CHAPTER 4: NONSENSE IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌NONSENSE IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD‌

Love is the only religion, the only god, the only mystery that has to be lived, understood. When love is understood, you have understood all the sages and all the mystics of the world. It is not anything difficult. It is as simple as your heartbeats or your breathing. It comes with you, it is not given to you by the society. And this is the point that I want to emphasize: love comes with your birth, but of course it is undeveloped as everything else is undeveloped. The child has to grow.

The society takes the advantage of the gap. The child’s love will take time to grow; meanwhile the society goes on conditioning the mind of the child with ideas about love which are false. By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false.

For example, every child everywhere has been told in a thousand and one ways that love is eternal: once you love a person you love the person always. If you love a person and later on you feel that you don’t love, it only means you never loved the person in the first place. Now this is a very dangerous idea. It is giving you an idea of a permanent love and in life nothing is permanent. The flowers blossom in the morning and by the evening they are gone.

Life is a continuous flux; everything is changing, moving. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. You have been given the idea of a permanent love which is going to destroy your whole life. You will expect permanent love from the poor woman, and the woman will expect permanent love from you.

Love becomes secondary, permanence becomes primary. And love is such a delicate flower that you cannot force it to be permanent. You can have plastic flowers; that’s what people have—marriage, their family, their children, their relatives, everything is plastic. Plastic has one very spiritual thing: it is

permanent. Real love is as uncertain as your life is uncertain. You cannot say that you will be here tomorrow. You cannot even say that you are going to survive the next moment. Your life is continuously changing—from childhood to youth, to middle age, to old age, to death, it goes on changing.

A real love will also change.

It is possible that if you are enlightened your love has gone beyond the ordinary laws of life. It is neither changing nor permanent; it simply is. It is no more a question of how to love; you have become love itself, so whatever you do is loving. It is not that you specifically do something which is love; whatever you do, your love starts pouring through it. But before enlightenment your love is going to be the same as everything else; it will change.

If you understand that it will change, that once in a while your partner may become interested in somebody, and you have to be understanding and loving and caring and allowing her to go the way her being feels—this is a chance for you to prove to your partner that you love her. You love her; even if she is going to love somebody else, that is irrelevant. With understanding, it is possible that your love may become a lifelong affair, but remember it will not be permanent. It will have its ups and downs, it will have changes.

It is so simple to understand. When you started loving you were too young, with no experience; how can your love remain the same when you have become a mature person? Your love will also attain to some maturity. And when you have become old your love will have a different flavor to it. Love will go on changing, and once in a while love will just need an opportunity for change. In a healthy society it will be possible to take that opportunity, yet your relationship with someone will not be broken.

But it is also possible that you may have to change your lovers many times in life. There is no harm in it. In fact, by changing your lovers many times in life you will be enriched, and if the whole world follows what I am saying to you about love, the whole world will be enriched.

But a wrong idea has destroyed all possibility. The moment your partner looks at somebody, just looking, his eyes show his attraction and you freak out. You have to understand that if the man drops being interested in beautiful women on

the street, beautiful actresses in the movies, that’s what you want; you want him not to be interested in anything except you. But you don’t understand human psychology. If he is not interested in women on the street, in the movies, why will he be interested in you? His interest in women is a guarantee that he is interested in you, that there is still a possibility that your love can go on and on.

But we are doing just the opposite. Men are trying to arrange it so that their women should not be interested in anybody other than them; they should be the woman’s only focus, her total concentration. The woman is asking the same, and both are driving each other mad. Concentration on one person is bound to lead you into madness.

For a lighter life, for a more playful life, you need to be flexible. You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love.

Freedom is a criterion: anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong. If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, will start settling on the right path about everything: your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.

Dropping old concepts, ugly concepts. For example in India, millions of women have died by being burned alive in the funeral pyre with their husbands. It shows that the possessiveness of the husband is so much that not only does he want to possess the woman while he is alive, he is afraid of what will happen when he is dead! He will not be able to do anything then, so it is better to take the woman with him.

