Friday 4 January 2013

The secret of love and the secret of prayer and the secret of anything that can make you fulfilled is surrender – the capacity to be possessed


”IN REFERENCE TO YOUR STATEMENT THAT TANTRA IS A LOVE TECHNIQUE, PLEASE
EXPLAIN WHY MODERN MAN AND WOMAN HAVE BECOME INCAPABLE OF LOVE.”

Love is spontaneous. It cannot be controlled. You cannot ”make” love; you cannot do anything about it. And the more you do, the more you will miss it. You have to allow it to happen. You are not needed for it. Your presence is the hindrance. The more you are absent, the better. When you are not, love happens. Because of their inability to be absent, modern man and woman have become incapable of love. They are capable of doing things. The whole modern mind is based on doing. Whatsoever can be done, modern man can do more efficiently than any man that has ever existed. Whatsoever can be done, we can do more efficiently. We are the most efficient century; we have turned everything into technology – into a problem of how to ”do” it. We have developed one dimension and that is the dimension of doing, but in developing this  dimension we have lost much. At the loss of being we have learned how to do things, so that which can be done we do better than anyone – better than any society that ever existed on earth. But when the question of love comes, a problem arises because love cannot be done. And not only is this so with love; we have become incapable of all that cannot be done. For example, meditation: we have become incapable of it; it cannot be done. Or play: we have become incapable of it; it cannot be done. Or joy, happiness: we have become incapable of them because they cannot be done. They are not acts; you cannot manipulate them. On the contrary, you have to let yourself go. Then joy happens to you, then happiness comes to you, then love enters you, then love takes possession. And because of this possession we have become afraid. Modern man, the modern mind, wants to possess everything and not be possessed by anything. Modern man wants to be the master of everything, and you can only be the master of things – not of happenings. You can be the master of a house, you can be the master of a mechanical device; you cannot be the master of anything which is alive. Life cannot be mastered; you cannot possess it. On the contrary, you have to be possessed by it. Only then is there contact with it. Love is life, and it is greater than you. You cannot possess it. I would like to repeat it: love is greater than you; you cannot possess it. You can only allow yourself to be possessed by it; it cannot be controlled. The modern ego wants to control everything, and you become scared of whatsoever you cannot control. You become afraid; you close the door. You close that dimension completely because fear enters. You will not be in control. With love you cannot be in control, and the whole
trend which has led to this century was one of how to control. All over the world, and particularly in the West, the trend is for how to control nature, how to control everything, how to control energies. Man must become the master, and you have become the master – of course, only of those things which are possible to possess, and side by side you have been developing an incapacity for those things which cannot be possessed. You can possess money; you cannot possess love. And because of this we have been turning everything into a thing. You even go on turning persons into things because then you can possess them. If you love a person, you are not the master; no one is the master. Two persons love each other, and no one is the master – neither the lover nor the beloved. Rather, love is the master and both are possessed by a greater force than themselves, encircled by a greater force – a whirlwind. If they try to possess each other, they will miss. Then they can possess each other. Then the lover will become the husband and the beloved will become the wife. Then they can possess, but a husband is a thing and a wife is a thing. They are not persons. You can possess them. They are dead entities, legal labels – not alive. We go on turning persons into things just to possess them, and then we feel frustrated – because we wanted to possess the person and the person cannot be possessed. When you possess a person, he is no more a person; he is a dead thing, and you cannot be fulfilled by a dead thing. Look at this contradiction: you can be fulfilled only by persons, never by things, but your mind desires possessions – so you turn them into things. Then you cannot be fulfilled. Then frustration sets in. Possessiveness, the attitude to possess, has killed the capacity to love. Don’t think in terms of possession. Rather, think in terms of being possessed. That is what surrender means – being possessed: you allow yourself to be possessed by something greater than you. Then you will not be in control. Then a greater force will take you. Then the direction will not be yours. Then you cannot choose the goal. Then the future is unknown; you cannot be secure now. Moving with a greater force than yourself, you are insecure, afraid. If you are afraid and insecure, it is better not to move with great forces. Just work with lower forces
