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‌CHAPTER 3

3 April 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A woman, with a six-year-old child, takes sannyas. She says she is worried about her child who is very closed.]

She is a born meditator! Don’t make a problem out of it. Allow her her own space. Let it be so: if she enjoys being inside herself, allow it. Don’t force and drag her out, that will be destructive. We never accept children as they are. We always find something or other which has to be fixed, changed. We don’t have respect for them as they are. Who are we to decide what will be right for her? We can only help her to be herself. If she is happy, just allow it; don’t try to drag her in some other direction.

I can understand your problem. You must be worried about her future: if she does not open up, if she does not relate, what is going to happen to her in her life? How will she love, how will she move, how will she ever be independent? Don’t be worried – just accept her as she is. She will find her own way and she will live her life; don’t interfere. The problem is in your mind, not in her being. The problem is in the mother’s caring. The mother is worried. She would like to have children who are normal, who are just like everybody else. But she seems to be a special child.

Drop the problem, and in dropping the problem it may be possible for her to come out of herself. Because when you try to bring somebody out, the natural reaction is for them to go even deeper into themselves. Children are powerful people: they can defend themselves, they can resist, they can fight back. If you allow her to be herself then there will be no point in her fighting back. She may open up on her own. And even if she doesn’t, it is her life, she has to live it that way.

Do you think that normal children are having a very beautiful life? This whole world is full of normal children who have become grown-up now. Adolf Hitler was a normal child, so was Joseph Stalin, so were Benito Mussolini and all the generals, all the mad people of the world.

Who knows what is going to happen to her? Maybe this is right for her, maybe this is how God wants her to be. Have respect for her space, that is all that can be done. Love her, respect her, but don’t interfere.

[A sannyasin, returning to the West, says that the joy and fun has gone out of his relationship with his girlfriend, though the love is still there.]

There is some misunderstanding in your mind. The joy is not gone, joy has never been there – it was something else. It is excitement that has gone but you were thinking that excitement was joy. Joy will come now; when the excitement subsides only their does joy come. Joy is a very silent phenomenon. It is not excitement at all, it is not feverish at all. It is tranquil, calm and cool.

But in the West that misunderstanding has become very prevalent. People think that excitement is joy It is a kind of intoxication one feels occupied, tremendously occupied. In that occupation one forgets one’s worries, problems, anxieties. So it is like alcohol: you forget your problems, you forget yourself; at least for the moment you are far, far away from yourself. That is the meaning of excitement: you are no more inside; you are outside yourself, you have escaped from yourself. But because of this being outside yourself, sooner or later you become tired. You miss the nourishment that comes from your innermost core when you are close to it.

So no excitement can be permanent; it can only be a moment’s phenomenon, a momentary thing. All honeymoons end, they have to end, otherwise you will be killed. If you remain excited you will go berserk. It has to subside, you have to be nourished there again. It is just as one cannot remain awake for many nights. For one night, two nights, three nights, it is okay, but if you remain awake for too many nights you will start feeling tired, utterly tired, exhausted. And you will start feeling dull and dead too; you will need rest. After each excitement there is a need for rest. In rest you recapitulate, you recover; then you can move into excitement again.

But excitement is not joy, it is just an escape from misery. Try to understand it very clearly: excitement is just an escape from misery. It gives only a pseudo experience of joy. Because you are no more miserable you think you are joyous – not to be miserable is equivalent to being joyous. Joy is a positive phenomenon. Not to be miserable is just a forgetfulness. The misery is waiting back home for you: whenever you come back it will be there.

When excitement disappears, one starts thinking ‘Now what is the point of this love?’ In the West love dies with excitement, and that is a calamity. In fact love had never been born. It was just love of excitement, it was not real love. It was just an effort to move away from oneself It was a search for sensation. You rightly use the word ‘fun’; it was fun but it was not intimacy. When excitement disappears and you just start feeling loving, love can grow; now the feverish days are over. This is the true beginning.

To me, the true love begins when the honeymoon is over. But by that time the western mind thinks that all is over, finished: ‘Search for another woman, search for another man. Now what is the point in continuing? – there is no more fun!’