And you can see that this was applied only to women—not a single man jumped into the funeral pyre of a woman in ten thousand years. What does it mean? Does it mean that only women love men and men do not love women? Does it mean that the woman has no life of her own? Only the husband’s life is her life; when the husband is dead, she has to be dead?

Such nonsense ideas have settled in our heads. You have to do continuous cleaning. Whenever you see some nonsense in your head, clean it, throw it away. If you are clear and clean in the mind you will be able to find solutions for every problem that arises in your life.

I have recently realized that I can’t even see a man, let alone love him. I have accepted my mother’s angry conditioning towards men. When a man comes to me with his love, I run away, which encourages him to chase me. This game I play is so ugly. Please help me to drop this garbage, to be able to see men and to know their beauty, their gifts, their love.

If you really want to drop this garbage you have to be aware that your mother is in that garbage, and that will hurt you. You have been poisoned by your mother. Out of a hundred problems and troubles, almost 90 percent of them are because of your mothers because the child grows in the mother’s womb. Even while he is in the womb, the mother’s moods and emotions affect him. If the mother remains constantly angry, sad, gloomy, frustrated; if she does not want the child and the husband has forced her to have a child; if she is having the child unwillingly, all these things are going to affect the basic fabric of the child’s mind. The child is in the making; it is not only the flesh and blood of the mother that influences the child, he will also be influenced by her psychology.

So while a mother is pregnant she has to be very careful because a new life is being created inside her. Anything she is going to do—fighting with the husband, fighting with the neighbors, or being frustrated for any reason—is poisoning the child’s mind from the very roots. Even before he is born he is already prejudiced.

It is not only your mother who is angry with men. The vast majority of women are angry with their husbands. The same is true about husbands; most of them are angry with their wives. But the father’s anger does not affect the child so much, because the child starts inside the mother’s womb, starts growing in the shadow of the mother, not in the shadow of the father. The father remains only a casual visitor. In the morning he may give the child a kiss, pat him, and go to the office. In the evening he may come and have a little talk with the child; otherwise, the whole day long the child is learning everything from the mother.

That’s why every language is called the “mother tongue,” because the father has no chance to speak to the child when the mother is present! Mother speaks, father listens—the child learns the language from the mother. And it is not only

the language but all her attitudes.

But life as we have lived it up to now is mostly managed by men. It is a man- made society and for centuries it has had no place for women. That’s why it is so strange that women are not in sympathy with other women. But their minds are also conditioned in such a way that they are sympathetic to the man.

Once in a while it also happens, as it has happened with the questioner, that deep down a woman carries her mother’s feelings. The mother has been against men—and I don’t see why she should not be; there is every reason. It is absolutely well founded, but it is not going to help human society or create a better future.

The past is past. You should start looking at men with fresh eyes—and particularly in this place, where our whole effort is to expose the conditioning, to dehypnotize ourselves. All the rubbish that you are carrying has to be thrown away; you have to become unburdened and light so that you can gain your own understanding, your own insight.

And the women in this community are not uneducated. You are financially capable of being independent—and as intelligent as any man. There is no need for you to be angry against men. If your mother was angry—perhaps she was not educated, perhaps she was not financially able to be independent. She wanted to fly in the open sky but she was encaged. You are not.

This is one of the reasons why I cannot communicate to the vast majority of the people of India: because the man will not be willing to listen to me; it goes against his domination, his power. And the woman cannot understand me; she is not educated. Even if she can understand me, she is not financially able to be independent; she cannot revolt against the man-made society. In most parts of India there is nothing like a women’s liberation movement—not even the talk of it. No woman ever thinks that there is any possibility of liberation. She has lost all hope.

But your situation is different. You come from a country where women can receive an education, and education makes you financially able to be independent. You need not be a housewife; it is not necessary for you to be married. You can live with someone you love without any marriage.

The woman has to fight for it, the woman has to make marriage an absolutely personal affair in which the government, the state, the society, nobody has any business to interfere.