than you; then you can be the master, and you can decide the goal beforehand. Then you will achieve the goal, but you will not get anything out of it. You will have just wasted your life. The secret of love and the secret of prayer and the secret of anything that can make you fulfilled is surrender – the capacity to be possessed. The problem with love exists because this capacity is not there. There are other reasons also, but this is the base. The first reason is too much emphasis on intellect, reason. So man is lopsided. Your head has grown and your heart has remained absolutely neglected. And love is not a capacity of the intellect. It has a different center; it has a different focus, source. It is in your heart, it is your feeling; it is not reasoning. But the whole modern education consists of reasoning, logic, intellect, mind. The heart is not even talked about. It is denied, really; it is just ”a poetic fiction.” It is not! It is a reality! Just look at it in this way: if from the very beginning a child is brought up without any training of the mind or the reasoning, without any intellectual training, will he have an intellect? He cannot! There have been such cases. Sometimes it has happened that wolves have brought up a human child. Just ten years before, one child was caught in a forest. The wolves had brought him up. He was fourteen years of age. He couldn’t even stand on two legs; he would run on all fours. He couldn’t speak a single word; he would roar like a wolf. He was in every way a wolf, and fourteen years of age. Those who caught him named him Ram. The child took six months to learn the name. Within a
year the child died, and the psychologists who worked on him suspected that he died because of too much strain on the intellect. This forcing, this training to get him to stand on two feet, this memory training to get him to remember the name, the effort to make him a human being, killed him. He was robust in health when he was caught – more healthy than any human being ever is. He was just like an animal. But this training killed him. Every effort was made so that if you could have asked him, ”What is your name?” he would be able to say ”Ram.” This was his whole intellect. After six months of constant training, punishment, creating a profit motive in him, the only proof that the child could give of his intellect was this much: he would be able to say ”Ram.” What happened? If someone from Mars could get hold of this child, he would think that humanity has no mind, no intellect, no reason. The same has happened to the heart. Without training it is as if it is not. It has been completely neglected, so your whole life energy has been forced towards the head, not towards the heart, and love is a functioning of the heart center. This is why modern man has become incapable of love: modern man has become incapable of the heart. He calculates, and love is not a calculation. He knows arithmetic and love is not arithmetic. He thinks in terms of logic and love is illogical. He always tries to rationalize everything. Whatsoever he is doing reason must support it, and love is not supported by reason.
Really, when you fall in love you throw your reason completely. That is why we say man ”falls” in love. Falls from where? Falls from the head down into the heart. We use this term of condemnation, ”falling in love,” because the head, the reason, cannot look at it without condemning it. It is a fall. Is love really a fall or a rising? Do you become more with it or do you become less? Do you expand or do you shrink? With love you become more! Your consciousness is more, your feeling is more; your ecstatic sensation is more, your sensitivity is more. You are more alive, but one thing is less: reasoning is less. You cannot reason it out; it is blind. As far as reason is concerned it is blind. The heart has its own reason – that is another thing – and the heart has its own eyes, but that is another thing. The eyes of reason are not there, so reason says it is a fall; you have fallen. Unless the heart center starts functioning again man will not be capable of love, and the whole misery of modern life is because unless he loves he cannot feel any meaning in his life. Life looks
meaningless. Love gives it meaning; love is the only meaning. Unless you are capable of love you will be meaningless, and you will feel that you are existing without any meaning, futilely, and suicide will become attractive. Then you will like to kill yourself, to finish with yourself, to end, because what is the use of existing? Mere existing cannot be tolerated. Existence must have a meaning; otherwise, what is the use?
