Don’t reduce life into technology. Life reduced into technology loses all flavor of joy.
Emotions cannot be permanent. That’s why they are called “emotions”.
The mystics, for thousands of years, have been saying exactly the same thing — that all these things that your mind is filled with are not yours, you are beyond them.
Feeling and thinking, thoughts and emotions, but witnessing is separated from both.
Love always makes one nervous.
There are reasons why it makes one nervous. It comes from the unconscious, and all your capacities are in the conscious; all your skill, all your knowledge, is in the conscious. Love comes from the unconscious and you don’t know how to cope with it, what to do with it, and it is too much.
If it is a poisonous emotion, you are relieved of it through awareness. If it is good, blissful, ecstatic, you become one with it. Awareness deepens it. So to me this is the criterion: if something is deepened by your awareness, it is something good. If something is dissolved through awareness, it is something bad.
That which cannot remain in awareness is sin, and that which grows in awareness is virtue. Virtue and sin are not social concepts, they are inner realization.
Rationality is one thing; rationalization is a manipulation of reason, just as sentimentality is a manipulation of emotion.
Repression is to live a life that you were not meant to live. Repression is to do things you never wanted to do. Repression is to be the fellow that you are not, repression is a way to destroy yourself. Repression is suicide — very slow of course, but a very certain, slow poisoning.
Expression is life; repression is suicide.
It is the same as when you feel like vomiting: you don’t go and vomit on somebody. Anger needs a vomit. You go to the bathroom and vomit. It cleanses the whole body — if you suppress the vomit it will be dangerous, and when you have vomited you will feel fresh, you will feel unburdened, unloaded, good, healthy. Something was wrong in the food that you took and the body rejects it.
First is the distinction between reaction and response. Reaction is dominated by the other person. Response is out of freedom.
Emotions blind a person exactly as alcohol does.
If you really want to know what anger is, go into it, mediate over it, taste it in many ways, allow it to happen inside you, be surrounded by it, be clouded by it, feel all the pang and the pain and the hurt of it, and the poison, and how it brings you low, how it creates a dark valley for your being, how you fall into hell through it, and hot it is a downward flow. Feel it, know it. And that understanding will start a transformation in you. To know truth is to be transformed.
So-called “nonviolent” people are the ugliest in the world. They are not good people, because they are holding down a volcano. You cannot feel at ease with them. Something is dangerously present there. You can feel it, you can touch it; it is oozing out of them.
In fact, only sadness gives you depth. Laughter is shallow; happiness is skin-deep. Sadness goes to the very bones, to the marrow. Nothing goes as deep as sadness.
The only problem with sadness, desperation, anger, hopelessness, anxiety, anguish, misery, is that you want to get rid of them. That’s the only barrier. You will have to live with them. You cannot just escape. They are the very situation in which life has to integrate and grow. They are the challenges of life. Accept them. They are blessings in disguise. If you want to escape from them, if you somehow want to get rid of them, then a problem arises — because if you want to get rid of something you never look at it directly.
I don’t say anger is wrong, I say anger is energy — pure energy, beautiful energy. When anger arises, be aware of it, and see the miracle happen. When anger arises, be aware of it, and if you are aware you will be surprised; you are in for a surprise that as you become aware, anger disappears.
It is fear that keeps people closed. They can’t hear you — they are afraid to hear. And their anger is really their fear upside down. It is only a person who is full of fear who becomes immediately angry. If he does not become angry then you will be able to see his fear. Anger is a cover-up. By being angry he is trying to make you afraid: before you get any idea of his fear, he is trying to make you afraid.
Their anger is an effort to deceive themselves. It has nothing to do with you.
A priori conclusions make you believers, not scientists.
When I say “mediate over it,” I mean watch. Be a scientist in your inner world.
What happens when you watch without any judgment?
You start seeing through and through. Jealousy becomes transparent: you see the stupidity of it, you see the foolishness of it. Not that you have already decided that it is stupid; if you have decided you will miss the whole point.
You cannot even see the other person being happy with someone for a minute — and you think you can die for the other person? Just try to see what actually is in you for the other person — and jealousy will disappear. In most of the cases with jealousy, you love will also disappear. But it is good, because what is the point of having a love which is full of jealousy, which is not love?
If jealousy disappears and love still remains, then you have something solid in your life which is worth having.
By “love” people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness — without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed that person.
Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open.
Don’t think of tomorrow. The moment you think of tomorrow your living today remains half-hearted. Just live today, and leave tomorrow, it will take its own course.
In fact, your so-called love also has nothing to do with love. These are beautiful words which you use without knowing what they mean, without experiencing what they mean. You go on using the word “love.” You use it so much that you forget the fact that you have not experienced it yet. That is one of the dangers of using such beautiful words: God, love, prayer. Beautiful words — you go on using them, you go on repeating them, and by and by, the very repetition makes you feel as if you know. What do you know about love?
There is only one basic fear. The fear is of losing yourself. It may be in death, it may be in love, but the fear is the same: You are afraid of losing yourself. And the strangest thing is that only those people who are afraid of losing themselves who don’t have themselves.
Those who do have themselves are not afraid. So it is really a question of exposure. You don’t have anything to lose; you just believe that you have something to lose.
The fear of death is not the fear of death, it is a fear of remaining unfulfilled.
But that substitute is useful only in the same crowd which has given it to you. The moment you are alone, the false starts falling apart and the repressed real starts expressing itself. Hence the fear of being lonely.
You believed yourself to be somebody, and then suddenly in a moment of loneliness you start feeling you are not that. It creates fear: then who are you? It will take some time for the real to express itself. The gap between the two has been called by the mystics “the dark night of the soul.”
We are afraid of love because Love is a small death. Love requires that we should surrender, and we don’t want to surrender at all. We would like the other to surrender, we would like the other to be a slave.
So because of the fear of death we strive for security, for a bank balance, for insurance, for marriage, for a settled life, for a home; we become a part of a country, we join a political party, we join a religious church. These are all ways to find security.
You have never looked at them. You have been escaping from them. You have been creating protections against them, rather than looking directly into the eyes of your fear.
There is nothing to fear at all; all that is needed is a little more awareness. So whatever your fear is, catch hold of it, look at it minutely, the way a scientist looks at a thing.