You are in a totally different space than your mother. Now, carrying her anger and her conditioning is simply stupid. Just forgive her and forget her, because if you go on having this conditioning of anger against men, you will never feel complete, because a woman or a man who is incapable of loving remains incomplete, frustrated.

As it is, it creates a vicious circle. Your anger prevents you from love, because love means dropping anger against men and moving to the diametrically opposite polarity—instead of anger, love; instead of hate, love. A quantum leap needs courage. The vicious circle is that because of your angry conditioning you cannot love men, and because you cannot love men you become more and more frustrated, and your frustration makes you more angry—this is the vicious circle. Anger brings frustration; frustration makes you more angry, more violent, more against men. That brings more anger, and the circle goes on becoming deeper and deeper. To get out of it becomes almost impossible.

You have to begin from the very beginning. The first thing is to try and understand that your mother lived in a different situation. Perhaps her anger was justified. Your situation is different, and carrying your mother within your mind is simply unreasonable. You have to live your life; you are not to live your mother’s life. She suffered; now why do you want to make more suffering in the world? Why do you want to be a martyr?

Have every compassion towards your mother—I am not saying to get angry at your mother that she conditioned you. That will be again keeping you in anger, just changing the object from men to the mother. No, you need to drop the anger completely. Your mother needs your compassion; she must have suffered, and that created anger in her. But you are not suffering. You can put your anger aside and you have a fresh look at men. If their forefathers have caused women to suffer it is beyond their power to undo it. What has happened, has happened. Now they can feel a deep apology in their hearts for what man has done to women. These types of men are a different category of people.

I am trying to create every possibility for the emergence of a new kind of

human being who is not contaminated by the past, who is discontinuous with the past. It is a difficult job; it is almost like hitting my head against the wall. But I am determined to go on hitting—I trust in my head! And the wall is very old and ancient. It may hurt me, but it has to fall some day; its time is finished. It has already lived more than its life span.

So meditate more, and be aware when your mother’s voice starts speaking to your mind. Slowly, slowly put that voice to sleep. Don’t listen to it; it will spoil your whole life. You have to learn how to love. And when he is loved, the man becomes more polite, nicer, a gentleman. He loses his corners, becomes softer. Through love, the woman starts blossoming; otherwise she remains a closed bud. Only in love, when the sun of love rises, she opens her petals. Only in love her eyes start having a different depth, a different shine; her face starts having a joyous outlook. She has a deep transformation through love; she comes to maturity, of age.

So get rid of the conditioning that your mother unconsciously has given to you. You have accepted it unconsciously. The way to get rid of it is to become conscious of it. It is a good beginning that you have asked. This is the beginning of consciousness—just the very ABC. You have to go far to change your mind completely, to be fresh, unconditioned, open and vulnerable.

And because of this conditioning you have been playing this ugly game, that whenever a man comes to you with his love, you run away, which naturally encourages him to chase you. That you enjoy, that he is chasing you. Every woman enjoys that. It is ugly, and you are not aware of its deeper implications. It means you are the prey; the man is the hunter and he is chasing game. You are allowing supremacy to the man, unknowingly. It has been traditionally given to you that the initiative in love should be taken by men, not by women; it is against a woman’s grace. Those are all rotten ideas—why be number two from the very beginning? If you love a man, why wait? I know many women who have waited for years because they wanted the man to take the initiative. But they have fallen in love with such men who were not going to take the initiative.

I know one woman in Bombay who was in love with J. Krishnamurti. Her whole life she remained unmarried, waiting for J. Krishnamurti to take the initiative. She is one of the most beautiful women but J. Krishnamurti is utterly fulfilled within himself, he does not need anybody else to complete him.

Obviously, he never took any initiative. And the woman, out of the conditioning of thousands of years, of course could not take the initiative; that is against feminine grace, that is “primitive.”

There is really no reason for the woman to wait for the man to take the initiative. If a woman feels love for someone, she should take the initiative and she should not feel humiliated if the man is not willing. This will give them equality. These are small things that will make the liberation of women possible.

