Never ask, ‘Who is my real friend?’ Ask,‘Am I a real friend to somebody?’ That is the right question. Why are you worried about others — whether they are friends to you or not? The proverb is: A friend in need is a friend indeed.But deep down that is greed. That is not friendship; that is not love.You want to use the other as a means, and no man is a means, every man is an end unto himself. Why are you so worried about who is a real friend? The real question has to be: Am I friendly to people? Do you know what friendship is? It is the highest form of love. In love, some lust is bound to be there; in friendship, all lust disappears. In friendship nothing gross remains; it becomes absolutely subtle.
It is not a question of using the other, it is not even a question of needing the other,it is a question of sharing.You have too much and you would like to share.And whosoever is ready to share your joy with you, your dance, your song, you will be grateful to him, you will feel obliged…. A friend always feels grateful to those people who allow him to love them, to give them whatsoever he has got. Love is greed.You will be surprised to know that the English word ‘love’ comes from a Sanskrit word lobh and it means ‘greed’…. Making friendships with the idea of using people is taking a wrong step from the very beginning. Friendship has to be a sharing.If you have something, share it — and whosoever is ready to share with you is a friend.
It is not a question of need.It is not about when you are in danger, the friend has to come to your aid.That is irrelevant — he may come, he may not come, but if he does not come, you don’t have any complaint. If he comes you are grateful,but if he does not come,it’s perfectly okay. It is his decision to come or not to come. You don’t want to manipulate him, you don’t want to make him feel guilty.You will not have any grudge. Friendship is not something of the marketplace.Friendship is one of those rare things which belong to the temple and not to the shop.But you are not aware of that kind of friendship,you will have to learn it. Friendship is a great art.Love has a natural instinct behind it; friendship has no natural instinct behind it.
Friendship is something conscious; love is unconscious.You fall in love with a woman.... Why do we say ‘falling in love’? That phrase is significant: ‘falling in love’. Nobody ever rises in love, everybody falls in love.Why do you fall in love? This is because it is falling from the conscious to the unconscious, from intelligence to instinct. What we call love is more animalistic than human. Friendship is absolutely human. It has something for which there is no inbuilt mechanism in your biology;it is nonbiological. Hence, one rises in friendship,one does not fall in friendship. It has a spiritual dimension
We begin with one of the most profound sutras of Gautama the Buddha: 'Love yourself…'
"Just the opposite has been taught to you by all the traditions of the world, all the civilizations, all the cultures, all the churches. They say: "Love others, don't love yourself." And there is a certain cunning strategy behind their teaching.
"Love is the nourishment for the soul. Just as food is to the body, so love is to the soul. Without food the body is weak, without love the soul is weak. And no state, no church, no vested interest, has ever wanted people to have strong souls, because a person with spiritual energy is bound to be rebellious.
"Love makes you rebellious, revolutionary. Love gives you wings to soar high. Love gives you insight into things, so that nobody can deceive you, exploit you, oppress you. And the priests and the politicians survive only on your blood – they survive only on exploitation. All the priests and all the politicians are parasites.
"To make you spiritually weak they have found a sure method, one hundred percent guaranteed, and that is to teach you not to love yourself. If a man cannot love himself he cannot love anybody else either. The teaching is very tricky. They say "Love others," because they know if you cannot love yourself you cannot love at all. But they go on saying, "Love others, love humanity, love God, love nature, love your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, but don't love yourself" – because to love oneself is selfish according to them.
They condemn self-love as they condemn nothing else – and they have made their teaching look very logical. They say: "If you love yourself you will become an egoist, if you love yourself you will become narcissistic." It is not true. A man who loves himself finds that there is no ego in him. It is by loving others without loving yourself, trying to love others, that the ego arises.
"The missionaries, the social reformers, the social servants, have the greatest egos in the world – naturally, because they think themselves to be superior human beings. They are not ordinary: ordinary people love themselves; they love others, they love great ideals, they love God. And all their love is false, because all their love is without any roots. A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love." ::smitten:
“Love respects the other. It is a give-and-take relationship. Love enjoys giving, and love enjoys taking. It is a sharing, it is a communication. Both are equal in love; in a s*xual relationship both are not equal. Love has a totally different beauty to it.
“The world is slowly, slowly moving towards love relationships; hence there is great turmoil. All the old institutions are disappearing – they have to disappear, because they were based on the I/it relationship. New ways of communication, new ways of sharing are bound to be discovered. They will have a different flavor, the flavor of love, of sharing. They will be nonpossessive; there will be no owner.
