15

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 15

15 March 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem Maitri means love, friendship, and friendship has a higher quality than love. The next step of love is friendship. Not that it is lower, as it is understood ordinarily; it is not.

In love there is passion, lust; love is more rooted in the physical. Friendship is purer, not rooted in the sexual at all. Friendship is between two beings: it is asexual and transcendental to the physical.

Friendship has a coolness in it. Love has heat, hence it goes high, low; sometimes everything is beautiful and sometimes everything is ugly. Love changes. Friendship has a more eternal quality to it; it doesn’t change.

Love has moods and climates, it can move to the opposite: it can become hate. And something of the hatred is always involved in love: you love the person and you hate the person too, so a constant conflict is part of it.

Friendship is more unearthly. You simply rejoice in somebody’s being, you celebrate somebody’s being for no reason at all; it is very irrational. Love has a rational quality to it but friendship is very irrational.

I have given you the name ‘Prem Maitri’; it means to pass through love, to go beyond and arrive at friendship. Let love be the first step and friendship the climax.

Friendship is more meditative. It has no passion but it has tremendous compassion. Love is very jealous: it is very difficult to love two persons; there is bound to be trouble. But friendship is non-jealous: you can be friendly to as many people as possible, you can be friendly to the whole existence. There is no jealousy involved, so friendship is higher and more spiritual.

But we have to move through love because we are rooted in the body, in the gross, and we have to refine our being slowly, step by step, inch by inch.

So even if you are in love with some person, try to make it more of a friendship, then it will have more permanency. It will have more joy, it will have more communication and more communion.

It is almost impossible to see a husband and wife as friends. They may be lovers and they may be enemies, both are possible and both are possible together too, but to think of a wife and husband as friends is difficult. And that is very ugly, because you love a person, you live with a person, and the friendship is not growing.

My feeling and my observation is that love is just like the starter in a motor car: you cannot run the car on the starter. It starts the car, that’s its function; then the car has to take over, the motor has to run. Love should function as a starter to friendship but it cannot run the whole show; that’s why love fails.

Unless friendship grows love is bound to fail. So while love is there make sure that friendship is growing, because sooner or later the romance of love will disappear and if the friendship has not grown by that time then the whole thing falls flat. That’s what is happening in the West every day.…

People move into love with such great enthusiasm, with such great hope and fantasy. With high hopes they enter into love and within days it is gone! In fact the honeymoon is not over and the love has gone. What is happening? And then the whole thing becomes a drag – dragging, ugly, and one somehow manages, pretends... a hypocrisy.

My feeling is that love is just a starter; don’t depend on it. It is good, it is needed to start with, but when the car has started don’t depend on the starter: its work is done! Now the car has to run on its own; that’s what friendship is.

So before the romance wears out make sure that friendship has arrived, then love has done its work, has served beautifully, has made the possibility for friendship to descend. Now its function is over.

If it does not happen that way and the friendship has not arrived and the function of love is over, then all is over! Then there is nothing left behind, only frustration. And next time even love will become more difficult because now you will know that it all fails.

Once love has failed once, twice, thrice, one starts feeling hopeless, one starts feeling that it is all nonsense, just a dream. It doesn’t happen, it is not real, it is not true – an hallucination or an auto – hypnosis but nothing more.

Love is not an hallucination, it is a moment of high passion, but one cannot remain on the high moment forever. One has to cool down, come back to earth, move on the plains; that’s where life exists. You can fly high in the sky for a few moments but then you have to come back to earth.

Before you come back to the earth create friendship because that will last. So love, love as much as possible, but always remember that love has to give space to friendship.

Use love as a stepping-stone towards friendship. That is the meaning of your name.…

[A sannyasin says: I’m going back (to the West) to try to work from a different vibration than my mind.]

It will happen... now it can happen. And once you know that you can work from a different dimension and a different vibration, once you know that it is possible and you try it and it happens, by and by it becomes very easy to drop the mind. Because then you have a higher intelligence than the mind can make available: you have a deeper-going insight into things which is not possible for the mind.

The mind has a grip on us because we don’t know that there is something higher than the mind which can be depended upon... so one has to try it! And now you have the space; you can just move and it will be very easy. Once things start working, confidence arises and you become more and more certain that it works. It works in a far better way than the mind has worked before. And moreover it never tires and never becomes mechanical; that is the beauty of the insight.

To function from the heart is to function from the non-mechanical part of your being, so nothing ever becomes mechanical: each day you are fresh, new and each moment you respond in a new way. Not only are others surprised; you are surprised that this happened through you! You had never imagined that this was possible.

And once you have the taste of it there is no falling back. Right now is the moment. Start functioning from the new vibe, relate to people from the new vibe and allow me to function through you more!

Miracles are possible, miracles are possible every moment. One just has to be in a let-go, and that is possible now.

[A sannyasin says she and her husband are in conflict bringing up their son. He wants to be stricter and she wants to be more loving.]