But the woman has been always trying to be “game.” She attracts the man, she tries in every way to attract him by her beauty, by her clothes, her perfume, her hairdo—all that she can manage. She attracts the man, and once the man is attracted, then she starts running away. But she does not run too fast, either. She goes on looking back, to see whether that fellow is coming or not. If he is left far behind, she waits. When he comes close again she starts running.

This is stupid; love should be a clean affair. You love someone, you express your love and tell the other person, “You are not obliged to say yes; your no will be perfectly respected. It is just my desire. You need not unwillingly say yes to me, because that yes is dangerous unless you also feel love for me. Only then can our life become a completion.”

A woman and a man in love can move into meditation very easily. Meditation and love are such close phenomena that if you move into meditation, your love energies start overflowing. If you really fall in love with someone who loves you, your meditative energies start growing; they are very deeply joined experiences. Hence I am in favor of both.

I have heard you speak about the ego and how, with awareness, one can see that it does not exist. But I realize that I never put much emphasis on awareness. Can you please show the way to become more aware?

Love is enough unto itself, if your love is not the ordinary, biological instinctive love. If it is not part of your ego, if it is not a power trip to dominate someone—if your love is just a pure joy, rejoicing in the being of the other for no reason at all, a sheer joy—awareness will follow this pure love just like a

shadow. You need not worry about awareness.

There are only two ways: either you become aware, then love follows as a shadow; or you become so loving that awareness comes of its own accord. They are two sides of the same coin. You need not bother about the other side; just keep hold of one side and the other side cannot escape! The other side is bound to come.

And the path of love is easier, rosier, innocent, simple.

The path of awareness is a little arduous. Those who cannot love, for them I suggest the path of awareness. There are people who cannot love—their hearts have become stones. Their upbringing, their culture, their society has killed the very capacity to love because this whole world is not run by love, it is run by cunningness. To succeed in this world you don’t need love, you need a hard heart and a sharp mind. In fact, you don’t need the heart at all.

In this world, the people of the heart are crushed, exploited, oppressed. This world is run by the cunning, by the clever, by the heartless, and the cruel. So the whole society is managed in such a way that every child starts losing his heart, and his energy starts moving directly towards the head. The heart is ignored.

I have heard an ancient parable from Tibet, that in the beginning of time the heart used to be exactly in the middle part of the body. But because of continuously being pushed aside, out of the way, now it is no longer in the middle of the body. Now the poor fellow waits by the side of the road—“If some day you need me, I am here”—but it gets no nourishment, no encouragement. Instead it gets all kinds of condemnation.

If you do something and you say, “I did it because I felt like doing it,” everybody is going to laugh: “Felt? Have you lost your head? Give your reason, your logic for doing it. Feeling is not a reason to do anything.”

Even if you fall in love, you have to find reasons why you have fallen in love: because the woman’s nose is beautiful, her eyes have such depth, her body is so proportionate. These are not the reasons. You have never added up all these reasons on your calculator and then found that this woman seems to be worthy of falling in love with: “Fall in love with this woman—exactly the right length of

nose, the right kind of hair, the right color, the right proportion of the body. What more do you want?”

But this is not the way that anybody ever falls in love. You fall in love. Then just to satisfy the idiots around you that you are not a fool, you have calculated everything and only then you have taken the step. It is a reasonable, rational, logical step.

Nobody hears the heart.

And the mind is so chattering, so continuously chattering—yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak—that even if the heart sometimes says something, it never reaches to you. It cannot reach. The bazaar in your head is buzzing so much that it is impossible, absolutely impossible for the heart. Slowly, the heart stops saying anything. Not heard again and again, ignored again and again, it falls silent.

The head runs the show in the society; otherwise, we would have lived in a totally different world—more loving, less hate, less war, no possibility of nuclear weapons. The heart will never give support for any destructive technology to be developed. The heart will never be in the service of death. It is life: it throbs for life, it beats for life.