“Then the highest state of love is prayerfulness. In prayerfulness there is communion. In sex there is the I/it relationship, in love the I/thou relationship. Martin Buber stops there; his Judaic tradition won’t allow him to go further. But one step more has to be taken that is neither 'I' nor 'thou' – a relationship where I and thou disappear, a relationship where two persons no longer function as two but function as one. A tremendous unity, a harmony, a deep accord – two bodies but one soul. That is the highest quality of love. I call it prayerfulness.
“Love has these three stages, and compassion accordingly has three stages, and both can exist in different combinations.
“Hence there are so many kinds of love and so many kinds of compassion. But the basic, the most fundamental, is to understand this three-rung ladder of love. That will help you, that will give you an insight into where you are, what kind of love you are living in and what kind of compassion is happening to you. Watch. Beware not to remain caught in it. There are higher realms, heights to be climbed, peaks to be attained.”
Forget relationships and learn how to relate. Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted – that’s what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful. To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don’t take it for granted. And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That’s what I mean by relating
The night has not yet given way to the dawn, and the sky is still studded with departing stars.
The river looks like a thin stream of silver. The sand is cool with dewdrops, and the winds is bitter with cold. A deep stillness prevails, and the sound of birds every now and then only deepens it.
Taking a friend with me, I have come to this solitary place rather early. The friend says that he feels fear in solitude, and the stillness feels biting. If he keeps himself occupied somehow then it is fine; otherwise a strange kind of anguish and sadness overtakes him.
This anguish comes to everybody. Nobody wants to face himself. Looking within oneself, one feels puzzled. And because solitude leaves one alone with oneself, it is frightening. If you are entangled in the other, the self is forgotten. That is a kind of unconsciousness and an escape. Man keeps himself busy his whole life in this escape. But this escape is temporary. There is no way man can escape from his own self! All his efforts to escape are futile, because he himself is the one from whom he is trying to escape. How can one escape from oneself, and how can one run away from oneself? We can run away from everything but not from our own selves. Having run throughout our whole life we will find that we have not reached anywhere. Hence those who are intelligent do not run away from their own self; rather they face it.
If man looks inward he experiences an emptiness. There is an infinite nothingness within. Hence, becoming puzzled, he runs outwards. He makes endless efforts to fill this emptiness. He wants to fill it up in the world, in relationships. But it cannot be filled in any way – it is impossible to fill it up – and this is his anguish and the failure of his life. Death shows this anguish very clearly. Death throws him into this very emptiness from which he has been escaping his whole life. And that is why the fear of death is uppermost.
I say, fleeing from one’s emptiness is ignorance. It is through facing it, entering it, that life is attained. Reaching to this nothingness, we realize our nature.
Religion is an entry into the emptiness. What man experiences in himself in utter aloneness is religiousness.
We all must have often heard our self and other people saying about their closest friends ,girlfriends, boyfriends(never husbands and wives though!) that we share this level of understanding . They sum up quite a lot in that one word.
Misunderstanding is the stepping stone towards confusion, chaos. Is it that we are talking too much, in that incessant chatter, that we surpass our realms of beautiful silence and step into the dark clouds of meaningless thoughts, each word is like a thunderbolt, sometimes it misses our mind , but Lo behold, when it does strike we are astonished at the interpretations
The word understand is beautiful . When you are in meditation EVER THING STANDS UNDER YOU , YOU ARE SO ABOVE IT. Intellect can’t see it , it is on the same plane. Understanding happens when problem is on one plane and you are on a higher plane.
You see one thing and you understand something else. Your mind immediately distorts it . It makes a mess of everything , it is in confusion &you look through that confusion, so the world looks confused.
Once you say something u r no more a master of it.
Your words belong to the listener, he will squeeze his own meaning out of it, It entirely depends on his state of awareness.
On Krishna’s Bhagvad Gita , there are 1000 commentaries & further thousand interpretations, on each of his statement . But Krishna was just talking to his disciple & friend Arjun . It was a love dialogue. I f he comes back , & reads even he will not be able to get how things have been twisted up.
Language is hindrance.
You will have to put aside the word ROSE. When you see a red rose on a bush, in the rain , in the sun , in the wind , do not go on repeating that ‘’ this is a rose’’, otherwise you will carry a curtain on your ears, eyes, you won’t be able to see o feel it.
And do not say it’s a beautiful rose as beautiful is a word again , just penetrate and encounter beauty. Clean the passage between you and the rose, and do not compare it with other roses that you have seen before, otherwise you would say , it’s more beautiful than the last years roses or better than those of the neighbour’s.
