Ego's Attraction_

 

The Third Question:

This is what I was talking about. If you feel pain, be attentive to it, don't do anything. Attention is the great sword - it cuts everything. You simply pay attention to the pain.

For example, you are sitting in the last part of the meditation silently, unmoving, and you feel many problems in the body. You feel the leg is going dead, there is some itching in the hand, you feel ants are creeping on the body and many times you have looked - there are no ants. The creeping is inside, not outside.

What you should do?

You feel the leg is going dead - be watchful just give your total attention to it. You feel itching - don't itch. That will not help. You just pay your attention. Don't open even your eyes. Just pay your attention inwardly, and just wait and watch, and within seconds the itching has disappeared. Whatsoever happens - even if you feel pain, severe pain in the stomach or in the head, it is possible because in meditation the whole body changes. It changes its chemistry. New things start happening; the body is in a chaos. Sometimes the stomach will be affected, because in the stomach you have suppressed many emotions, and they are all stirred. Sometimes you will feel like vomiting, nausea. Sometimes you will feel a severe pain in the head because the meditation is changing the inner structure of your brain. You are really in a chaos passing through meditation. Soon things will settle. But for the time being - in the beginning - everything will be unsettled.

So what are you to do?

You simply see the pain in the head; watch it. You be a watcher. You just forget that you are a doer, and by and by, everything subsides and subsides so beautifully and so gracefully that you cannot believe unless you know it. And not only that the pain disappears from the head - because the energy which was creating pain, if it is watched... pain disappears and the same energy becomes pleasure. The energy is the same.

Pain or pleasure are two dimensions of the same energy. And if you can remain silently sitting and paying attention to distractions, all distractions disappear. And when all distractions disappear, you will suddenly become aware that the whole body has disappeared.

In fact, what was happening? Why these things were happening? - and when you don't meditate they don't happen. The whole day you are there and the hand never itches, the head has no pain, and the stomach is perfect, and the legs are okay. Everything is okay. What was really happening? Why in meditation these things start suddenly?

The body has remained the master for long, and in meditation you are throwing the body out of its mastery. You are dethroning it. It clings; it tries in every way to remain the master. It will create many things to distract you so the meditation is lost. You are thrown off balance and the body is again on the throne. Up to now, the body has remained the master and you have been a slave. Through meditation, you are changing the whole thing; it is a great revolution. And of course, no ruler wants to be thrown out of his power. The body plays politics - that's what is happening. When she creates imaginary pain, itching, ants creeping, the body is trying to distract you. And it is natural, because the body has remained in rule for so long; for many lives it has been the emperor and you have been the slave. Now you are changing everything upside down. You are reclaiming your throne, and it is natural the body will try whatsoever it can do to disturb you. If you get disturbed, you are lost. Ordinarily, people suppress these things. They will start chanting a mantra; they will not look at the body.

I am not teaching you any sort of suppression. Only awareness I teach. You just watch, pay attention, and because it is false, immediately it will disappear. When all the pains and itches and ants have disappeared and the body has settled in its right place of being a slave, suddenly arises so much bliss you cannot contain it. Suddenly arises so much celebration in the being, you cannot express it; you are overflowing with a peace that passeth understanding, a bliss which is not of this world.

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The Fourth Question:

Very very difficult it seems: how to be in love without the lover being there? The lover causes misery, not love. The lover starts things which end into a hell. All lovers fail, and I make no exception, but love never fails. So you have to understand: you should not be there in your love. Love should be there, but without any ego in it.

You should walk, but the walker should not be there. You should eat, but the eater should not be there. You should do whatsoever is required, but the doer should not be there.

This is the whole discipline. This is the only discipline of religion. A religious man is not one who belongs to any religion. In fact, a religious man never belongs to any religion. A religious man is one who has dropped the doer and lives naturally, and is just there.

Then love has a different quality - it is not possessive, it is not jealous. It simply gives. It is not a bargain; you don't trade in it. It is not a commodity, it is an overflowing of your being. You share it. In fact, in that state of being where love exists and not the lover, it is not that you are in love with someone and not in love with someone else, you are simply in love. It is not a question of objects.

It is just like breathing. With whom you breathe you simply breathe. Whosoever is with you is not the case, and just like that, with whom you are in love becomes irrelevant, you are simply in love - whosoever is with you! Or, there may be nobody. You may be sitting in an empty room, but the love goes on flowing. Now love is not an activity, it is your being. You cannot put it on and off - it is you. This is the paradox.

When you disappear, then love is you; when you are not, then only love is. Finally, you completely forget about love, because who is there to remember it? Then love is just like a flower blooms, the sun rises, the stars fill the night sky - just it happens. Even if you touch a rock, you touch it lovingly. That has become your being.