Because of the whole conditioning of the society, the method of awareness has to be chosen, because awareness appears to be very logical and rational. But if you can love, then there is no need to go on a long, arduous route unnecessarily. Love is the shortest way, the most natural—so easy that it is possible even for a small child. It needs no training. You are born with the quality of it, if it is not corrupted by others.

But love should be pure. It should not be impure.

You will be surprised to know that the English word “love” comes from a very ugly root in Sanskrit. It comes from lobh. Lobh means “greed.”

And as far as ordinary love is concerned, it is a kind of greed. That’s why there are people who love money, who love houses; there are people who love this, who love that. Even if they love a woman or a man, it is simply their greed; they want to possess everything beautiful. It is a power trip. Hence, you will find

lovers continuously fighting, fighting about such trivia that they both feel ashamed “about what things we go on fighting!” In their silent moments when they are alone, they wonder, “Do I become possessed by some evil spirit? Such trivia, so meaningless!” But it is not a question of trivia; it is a question of who has power, who is more dominant, whose voice is heard.

Love cannot exist in such circumstances.

I have heard a story: In the life of one of the great emperors of India, Akbar, there is a small story. He was very much interested in all kinds of talented people, and from all over India he had collected nine people, the most talented geniuses, who were known as the “nine jewels of Akbar’s court.”

One day, just gossiping with his vice-councillors, he said, “Last night I was discussing with my wife. She is very insistent that every husband is henpecked. I tried hard, but she says, ‘I know many families, but I have never found any husband who is not henpecked.’ What do you think?” he asked the councillors.

One of the councillors, Birbal, said, “Perhaps she is right, because you could not prove it. You yourself are a henpecked husband; otherwise, you could have given her a good beating, then and there proving that you are the husband and you are in charge.”

Akbar said, “That I cannot do, because I have to live with her. It is easy to advise somebody else to beat his wife. Can you beat your wife?”

Birbal said, “No, I cannot. I simply accept that I am a henpecked husband, and your wife is right.”

But Akbar said, “It has to be proved, one way or another. Surely in the capital there must be at least one husband who is not henpecked. There is no rule in the world that has no exception, and this is not a scientific rule at all.” He said to Birbal, “You take my two beautiful Arabian horses”—one was black, one was white—“and go around the capital. If you can find a man who is not henpecked, you can give him the choice: whichever horse he wants is a present from me.” They were valuable. In those days horses were very valuable, and these were the most beautiful horses.

Birbal said, “It is useless, but if you say so I will go.”

He went, and everybody was found to be henpecked. It was so easy to see! Birbal would just call the person and his wife to their front door and ask the husband, “Are you henpecked or not?”

The man would look at his wife and say, “You should have asked when I was alone. This is not right, it will create unnecessary trouble. Just for a horse I am not going to destroy my life. You take your horses, I don’t want either one of them.”

But then he came upon one man who was sitting in front of his house, with two persons massaging him. He was a champion wrestler, a very strong man. Birbal thought, “Perhaps this man—he could kill anybody, even without any weapons. If he just got hold of your neck you would be finished!” Birbal said, “Can I ask you a question?”

The man stood up and said, “Question? What question?” Birbal asked him, “Are you henpecked?”

That man said, “First, let us greet each other, a handshake.” He crushed Birbal’s hand and said, “I will not let go of your hand until tears start coming from your eyes! You dare to ask me such a question?”

Birbal was nearly dying—he himself was almost a man of steel, but tears started coming, and he said, “Just let go of me! You are not henpecked! Clearly I have just come to the wrong place to ask such a thing. But where is your wife?”

The man pointed and said, “Look, she is there, cooking my breakfast.” A very small woman was cooking his breakfast.

The woman was so small and the man was so big that Birbal thought there really was a possibility that perhaps this man was not henpecked. He could kill this woman! So he said, “Now there is no need to go any further into investigation. You can choose either horse from these two, black and white, as a reward from the king for the man who is not henpecked.”

And just at that moment, that small woman said, “Don’t choose the black!

