there was trouble. The next morning there was chaos: somebody’s coat was missing, somebody’s shirt was missing, somebody’s money was gone. And everybody was shouting, “Where is my money?” and they were all telling Eknath, “We were worried from the very beginning that you were taking this man with you. A lifelong habit—.”

But then they started looking, and they found that things were not stolen. Somebody’s money was missing, but it was found in somebody else’s bag. Somebody else’s coat was missing, but it was found in somebody else’s luggage. Everything was found, but it was an unnecessary trouble—every morning! And nobody could conceive what can be the meaning of it? Certainly it is not the thief, because nothing was actually stolen.

The third night, Eknath remained awake to see what was going on. In the middle of the night, the thief—just out of habit—woke up, started taking things from one place to another place. Eknath stopped him and said, “What are you doing? Have you forgotten your promise?”

He said, “No, I have not forgotten my promise. I am not stealing anything, but I have not promised that I will not move things from one place to another place. After six months I have to be a thief again; this is just practice. And you must understand, it is a lifelong habit, you cannot drop it just like that. Just give me time. You should understand my problem also. For three days I have not stolen a single thing—it is just like fasting! This is just a substitute, I am keeping myself busy. This is my business time, in the middle of the night, so it is very hard for me just to lie down on the bed awake. And so many idiots are sleeping and I am not doing any harm to anybody. In the morning they will find their things.”

Eknath said, “You are a strange man. You see that every morning there is such chaos, and one or two hours unnecessarily are wasted in finding where you have put things, whose property has gone into whose luggage. Everybody has to open everything and ask everybody…‘To whom does this belong?’”

The thief said, “This much concession you have to give to me.”

Twenty-six years of a false personality imposed by people who you loved, whom you respected, and they were not intentionally doing anything bad to you. Their intentions were good, just their awareness was nil. They were not conscious people: your parents, your teachers, your priests, your politicians were not conscious people, they were unconscious. And even a good intention in the hands of an unconscious person turns out to be poisonous.

So whenever you are alone, a deep fear arises because suddenly the false starts disappearing. And the real will take a little time. You have lost it twenty-six years back. You will have to give some consideration to the fact that a gap of twenty-six years has to be bridged.

In fear that “I am losing myself, my senses, my sanity, my mind, everything,” because the self that has been given to you by others consists of all these things

—it looks like you will go insane. You immediately start doing something just to keep yourself engaged. If there are no people, at least there is some action. So the false remains engaged and does not start disappearing.

Hence, people find it the most difficult on holidays. For five days they work, hoping that on the weekend they are going to relax. But the weekend is the worst time in the whole world. More accidents happen on the weekend, more people commit suicide, more murders, more stealing, more rape. Strange, these people were engaged for five days and there was no problem. But the weekend suddenly gives them a choice, either to be engaged in something or to relax, but relaxing is fearsome; the false personality disappears. Keep engaged, do anything stupid.

People are running toward the beaches, bumper to bumper, miles-long traffic. And if you ask them where they are going, they are “getting away from the crowd” and the whole crowd is going with them! They are going to find a solitary, silent space—all of them. In fact, if they had remained home it would have been more solitary and silent, because all the idiots have gone in search of a solitary place. And they are rushing like mad, because two days will be finished soon, they have to reach don’t ask where! And on the beaches, you can see. Not even marketplaces are so crowded. Strangely enough, people are feeling very much at ease, taking a sunbath. Ten thousand people on a small beach taking a sunbath, relaxing.

The same person on the same beach alone will not be able to relax. But he knows thousands of other people are relaxing all around him. The same people were in the offices, the same people were in the streets, the same people were in the marketplace, now these people are on the beach.

The crowd is an essential for the false self to exist. The moment it is lonely, you start freaking out. This is where one should understand a little bit of meditation.

Don’t be worried, because that which can disappear is worth disappearing. It is meaningless to cling to it—it is not yours, it is not you. You are the one when the false has gone and the fresh, the innocent, the unpolluted being will arise in its place.

Nobody else can answer your question “Who am I?”—you will know it.

All meditative techniques are a help to destroy the false. They don’t give you the real—the real cannot be given. That which can be given cannot be real. The real you have got already; just the false has to be taken away.