That is the meaning of Jesus' saying, "Love your enemies." It is not a question of loving the enemies, it is becoming love. Then you cannot do anything else. Even if the enemy comes, you have to love. There is nothing else to do. Hate is so foolish that it can exist only with the ego. Hate is foolish because you are harming the other, and harming yourself more than the other. It is foolish because all the harm that you do will come to you back. Many times more it will come back to you. You will be crushed under the fallout. It is simply foolish, idiotic. All sins are foolish and idiotic.

That's why in the East we know only one sin, and that is ignorance. All else is just a by-product. When I speak about love, I speak about that love where the lover is not. And if your love is bringing you misery, know well it is not love. It is your ego that brings the misery. Ego poisons everything, whatsoever you touch.

It is just like King Midas: whatsoever he touches becomes gold. Ego is just like King Midas - whatsoever it touches becomes poison. And you know in what difficulties and trouble Midas fell! And things were turning into gold, and even then he became miserable, as miserable as any man has ever been on this earth. He touched his daughter whom he loved, and she became gold. He touched his wife and she became gold. He will touch the food and the food will become gold. He couldn't drink, he couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep, he couldn't love, he couldn't move. His own relatives escaped. Servants will stand far away, because if they come near and by chance he touches, they will be gold. King Midas must have gone absolutely crazy.

So what about you? Whatsoever you touch becomes poison. Even when everything turns into gold a hell is created. What about you? - you touch and things become poisonous. You live in misery, but you have to find the cause. The cause is within you: the doer, the ego, the "I". But you will have to pass through it. You cannot learn out of my experience.

In Zen they say that whether the water is hot or cold, only if you drink then you know. My saying that the ego transforms everything into poison will not be of much help. You have to watch. You have to be on lookout. You have to feel and understand your own ego - what it has done to you.

But ego is very tricky. It always says... whenever you are in misery it always says somebody else has caused it. That's the trick how ego protects itself. If you are in misery, you never think that it is you - it is always somebody else. Husband is in misery because the wife is creating; the wife is in misery because the husband is creating the misery - ego always throws the responsibility on the other - the father is in misery because of the son.

I have seen people who are in misery because they have children, and I have seen people - they are in misery because they don't have children. I see people in misery who are in love - their relationship is causing them much trouble, turmoil, anguish - and I see people in misery who are not in love, because without love they are miserable. It seems you are absolutely determined to be in misery. Whatsoever the case, you create misery. But you never look within. Something must be inside which causes it - that ego that you think you are, the idea of the self. Greater the idea of the self, the greater will be the misery.

Children are less in misery because their egos are yet not developed, and then, their whole life people go on thinking that life was a paradise in childhood. The only reason is simple: that the ego needs time to develop. Children don't have much egos. If you try to remember your past you will find a barrier somewhere. At the age of four or at the age of three suddenly memory stops there. Why?

Psychoanalysts have been probing the mystery and now they have come to a conclusion. They say because the ego was not there, so who will collect the memories? The collector was not there. Things happened, experience happened, because a child is not a blank sheet up to the age of three. Millions of things have happened. And for a child, more things happen than for an old man, because the child is more curious, and each small thing is a great thing. Millions of things have happened in those three years, but because the ego was not there, there is no trace left. If the child is hypnotized, he can remember. He can go beyond the barrier.

In many experiments, hypnotized persons have remembered not only things that happened after birth, but things that happened before birth, when they were in the womb of the mother. The mother was ill, or had a severe stomach-ache, and the child suffered. Or, when the child was in the mother's womb, grown seven months or eight months and the mother had made love, the child remembers it. Because when a woman makes love, the child suffocates inside.

So in the East it has been completely prohibited. When the mother is pregnant love should not be made - any sexual activity is dangerous for the child, because the child depends for his breathing on the mother. The oxygen is supplied by the mother, and when the mother is in sexual activity, her rhythm of breathing is lost. The continuous rhythm is no more there; the child suffocates, not knowing what is happening. While making sex, more oxygen is absorbed by the mother - now these are scientific facts - and when more oxygen is absorbed by the mother, the child cannot get the oxygen. Sometimes even death is possible; the child may die. The child remembers all these things. You also remember all these things; they are there, but because the ego was not there, they have not become a burden on you.

An enlightened person remembers things just like this. He has no center to remember. He has accumulated memory but it is not a burden. If he wants, he can look in the memory and find a thing out of it, but he is not burdened. Memories don't come by themselves to him. He can check, he can find, but normally he remains like an empty sky. Nothing comes by itself.

You will be held by your own experience, not by what I say. Look at the misery and always try to find out the cause, and you will find the cause within yourself. Once you find the cause is inside, the point of transformation has reached to its maturity. Now you can turn over, now you can change - you are ready. While you go on throwing responsibility on others no change is possible. Once you realize that you are responsible for all the misery that you have created - you are your own hell - that every moment a great turning happens. Immediately, you become your own heaven.

That's why I tell you to move into relationship, into the world; to experience, to become mature, to ripen, to become seasoned. Only then whatsoever I am saying will be meaningful to you. Otherwise, intellectually you will understand but existentially you will miss.