Again you will be lost in teh maze of words. Just look and forget all language, in that forgetting understanding arises.
The clarity will not come from logic , intellect, analysis, it comes through silence. If in your silence somebody’s word falls you can not misinterpret it, because there is nobody to interfere. Either you understand it or you don’t , there is no way to misunderstand.
Learn silence, at least with your friends, with your lovers your family, sit in silence sometimes.
Do not go on gossiping .Stop the talk even inside.
Just sit there being presences to each other. And soon you will find a way to communicate
GOOD WISHES TO ALL
There is no totality; there is only illusion of totality in life. The man of intelligence understands that life is not perfect and is not meant to be perfect. It is imperfect. We are all imperfect beings. So although there may be nooks and corners which you don’t like about a person, there may be things that you do like.... Don’t wait for a dream girl. Be more realistic and try to understand that everybody has faults, and to love someone does not mean that you have to change that person. To love that person does not mean that you have to destroy his freedom.
To love simply means that you feel that something clicks within the two of you. As long as that dance within your heart remains, good.
"Psychologists say that love is nothing but a foreplay to sex. They are right – because they have no other specimen to study. They study you and then they come to conclude that love is nothing but a foreplay – just creating a situation in which sex can happen, nothing else. So when sex has happened, love disappears. It is just like when you feel hungry you gravitate toward food and look at food with enchanted eyes. But when your hunger is satiated, you look away from the food. All the enchantment is lost.
"So when you love your wife or your husband, the love is just an etiquette to enter into sex – because it will be too rude to start… So it just plays like a lubricating agent. And when sex is satisfied, the husband moves to his own side of the bed and goes to sleep. He is finished; all the enchantment is gone. It will come again only when he feels a type of hunger. Psychologists say that love is nothing but a foreplay – just a mannerism. And they are right, because they do not know any other type of man."
India is not just a geography or history. It is not only a nation, a country, a mere piece of land. It is something more: it is a metaphor, poetry, something invisible but very tangible. It is vibrating with certain energy fields that no other country can claim.
For almost ten thousand years, thousands of people have reached to the ultimate explosion of consciousness. Their vibration is still alive, their impact is in the very air; you just need a certain perceptivity, a certain capacity to receive the invisible that surrounds this strange land.
It is strange because it has renounced everything for a single search, the search for the truth.
In these pages, we are treated to a spellbinding vision of "the real India," the India that has given birth to enlightened mystics and master musicians, to the inspired poetry of the Upanishads and the breathtaking architecture of the Taj Mahal. We travel through the landscape of India's golden past with Alexander the Great and meet the strange people he met along the way. We are given a front-row seat in the proceedings of the legendary court of the Moghul Emperor Akbar, and an insider's view of the assemblies of Gautama the Buddha and his disciples.
In the process, we discover just what it is about India that has made it a magnet for seekers for centuries, and the importance of India's unique contribution to our human search for truth.
Beautifully illustrated with photos of some of India's most sacred places, India My Love is a mystery tour with me as guide and storyteller. In its pages we are taken on a journey through India's "golden past," and into its haunting presence. Along the way we are introduced to beggars and kings, wise men and fools, lovers and warriors, artists and scholars, and learn how each of them has contributed to the rich tapestry of mysticism and mystery that makes up India's unique contribution to our human search for truth.
Two little old ladies were chatting over the backyard fence. The first one boasted, “I went out with old man Cain last night and I had to slap him twice.”
“To stop him?” asked her friend.
“No,” she giggled, “to start him!”
Something is always possible. One thing that you need is: rather than searching for a soulmate, become a soul, become more conscious. When love is unconscious it is only lust and nothing else — a beautiful name for an ugly thing. When love is conscious, only then it is love. But how many people are conscious? When love is meditative, only then it is love.
And a meditative love will attract a meditative love energy. You get only what you deserve, remember, neither less nor more. You always get exactly that which you deserve. Existence is very just and very fair. So if you are not getting a soulmate, it is not going to help to frantically search for one. Rather look in. You are missing something in you — you are missing love qualities. You are not tender, you are not sensitive, you are not conscious. And you don’t know how to give without asking anything in return. Your love is a demand, there is a condition to it. It is a kind of exploitation. You want to use the other’s body, and no woman is ever happy if she is used — she hates it.