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone. Slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence, which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence. And if you are not a coward, it will come to fruition, to flowering.

Only the brave, the courageous, the people who have guts can be religious. Not the churchgoers: these are the cowards. Not the Hindus, not the Mohammedans, not the Christians: they are against searching. It is the same crowd, and they are trying to make their false identity more consolidated.

You were born. You have come into the world with life, with consciousness, with tremendous sensitivity. Just look at a small child. Look at his eyes, the freshness. All that has been covered by a false personality.

There is no need to be afraid. You can lose only that which needs to be lost. And it is good to lose it soon, because the longer it stays, the stronger it becomes, and one does not know anything about tomorrow. Don’t die before realizing your authentic being. Only those few people are fortunate who have

lived with authentic being and who have died with authentic being because they know that life is eternal, and death is a fiction.

Then move out of it! One should always be watchful, because if one is not feeling happy in any situation, in any mood, then one should come out of it. Otherwise that becomes your habit, and by and by you lose sensitivity. You will go on being miserable and living in it, which simply shows a very deep insensitivity.

There is no need! If you are not feeling good in isolation, then come out of it. Meet with people, enjoy company, talk and laugh, but when you feel you are fed up with it, move into isolation again.

Always remember to judge everything by your inner feeling of bliss. If you are feeling blissful, everything is all right. If you are not feeling blissful, then whatsoever you are doing, something somewhere is wrong. The longer you remain in it, the more it becomes just an unaware thing, and you completely forget that it is through your cooperation that the miserable feeling continues. It needs your cooperation; it cannot exist itself.

Human growth requires that one moves from one polarity to another. Sometimes being alone is perfectly good: one needs one’s own space, one needs to forget the whole world, and to be oneself. The other is absent so you have no boundary to yourself. The other creates your boundary, otherwise you are infinite.

Living with people, moving in the world, in society, by and by one begins to feel confined, limited, as if there are walls all around. It becomes a subtle imprisonment, and one needs to move. One needs sometimes to be perfectly alone so that all boundaries disappear, as if the other does not exist at all, and the whole universe and the whole sky exists only for you. In that moment of aloneness one realizes for the first time what infinity is.

But then if you live in it too much, by and by the infinity bores you, it becomes tasteless. There is purity and silence, but there is no ecstasy in it. Ecstasy always comes through the other. One then starts feeling hungry for love, and wants to escape from this aloneness, this vast expanse of space. One wants a cozy place surrounded by others, so that one can forget oneself.

This is the basic polarity of life, love and meditation. People who try to live through love and relationships alone, by and by become very limited. They lose infinity and purity, and they become superficial. Always living in relationships means always living on the boundary where you can meet the other. So you are always standing at the gate, and you can never move into your palace, because only at the gate is the meeting-point where the other passes by. So people who only live in love, by and by become superficial. Their life loses depth. And people who live only in meditation will become very deep, but their life loses color, loses the ecstatic dance, the orgasmic quality of being.

Real humanity, the humanity of the future, will live with both the polarities together, and to share that understanding is my whole effort. One should be free to move from one to another, with neither polarity becoming a confinement. You should not be afraid of the marketplace, nor too afraid of the monastery. You should be free to move from the marketplace to the monastery, and from the monastery to the marketplace.

This freedom, this flexibility of movement, I call sannyas. The bigger the swing, the richer your life. There are attractions to remaining with just one of the polarities because then life is simpler. If you just remain with people, in the crowd, it is simple. Complexity comes with the contradictory, the opposite pole. If you become a monk or you go to the Himalayas and just live there, life is very simple. But a simple life which has no complexity in it loses much richness.

Life should be both complex and simple. One has to seek this harmony continuously; otherwise life becomes of one note, a single note. You can go on repeating it, but no orchestra can be created out of it.

So whenever you feel that something is now becoming troublesome, immediately move before you become unaware. Never make anywhere your home, neither relationships nor aloneness. Remain flowing and homeless, and don’t abide at any polarity. Enjoy it, delight in it, but when it is finished move to the other: make it a rhythm.