Choose the white, or I will make your life a hell!”

The man said, “No, no, I was anyway going to choose the white. You just keep quiet.”

And Birbal said, “You get neither white nor black. It is all finished, you lost the game. Even you are a henpecked husband.”

There is a continuous fight for domination. Love cannot blossom in such an atmosphere. The man is fighting in the world for all kinds of ambitions. The woman is fighting the man because she is afraid: he is out of the house the whole day. “Who knows? He may be having affairs with other women.” She is jealous, suspicious; she wants to be sure that this man remains controlled. So in the house the man is fighting with the wife, in the outside he is fighting with the world. Where do you think the flower of love can blossom?

The flower of love can blossom only when there is no ego, when there is no effort to dominate, when one is humble, when one is trying not to be somebody but is ready to be nobody. Then awareness will come of its own accord, and this is the most beautiful way, the most innocent way: a path full of flowers, a path that passes through beautiful lakes, rivers, groves, greenery.

If you can easily be heartful, forget all about awareness; it will come of its own accord. Each step of love will bring its own awareness. This love will not be falling in love; I call it rising in love.

How is it possible for a woman to be in love and still centered in herself and in her own individuality?

The question has many implications.

First, you do not understand what being centered means. Second, you also have no experience of the phenomenon of love. I can say this with absolute authority, because your question supplies all the evidence for what I am saying.

Love and centering are one phenomenon, they are not two. If you have known love, you cannot be anything but centered.

Love means coming to be at ease with existence. It may be through a lover, it may be through a friend, or it may be simply direct and immediate—through the sunrise, the sunset. The very experience of love will make you centered. This has been the whole philosophy of devotees down through the ages. Love is their science; centering is the result.

But there are people—and there are only two kinds of people—who have a dominant reasoning, logic. Their heart is undeveloped. And there are people whose heart is blossoming and now reason, rationality only function as servants to the heart. Man’s misery is that he is trying to do the impossible: he is trying to force the heart to serve the mind, which is impossible. This is your chaos, this is your mess.

The question has arisen out of the ordinary experience called love. It is not love, it is only called love—just a glimpse, just a small taste, which is not going to be a nourishment. On the contrary, it is going to become a pathological state because one moment you are high and everything is just far out, and the next moment all is dark, you cannot believe that there has been anything significant in your life. All those moments of love appear to have happened in dreams, or perhaps you have imagined them. And these dark moments are absolutely joined with the beautiful moments.

This is the dialectic of human mind. It functions through opposites. You will love a man and you will love the man for absolutely wrong reasons. You will love the man or the woman because you are carrying within you an image of the other. The boy has got it from the mother and the girl has got it from the father. All lovers are searching for their mothers, their fathers—in the final analysis they are all searching for the womb and its beautiful, relaxed state.

Psychologically, the eternal quest for moksha, ultimate liberation, enlightenment, can be reduced to the basic psychological fact that man has already known the most beautiful, the most peaceful state before he was born. Now, if something greater does not happen in his life, some exposure to the divine, to the universal, he is going to remain miserable because—unconsciously

—every moment there is judgment.

He knows he has lived for nine months and, remember, for a child in the mother’s womb, nine months are almost eternity because he does not know how

to count, he does not have any clock. Each moment is enough unto itself. He does not know there is going to be another moment afterwards, so each moment is a surprise. And with no worry, with no tension about food, about clothes, about shelter, he is absolutely at ease, relaxed, centered. There is nothing to distract him from the center.

There is nobody there even to say hello.

This experience of nine months of being centered, of immense joy, peace, aloneness…the other is no more there; you are the world, you are the whole. Nothing is missing, everything is supplied by nature without any effort on your part. But life confronts you in a totally different way—antagonistically, competitively. Everybody is your enemy, because everybody is in the same market; everybody is your enemy because everybody has the same desires, the same ambition. You are bound to come into conflict with millions of people.