Millions of women hate their husbands for the simple reason that they feel used, as if they are just machines for your s*xual lust to be relieved so that you can have a good night’s sleep. No woman can ever respect you if she feels she is being used. Each being is an end unto himself. Never use a woman, never use a man, never use anybody. Nobody is a means for your purposes. Respect — love is a sharing, it is not using the other, it is not trying to snatch something from the other. On the contrary, it is giving wholeheartedly for no reason at all, just for the sheer joy of giving.
And then suddenly you will find one day you have found someone with whom your energies are in harmony, in accord. And it is a beautiful experience even to find a single person with whom you are in accord. And here you can find many persons with whom you are in accord.
You can’t imagine my ecstasy, because I am in accord with all of my sannyasins, in deep accord, a tremendous harmony. Then love reaches its highest peak. It is no more s*xual, it is pure prayer. And when love is prayer, you have found the soulmate.
But if your love is lust you can’t find a soulmate, you can only find some woman’s body. And the body is not going to help fulfill your longing. You need attunement with the soul, with the inner being, with the interiority of the woman or of the man.
Doubt is something of tremendous significance. Only those who have doubted to the very end have found what truth is, what love is, what silence is, what beauty is. Skepticism finds nothing. It is utterly empty, but it makes much noise. Empty drums make much noise. And you cannot argue with a skeptic because he will go on saying no to anything, to any value which you cannot place as an object before him.
But doubt – of course, it is a long way and a hard way – goes on eliminating all that is not true. Ultimately only that which is true remains. And nobody can deny truth when one is facing it, experiencing it. Out of that experience comes yes: "Yes, Bhagwan, yes.”
It is not a belief. You have searched, gone into great anxiety, anguish, despair. There were many moments when you wanted to stop, because it looked as if the journey was endless. It is not. There is an end; you just have to keep yourself going. Doubt is surgical – it goes on cutting all that is absurd. But finally the real remains, unclouded. Doubt removes the clouds.
MEANING CAN BE understood in two ways. There is meaning that is somewhere far away, you have to reach to it. It is extrinsic.
Life is not meaningful in this first sense. And it is good that life is not meaningful in that sense, because then life becomes only a means to reach to the faraway goal, the faraway star. Then life loses its autonomous beauty. It is just a way; the real thing is tomorrow.
Meaning has another category too: intrinsic. Life is tremendously meaningful in the second sense. Then meaning is not separate, somewhere else; then meaning is in the very living itself.
You don't ask, has love any meaning? You know love is itself meaningful, it is not a means to some end. You do not ask if the beauty of a rose is meaningful. The beauty itself is enough; it does not lead anywhere, it contains its meaning within itself.
In existence everything that is really valuable is always intrinsically meaningful. And life is equivalent to existence. Life has meaning. If you just change the word "life" into "living," you will be able to understand more easily. Living has meaning -- each moment -- because living is not something dead like "life." The word "life" is dead -- all nouns are dead. But the language is created by dead people.
Some day the new man is going to create a language which consists only of verbs, because that will be authentic to existence. In existence there is no noun. Have you seen "life"? Have you met "life" anywhere? All that you meet, experience, is living.
Sipping a cup of tea, going for a morning walk, doing your work -- all these small activities make up your living. And each part, each moment of living, is meaningful. You just have to be there; otherwise, who is going to experience the meaning?
People go on drinking tea, but they never are there; their minds are wandering all over the world. People are making love, but they are not there. It is a very strange world that we have created. In one bedroom there are at least four people. Already the bedrooms are so small, too difficult for two people; and in the bed there are four people, or even more. These two people who are making love are not there: the man is thinking of some Hollywood actress, the woman is thinking of Muhammad Ali. So there are four people. Who is making love to whom? These two people are simply going through the gestures of love -- they are not present -- mechanical gestures of love. And then they ask, "Is there any meaning in life?"
You go on losing every moment by your absence.
WHEN I WAS A STUDENT, my principal in the high school was continuously troubled by my absence from the school. My family was troubled. I would start going to school, but never reach there. Life was so much, and so many things were happening on the way... and the school was almost one mile away from the house.
The principal called me one day and said, "You are almost always absent."
I said, "That's where you are wrong."
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "I am always present wherever I am. To be absent is not my style of life. And what can I do? -- this one mile between the school and my house.... A magician was doing his tricks on the street, and I became present there. It was far more interesting than your teachers, and I learned more than I could have learned here -- because whatever your teacher is saying I can read in the book, but I will never meet that magician again. And he did such beautiful tricks that when he was finished I followed him to his tent outside the city.
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