Why go on prolonging yourself unnecessarily? Why go on repeating the same pattern every day? Getting out of the bed and doing the same thing, and again falling asleep and the next day the same pattern: why? You have done it so far, and what has happened? And you will do it unless death comes and relieves of you of your body. So what is the use? Love gives meaning. It is not that through love any result comes into being or any goal – no! Through love every moment becomes of value in itself. Then you never ask this. If someone asks what is the meaning of life, know well that love is lacking. Whenever someone asks what is the meaning of life, he is asking because he has not been able to flower in a love experience. Whenever someone is in love, he never asks what is the meaning of life. He knows the meaning; there is no need to ask. He knows the meaning! The meaning is there: love is the meaning in life. And through love prayer is possible because prayer is again a love relationship – not between two individuals, but between one individual and existence itself. Then the whole existence becomes your beloved or lover. But it is possible only through love experience that you can grow into prayer or into meditation, and the ultimate ecstasy is just like love. That is why Jesus says that ”God is love,” not that ”God is loving.” Christians have been interpreting it in this way – that God is kind, loving. That is not the meaning.Jesus says that God is love. He simply equates God and love. You can say ”love” or you can say ”God”; they both mean the same. God is not loving; God is love itself. If you can love, you have entered the divine. And when your love grows to such an infinity that it is not concerned with anyone in particular – rather, it has become a diffused phenomenon; when there is no lover for you – rather, the whole existence, all that is, has become the lover or beloved – then it has become prayer. And tantra is a love method. So the first thing is how to love, and then the second thing is how to
grow in love so that love becomes prayer. But one must start from love. And don’t be afraid of love because that fear shows you are afraid of the heart. The head is cunning; the heart is innocent. With the head you feel protected; with the heart you become vulnerable, open. Anything can happen. That is why we have become closed. The fear is there: if you are vulnerable, anything can happen to you; someone can deceive you. With the mind no one can deceive you; you can deceive others. But I tell you be ready to be deceived, but don’t close the heart. Be ready to be deceived, but don’t close the heart! That vulnerability to be deceived is of worth because you will not lose anything by it. And if you are ready to be deceived infinitely, only then can you believe in the heart. If you are calculative, cunning, clever, too much clever, then you will miss the heart, and modern man is so educated, so sophisticated, so clever; that is why he has become incapable of love. Women were not like this, but they are following modern man fast, they are copying modern man fast. Sooner or later they will become just like man, or they may even overtake him. Now they are also becoming incapable because the same head orientation, the same effort to be cunning and clever, is there now. They may form a ”Women’s Liberation Movement” or anything like it, but it is not heart oriented. It is just a copy of the same stupidity that man has been doing with himself. You may go to the other extreme, but if you react, even in your reaction you are following. A great crisis is there. It is difficult now to prevent women all over the world from copying man and his nonsense because man seems to be so successful. He is successful in a way; he has become the master of things. Now he possesses the whole world. Now he feels he has conquered nature, and ”success succeeds; nothing succeeds like success.”
Now women feel that man has succeeded and has become the master, so they must copy him. But look also at the thing in which man has failed completely. He has lost his heart; he cannot love. Reason alone is not enough, and reason in control is dangerous. The heart must be higher than reason because reason is just an instrument and the heart is you. The heart must be allowed to use reason – not vice versa. But you have been doing that. The head is allowed to dominate; in its domination, the head has killed the heart. And thirdly, one thing more has to be remembered as to why modern man has become incapable of love. Love is basically a sort of madness, a sort of deep participation with nature, a sort of dissolving  of the ego. It is primal. You are born out of love; your every cell of the body is a love cell. Your very energy, your life energy, is a love energy. You exist in it, but there is no ego in that energy. You cannot feel ”I.” That energy is unconscious, and when you move in love YOU become unconscious. Only a fragment of your mind is conscious, and in that fragment of the mind exists the ego. The mind has three layers. First is the unconscious: when you are deeply asleep with no dreams, you are in it. The child in the mother’s womb is absolutely unconscious, he is just part of the mother. The child is not aware that ”I am separate”; he is just part of the mother. There is no separation, no defined existence. He is undifferentiated from the mother and from the existence itself. There is no fear because fear comes only when you become aware of yourself. The child is totally at ease; he is unconscious. And the second layer is of consciousness. It is a very small fragment. One tenth part of the
unconscious has become conscious in you through training, education, society, family. It was needed for survival, so a part of you has become conscious. But that part also gets tired very soon; that is why you need sleep. In sleep you become again a child in the womb. You have fallen back, the conscious is no more there. It has become part of the unconscious. That is why sleep is so refreshing. In the morning you feel alive again, fresh, because you have fallen back into the mother’s womb.
