Old age: A new beginning

Question 1:

The problem of the elderly has arisen because man is living longer than he used to live before.

All the old skeletons found in India, in China and other ancient countries prove one thing: that nobody used to live more than forty years, hence the problem of the elderly never arose in those societies.

It is because of this fact that the scriptures go on saying that in our country people never became old. It was not something great, it was simply that before old age they were dead. Death came before old age; now it comes after.

And as a country is more advanced, people are living longer - ninety years, a hundred years. In a few countries, there are thousands of people who have crossed the boundary line of one hundred and fifty. And in a few special places, because of their food, their climate and their genetics, a few people have reached the age of one hundred and eighty. And they are still young, they are working just like anybody else.

But the problem for the society is that employment is limited. The population growth is tremendous.

New people are coming in such great numbers that we have to vacate places for them, we have to retire people. And as time passes, we will have to retire people even earlier than we are retiring them now. Now in a few countries it is sixty years, in a few countries fifty-five years, but soon this will not be possible. People will have to retire by the age of around forty-five - because the pressure of the new people coming will be so great that if you don't give them opportunities they will create chaos.

But to retire somebody at the age of forty-five is dangerous, it creates many psychological problems.

First, a person needs some work, some creativity, to feel that he is needed. This is one of the most essential psychological needs of man - to be needed. The moment you feel you are no more needed, suddenly something starts dying within you, shrinking within you - as if the will to live has lost all its power, energy, hope. Tomorrow is nothing but darkness.

And the person who has become useless to the society - that's what retirement is.... We make it as beautiful as we can by giving a beautiful pocket watch, celebrating it - it is just a cover-up. The reality is, we are throwing the person in the junkyard: "You are no longer needed, your work is finished.

Now younger people, more educated, better educated, who know the latest scientific developments, are going to replace you. You are out of date."

Suddenly, you have become a posthumous person.

You will go on living, breathing, eating, but it will be just like an appendix to a book - the book is finished, and nobody reads the appendix. One starts losing dignity, self-respect; one starts feeling out of place everywhere - one is no longer connected with the society, with who is now in power; a great gap has arisen.

These people are going through a tremendous inner turmoil and crisis.

To keep them in the family, as has always been done in the past, is to create a nuisance for the new ones - because these people have nothing to do except criticize. They are ready to get angry, easily annoyed, irritated, ready to fight.

In fact, these are their ways of making the society and the family feel that they are alive, that you cannot just ignore them. They are doing it in a wrong way, but whatever they are doing should be understood with great compassion: they are simply asking for a little attention. For their whole life they have been paid attention to - in the offices, in the shops, in the government, wherever they were they were somebody. And now they are nobody - not even to their own children.

And the problem becomes more complex because the children have no obligation to be bothered with these old people. They have a small life span of their own; soon they will be retired. Before retirement they want to enjoy life - to eat, drink and be merry.

And these old people are sitting there, continuously watching what you are doing; they suddenly become very spiritual, moralistic disciplinarians; they start finding loopholes in everybody's life - and nobody likes it. Nobody wants to be interfered with. Their independence to live their life in their own way is their birthright.

And these old people, to the younger generation, look like idiots for the simple reason that the younger generation knows more, it is better educated. Science is progressing in leaps and bounds.

Every generation comes with the latest developments, canceling all old knowledge as false, as mistaken.

It was not so in the past. Things have changed so dramatically that unless we take the whole into account, we will not be able to solve the problem.

In the past the situation was totally different, diametrically different. There was no gap between the younger and the older generation.

The gap has only been created in this century. In the past, by the time he was six or seven the young child would start following his father - if the father was a carpenter, he would start carrying his wood, his instruments. If the father was a woodcutter, he would go with him to the forest - whatever small help he could give, and whatever small amount he could learn... because profession came by birth. You were going to do the same thing your father did and your forefathers had been doing for centuries, there was no mobility.

It was not that a shoemaker's son would become a carpenter, or a carpenter's son would become a goldsmith - the profession came by birth. So from the very beginning the child knew what he was going to become: he was going to become exactly a replica of his father.

The question of a gap did not arise. And the father always knew more, and the child always knew less - because the only way of knowing was by experience. A carpenter's son had to learn by doing carpentry. Naturally the father was much more knowledgeable about the art, the craftsmanship, and at no time could the son say, "You are out of date."

This is why all the old civilizations respect old people, because the old people always knew more than the young people. Old people expect the same today also, but it is not possible - they have forgotten that the basic root was that the older knew more than the younger. Now the situation is just the reverse: the younger know more than the older.

Your father may have come out of the university thirty years ago. In thirty years, everything has changed. And when you come out of the university, the father cannot expect - should not expect the same respect that was always given to him in the past. The situation is completely reversed. Now the son knows more; the father has to ask the son for his advice because he is coming fresh from the university, bringing the latest research on any subject.