It is because of this inner antagonism that all the cultures of the world have created a certain system of etiquette, familiarity, formality, and they have emphasized it continuously to the child: “You have to respect your father.” All the cultures all over the world throughout the whole of history, why are they all insisting to the child, “You should respect your father”? There is some suspicion that if he is left alone, the child is not going to respect the father; that much is certain, simple logic. In fact, the child is going to hate. Every girl hates her mother.

To hide it—because it will be very difficult to live in a society where all your wounds are uncovered and everybody is walking around with uncovered wounds

—a certain ethos, a morality, a certain style of life has to cover it, and to show just the opposite, that you love your mother, that you love and respect your father. Deep down just the opposite is the case.

You have been divided into two parts by the society. The false part has been given all respect, because the false is created by the society. The real is denied any respectability, because the real comes from nature, which is beyond the control of any society, culture, or civilization. Each child has to be trained in lies, has to be programmed in such a way that he will be subservient to the society, a docile slave.

All societies are breaking the very spine of every child so he becomes spineless. He cannot raise his voice, he cannot question anything. His life is just not his own. He loves, but his love is false. From the very beginning he was told to love his mother “because she is your mother”—as if being a mother has some intrinsic quality or some obligation that you should love her. But it has been accepted that the mother should be loved.

My emphasis is that the mother should be loving, and no child should ever be told to love somebody unless it happens on its own. Yes, the mother, the father, the family can create a milieu without saying anything; the whole energy can generate, can trigger your own forces of love.

But never say to anybody that love is a duty. It is not. Duty is a false substitute for love. When you cannot love, society goes on supplying duties. They may appear to be love, but inside there is nothing loving in it; on the contrary, it is only social formality. And you become so accustomed to social formalities that you forget completely that there are things which are waiting to happen in your life but you are so occupied that you don’t give space, you don’t allow love to blossom in you.

Hence, you don’t know that centering and love are one thing.

Centering is more appealing to the intellectual. Nothing has to be believed; there is nobody else to whom you have to surrender.

It is because of the other that every love affair becomes a tragedy.

In Indian literature there are no tragedies. In my student days I was asking my professors, “Why are tragedies missing in Indian literature?” And not a single teacher or professor was able to say something significant about it.

They simply shrugged their shoulders and they said, “You are strange; you find such questions. I have been in this university for thirty years and nobody has asked.”

I said, “To me it seems very obvious that the question has deep roots in the culture.” In all other countries except India there are tragedies—beautiful stories, novels, fiction—but in India they are missing. And the reason is India is a more

ancient land than any other land. It has learned many things from experience, and one of them is that which should not be, should not be talked about; hence, there should be no tragedy.

Their logic can be understood. If man feels that life is everywhere a comedy, then there is a possibility he might continue deceiving himself. He might never tell anybody his problems because he thinks nobody has problems. Why become a laughingstock? Something is wrong with you, just keep quiet. There is no point in exposing yourself to a cruel society that will simply laugh at you and prove that you are an idiot and you don’t know how to live.

But it is not so simple. It is not a question just of knowing how to live. It is a question first of dropping all that is false in you. The false comes from the outside. And when all that is false is dropped and you are utterly naked before existence, the real will start growing in you. This is the situation which has to be fulfilled for the real to grow, to blossom, and to bring you to the ultimate meaning and truth of life.

It has to be remembered: You can start either from centering—the moment you are centered you will suddenly find immense love overflowing—or you can start from love. And the moment your love is without any jealousy, without any conditionings, but just a sharing of the dance of the heart, you will experience centering.

They are two sides of the same coin. Centering is a more intellectual, scientific method. Love has a different source in you—your heart. It is more poetic, it is more aesthetic, it is more sensitive, it is more feminine, it is more beautiful. And it is easier than centering.

My suggestion is, first drop all false ideas about love. Let something real grow in you, and centering will be coming, enlightenment will be coming. But if you find it very difficult to start with love, then don’t feel despair. You can move directly through centering. You can call it meditation, you can call it awareness. But in each case, the ultimate result is the same: you are centered and overflowing with love.

< Previous | Contents | Next >