You may not have observed this.... Observe someone who is deeply asleep. More or less, he will be in the same posture in which he was in his mother’s womb. And if you can be in the right posture, sleep will follow more easily. If you feel any difficulty in falling asleep, just feel your mother’s womb, as if you are in it. Imagine it, and take the posture in which you would have been in your mother’s womb. In that posture you will fall deeply asleep. You need the same warmth; otherwise the sleep will be disturbed. You need the same warmth as there was in your mother’s womb. That is why hot milk is good. If you sip hot milk before you go to sleep it will be good, because that again makes you a child. Milk is child’s food, and if it is hot you are again at your mother’s breast. Hot milk is good for sleep only because of this reason: you fall back into childhood, you are reduced into a child. Sleep refreshes you. Why? Because the conscious mind gets tired. It is just a part, and the whole is unconscious. It has to fall back to the whole to become revived. It is again resurrected. That is why in the morning you feel good and morning looks beautiful – not only because morning is beautiful, but because again you have a child’s eyes. The afternoon is not so beautiful. The world
is the same, but you have lost those innocent eyes again. And the evening becomes ugly because you are tired. You have lived too much in the conscious. This conscious has ego as the center. These are two ordinary states which we know. The third state, that with which tantra and yoga are concerned, is the superconscious. ”Superconscious” means that your whole unconscious has become conscious. In the unconscious there is no ego; you are total. In the superconscious, again there is no ego; you are total. But in between the two the conscious mind has a center – the ego. This ego is the problem, this ego creates problems. You cannot fall in love because then you will have to become unconscious, just as unconscious as you become in sleep. Or, if you want to rise to prayer, you have to become totally conscious like a Buddha or like a Meera. So love becomes impossible, prayer becomes impossible. The ego creates the barrier. You cannot lose yourself, and love is losing, dispersing, dissolving, melting. If you melt into the unconscious, it is love; if you melt into the superconscious it is prayer – but both are a melting. So what is to be done? Remember this: you cannot do anything about it. Let it be deeply noted: you cannot do anything about love, about prayer. Your conscious mind is impotent; it cannot do anything. It has to be lost, it has to be put aside. And then remember surrender: whenever you want to move beyond yourself, surrender is the way – either in love or in prayer.
Whenever you long to move beyond, somewhere else where you are not, then surrender, let-go is the path. Allow something to happen to you; don’t manipulate. And once you know how to allow, many things will start happening. You may not be even aware of what is possible for you, of what a great, tremendous energy you have closed within yourself which can explode and then become an ecstasy. Your whole life will be filled with consciousness, light and bliss, but you don’t know it. It is just as if every atom is an atom bomb: if one atom explodes, tremendous energy is released. And every heart is also an atom bomb. If it explodes in love or prayer, tremendous energy is released. But you have to explode and lose yourself. The seed has to lose itself; only then is the tree born. And if the seed resists and says, ”No, I must survive,” then the seed can survive, but the tree will never be born. And unless the tree is born the seed will feel frustrated, because the tree is the meaning. The seed will feel frustrated! The seed can feel fulfilled only when the tree is there flowering. But then the seed has to lose itself, die. Modern man has become incapable of love because he has become incapable of death. He cannot die to anything. He clings to life; he cannot die to anything. In old English, three or four hundred years ago, this was a usual expression. The lover would say to the beloved, ”I want to die in you.” This was a love expression. It is beautiful! ”I want to die in you.” Love is a death – a death of the ego. Only then is your real self born, and modern man is very, very afraid of death. In every way, surrender is death, love is death, and life also is a continuous death. If you are afraid, you will miss life itself. Be ready to die every moment. Die to the past, die to the future, and die in the present moment.
Don’t cling and don’t resist. Don’t make any effort for life, and you will have abundant life. Life will happen to you if you are ready to die. This looks paradoxical, but this is the law. Jesus says that one who is ready to lose will gain, and one who clings will lose everything.








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