If you go on loving now, love will take on a depth, it will become intimacy. A great grace will arise in it. It will have a subtlety now, it will not be superficial. It will not be fun, it will be meditation, it will

be prayer. It will help you to know yourself. The other will become a mirror, and through her you will be able to know yourself. Now is the time, the right time for love to grow because all the energy that was being channelled into excitement will not be wasted: it will be poured into the very roots of love and the tree will be able to have great foliage.

If you can go on growing in this intimacy, which is no more excitement, then joy will arise: first excitement, then love, then joy. Joy is the ultimate product, the fulfilment. Excitement is just a beginning, a triggering; it is not the end. And those who finish at excitement will never know what love is, will never know the mystery of love, will never come to know the joy of love. They will know sensations, excitement, passionate fever, but they will never know the grace that is love. They will never know how beautiful it is to be with a person with no excitement but with silence, with no words, with no effort to do anything. Just being together, sharing one space, one being, sharing each other, not thinking of what to do, what to say, where to go, how to enjoy; all those things are gone. The storm is over and there is silence.

And it is not that you will not make love but it will not be a making really; it will be love happening. It will happen out of grace, out of silence, out of rhythm; it will arise from your depths, it will not be bodily really. There is a sex which is spiritual, which has nothing to do with the body. Although the body partakes in it, participates in it, it is not the source of it. Then sex takes on the colour of Tantra, only then.

So my suggestion is: watch yourself. Now that you are coming closer to the temple don’t escape. Go into it. Forget excitement, it is just childish. And something beautiful is ahead. If you can wait for it, if you have patience and can trust in it, it will come. And to know love is to know God.…

[A sannyasin says he would like to work in the ashram, as an architect or in theatre. He says sometimes he wants to do something important.]

That idea is dangerous. If you want to do something important you will never be able to do it; that’s the danger of it. People who enjoy doing small things do important things because they have the relaxed attitude needed to do the important. Once the idea gets into your head that you have to do something special, something important, momentous, then you lose all peace; all calm is lost and you become so strained. How can the important thing happen through it? The important happens only when you are playful. But if you want it to happen you are serious, that’s the paradox.

All that has happened in the world which is important in any way, has always happened through playfulness, all great inventions are out of playfulness. Be playful! Forget about the important, because behind the important the ego is hiding. Why bother about the important? Once we are gone, everybody forgets about us. Within five hundred years nobody will remember you, so why bother?

Just think of people who lived five hundred years before us: they were doing great, important things and making much fuss about it, much ado about nothing. Where are they? Everybody will go down the drain, so why bother? Why waste time? Doing important things means that when you are gone people will remember you. But people are not bothering about you; you are not bothering about anybody else. In fact children hate history. Who wants to read history and who wants to remember those stupid names? Those people were doing great things and all that they have done is made history which poor children have to remember. That’s all that they have done so why bother?

Live your life joyously, and out of it important things happen. Not that people will remember them, but they will be important in the sense that you get such joy out of them, that you feel so fulfilled in doing them, that you are tremendously grateful that you lived, that you breathed, that you were able to write a poem or make a garden. Not that the garden is going to remain forever, nothing remains forever, but the joy was in your creating it.

And have you observed one very very significant factor? – whenever a person has created something he loses all interest in it. This is something psychological: a painter is so much into his painting, yet once the painting is finished he never looks at it again, he is finished with it.

Psychologists have been perplexed, have been very much intrigued by it; why is it so? The person was putting so much energy for years together into writing a book and yet when the book is published he never reads it. He was putting so much life and energy into it – for what? Psychologists have missed the point: the point is not the outcome, the point is the joy that is derived while they are creating it. The point is not in when the book or the poem or the painting is finished. The joy is while they are doing it, the joy is in its very creation. In that moment they are intoxicated with creation, they are lost in it. It is meditative. They participate with God in that moment, it is their prayer.

I call a thing important for no other reason than this: that you are lost in it. For example, I am talking to you. It is important because I am lost in it. I have forgotten the whole world; here only you exist for me and nobody else! It is important. Whether anything will come out of it or not is immaterial, irrelevant. I enjoy it – looking into you, communing with you. I enjoy the way you listen and receive it. The result has no value, the very process is important.

So drop that idea of doing something important. And you will be able to do many important things, why just one? But my feeling is that you should do a few more groups – then start working, mm? Have you booked for any groups?

Do Encounter, then the second group is Primal and the third, Tantra, these three. Then remind me again. By that time the idea of importance will have gone. Then we can start doing important things, right? Good!

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