You work in the day, by night you rest, so that again by the next day you are ready to work, energy regained. Just think of a man who goes on working all day and all night, or who goes on sleeping day and night—what kind of a life will that be? One will be a madness, the other a coma. Between the two there is a

balance, a harmony. Work hard so that you can relax. Relax deeply so that you become capable of working, of being more creative.

Please help me! My boyfriend has been in Goa for five weeks and I’ve had such a good time enjoying the freedom and independence, no need to face my jealousy and possessiveness, just floating through the day. Now it looks as if he is coming back soon and I’m getting nervous already, wondering what he is doing, how it is going to be, if he found somebody else, et cetera. What is this attachment to a particular person which creates all these comfortable and very uncomfortable feelings? I’m not really a meditative type, but is there any possibility to go beyond this attachment of the heart and feel free, or is the only way to live it, go through it, and suffer and enjoy the whole thing?

I know your boyfriend: he will make anybody happy if he goes to Goa and remains there forever! He is a challenge, so if you are becoming nervous, it is natural. And don’t be worried about his getting involved with any girl, because no girl will get involved with him.

I have thought about him and I think that only you can manage him. He’s a crackpot but you love him. You cannot love a simple human being. You are born for each other: neither can you find another boyfriend nor can he find another girlfriend. So don’t be worried about possessiveness or anything. You can be absolutely non-possessive, still he will be your boyfriend. Where else can he go? You are in a good, secured, guaranteed, insured condition.

In the first place, it is a miracle that you have found him. When I heard about it for the first time I said, “My God! Now something mysterious is going to happen. These two people together are going to create so much trouble.” But still, he’s attached to you, you are attached to him. Mostly your love is fighting, and when you are tired of fighting you love also, but that is only when you are both tired. He will also be feeling nervous, because he has to come back. I had suggested to him that he go away for a few weeks. He left immediately, the very moment he received my message: “Go to Goa.” He did not wait even a single day! He must have enjoyed those five weeks the same way you have enjoyed

them. Now you are feeling nervous, and he will be feeling nervous because those weeks will finally come to an end.

But deep down you are also feeling happy that he is coming back, and the same will be his situation. Let him come. He’s just your old boyfriend: you know him every bit, he knows you every bit. All the fights are well known, all the problems are well known. There is no need to feel nervous because there is not going to be anything new. It is just the same old chap, so let him come back and start life again in the same old way.

It is something to be understood: the girlfriend you get or the boyfriend you get, you deserve. You don’t get any boyfriend or girlfriend whom you don’t deserve; those kinds of relationships only last for one or two days. But your relationship has a history and it is going to last to the very end, so relax and take it easily!

You deserve him, he deserves you. And once you see the point that you deserve each other there is no question of any grudge, any complaining, any grumbling. You are strong enough, because that crackpot has not been able to make even a dent in you. He has been doing all kinds of neurotic things. But he does not know that you are a psychotic, and neurotics and psychotics make good marriages. They fit perfectly.

One psychoanalyst was asked—because those two words look so similar, and the difference is known only to the experts—the psychoanalyst was asked, “What is the difference between neurosis and psychosis?”

He said, “The psychotic thinks two plus two are five and, whatever you do, he never changes his mind. He’s determined and committed to his viewpoint. The neurotic knows that two plus two are four but feels very nervous—why are they four?”

Perfect marriages happen only in heaven, but once in a while on the earth too. You and your boyfriend are a perfect combination. So let the poor fellow come, start hammering each other in the old way. You are accustomed and well trained, he is accustomed and well trained. One feels worried about a new girlfriend; one never knows what she is going to do—freak out in the middle of the night? One is nervous about the new boyfriend, because one cannot predict what kind of

man he’s going to prove to be.

You are certain. In this certainty you should relax and let him come. I don’t see that there is any problem. You are both perfectly happy in your misery; all people are perfectly happy in their miserable relationships! That’s why after a five weeks’ separation you feel good. If the separation is for a longer time you will start missing him.

I have given just enough time so that you can enjoy freedom and he can enjoy freedom, and in the right moment, when you start missing each other, he’s back. Just wait!

And he’s not a dangerous person; he cannot harm you. He’s very good at heart, just a little loose in his head. But to have a boyfriend who is a little loose in the head is better than to have a boyfriend who is a little tight in the head. I know it is no ordinary relationship: you both are extraordinary.

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