So let him do his thing and you go on doing your thing; there is no problem. The child needs both, because this is how life is: if a child only gets love he will suffer; if he only gets hardness, then he will suffer. He needs both. That’s the function of the mother and the father: the mother should go on giving love so the child knows that love is possible and the father remains hard so the child knows life is not so easy. It is how life is!

There are thorns and there are roses and the child has to be prepared for both. The world is not going to be a mother; the world is going to be a hard struggle. So if you just go on giving him love he will not have any bone. When life is there in reality he will simply collapse, because he will wait for the mother and [she] is not there; life does not bother about him. Then he will be grateful to [his father] because life will put him out the door many times, will shout at him, and then he will know that he can tackle that too; he has been prepared for that too.

A child has to be prepared for both softness and hardness, yin and yang both, and that’s the function of the father and mother. The feminine and the masculine both have to be given so the child is ready: whatsoever the situation he will be able to respond. If life is hard, he can he hard too; if life is loving, he can be loving too; he will not have any fixation.

Now if [his father] alone is training him he will be fixed. He will be a hard person, he will be a perfect German, but he will never be able to love and he will never be able to accept love because he does

not know what love is. He will be a soldier, he will be ready to fight, to kill or be killed. That will be his only logic, he will not know anything else. That too is dangerous. That’s what happened to the german nation, that’s what helped Adolf Hitler. Two world wars have proved that german mothers have not been as loving as they should be and german fathers have been too disciplinarian. That’s why the whole world has suffered because of Germany.

So if the child is left alone to him (his father), the child will become a victim of any Adolf Hitler any day; that is dangerous. If the child is left to you, the child will become too indian, so wherever there is any fight he will simply escape, he will surrender; before even fighting he will surrender! He will be a slave.

Both ways he will get fixed, and a really alive person has no fixation. He is liquid: he can move and be hard when the circumstances are such that he needs to be hard like steel, and when circumstances are such that he needs to be like a rose flower, soft and vulnerable, he can soften.

This whole expanse should be available to the child’s consciousness so that he can move easily. So both are good; I will not say to choose any. And there is no need to be in any conflict: just go on doing your thing and let him do his thing, and sometimes even if the conflict is there that too is good! But sometimes too much of anything becomes ugly.

Sometimes the child should know this too – that the father and mother can fight – because some day he will find a woman and there will be fight; he should know that fight is natural. In fact whatsoever is natural is good. And now that you are both becoming alert things will

[A sannyasin says she cannot handle her energy after a T’ai Chi intensive.]

Everything is perfectly good; it is just that you are bewildered because the experience is so new. When energy comes to a very high peak it has to go to a very deep valley – it is natural: it moves to the opposite pole. So in the intensive t’ai chi it really came to an explosion; it was very very intense, and very good! But when it comes to such a peak it will relax and go to a very deep emptiness, almost like a black hole where one feels collapsed, gone or dead; one cannot believe that one is still alive.

So just do one thing: two, three days of perfect rest is needed, and enjoy the rest. Mm? don’t do anything strenuous. Sufi dancing is okay, Nadabrahma is okay, Nataraj is okay.… if you feel like doing them. Stop all strenuous meditations for two, three days.

Lie down more in your bed, rest and enjoy this emptiness. Don’t make a problem out of it, it is not a problem. It is a very very subtle experience of the negative, as important as the experience of the positive. It is the experience of death, as important as the experience of life itself... and one has to move both ways.

It will come many times so get acquainted with it, get attuned to it, start enjoying it because many times it will be coming and you have to be the host for this experience too. Whenever you go to the peak this experience will follow in the wake. If you become too much afraid of this experience you will stop going to the peak.

That’s why I would like you to welcome it – because if you can welcome it totally soon you will be able to go to the peak again. If you cannot welcome it and it is part of the peak, then the peak will be stopped; you will never go to the peak.

So just for three days enjoy this negative space. It is good, nothing wrong in it. I can understand that one feels empty, but emptiness is nothing wrong, emptiness is perfectly okay. In fact one of the very basic spiritual experiences is the experience of the zero, the zero experience; that’s where you are moving.

But you are unacquainted and afraid and fearful so you are not able to enjoy it. Accept it, embrace it, feel blessed, and for three days let it be a real holiday. Mm? do a few things that you enjoy doing and which don’t make you feel tired: only then do them, otherwise don’t. Go to the swimming pool, lie down in the swimming pool, enjoy yourself there. Sit under the shower, enjoy. Lie down in the bath or just sit under the tree; don’t do much.

This space has to be tasted well, digested well so that it starts circulating in your blood. And when the zero experience starts circulating in the blood you will feel very cool, very collected... in the world and yet far away.

It is something tremendous that has knocked at your door, but I can understand your bewilderment. Mm? whenever it comes for the first time everybody becomes bewildered. And T’ai Chi is a great technique: sometimes it can hit rightly at the centre and explode the energy.

That’s what has happened: it has been an explosion. And whenever it happens again, immediately rest for two, three days; three days should be the limit. So just rest. Nothing to be worried about, mm?

< Previous | Contents | Next >