Now, experience is not the only way of learning.

We have created schools, colleges, universities - an alternative way of learning, far quicker.

The way of experience is slower. Now, how quickly you can learn depends on your intelligence.

Libraries are available, books are available, teachers are available. If you are just ready to learn, you can learn so much by the time you come out of the university that it is natural at many points to think: "My father is behaving stupidly, my father is doing things which are out of date - they should not be done."

Your father may be a doctor - he is giving medicines which you know, because you have come from the university, have been abandoned; they are not to be given, they are dangerous. And he is still prescribing them because in his time he learned that those were the right medicines. Such drastic changes have happened.

The younger generation has come for the first time to a higher knowledge level than the older.

If he is considerate, a young person may respect old age - but it is going to be just formal, not real.

In the past it was a real phenomenon, not formal - he really felt it. Now he cannot feel it.

I know from my own experience.

My teachers in the university had passed their examinations, their post graduation, their Ph.D.s twenty years before. In those twenty years everything had changed.

It does not change for the mediocre - because they never go to the university, they are not bothered.

But what has happened in the world of knowledge is that people still go on listening to a man who is teaching everything wrong.

Because I have been interested in books from my very childhood, it was a constant problem and conflict in every class. I could not pay them respect; I said to my teachers, "Formally, I can pay respect to you, but don't expect it in a realistic way - because what you are saying is no longer true.

And to give real respect to you means to accept what you are saying as true.

"I respect truth - that's why I cannot respect you. For twenty years you have not been in contact with the developing knowledge. Once you came out of the university, you never read anything about what has happened in your subject."

And the rate of research in all subjects is such that now big books - particularly in physics, in chemistry, in biochemistry - are not written, because by the time you write a big book of a thousand pages most of it will have been proved wrong. So only periodicals, papers are published. And in that too you have to be very quick because you are not working on the subject alone.

Albert Einstein was asked once, "If you had not discovered the theory of relativity, do you think it would have ever been discovered?"

He said, "Within three weeks - at the most." It was very shocking because people thought that you had to be an Albert Einstein.

He said, "That is true, but there are many Albert Einsteins around the world who are working along the same lines. It is only a question of who comes first, it is a race."

And it was found that another German physicist had already discovered everything about the theory of relativity, but he was late in publishing his paper; otherwise, Albert Einstein would not have been the first man to bring light to the whole subject. This man had discovered everything, he was just a little lazy about writing his paper - but his discovery was earlier than Albert Einstein's.

People are researching small details - not big subjects, because big subjects take a longer time.

People are taking very small pieces of subjects so that they can finish them quickly before anybody else does, and then they can give the paper to the university, or to whoever publishes the paper.

Now there are thousands of universities around the world working on the same subjects, thousands of scholars.

And I found that my teachers, without exception, were twenty or thirty years behind the times. And because I said so, it became a constant trouble. Colleges, universities would not accept me, would not give me admission, and they would not give the reasons. Somehow I had to convince a principal.

I still remember the scene....

This principal was a little crazy. He was a devotee of the mother goddess Kali of Calcutta, and every morning from four o'clock he would start....

He was a very big man. He was a wrestler in his youth, and the rumor was that in the early days the famous wrestler Gama was defeated by him - but by that time Gama was no longer famous.

And this principal had the body of a great wrestler; he was black, looked dangerous. And from four o'clock the whole neighborhood was tortured by him - "JAI KALI." And he had a real loud voice, no loudspeakers needed.

When I was refused from a few places, I thought perhaps this crazy person could be persuaded. So I went early in the morning, five o'clock. He was in his temple - in his beautiful bungalow, he had a small temple, and the whole area was sounding, resounding, "Jai Kali" - victory to Kali.

I went into the temple. He was alone. I also started shouting, "Victory to Kali."

He looked at me. He said, "You are a believer in Kali?"

I said, "Anybody who has any intelligence has to be a believer in Kali. And you are the greatest man I have come across."

He said, "Everybody thinks I am crazy."

I said, "They are all crazy."

He invited me for breakfast. And he said, "What are you doing?"

I said I was studying in a certain college, although I had been expelled from that college.

He said, "You leave all those colleges and come to my college. I will give you all the scholarships, every kind of help, because you are the irst person who has recognized me."

In that way I got entry into his college. But once I was in, he was in trouble - professors started coming to him.... He called me, and he said, "This is not good. It seems you bluffed me."

I said, "This is true, I bluffed you - because there was no other way."

He said, "Then you will have to do one thing: you should not come to the college at all; just come to take your examinations."

I said, "What about my percentage for being present in the lectures?"

He said, "I will take care of it. You will get ninety percent for attendance, but don't come to the college! Because every professor is complaining - it is not a question of one professor; you are torturing everybody. They all say, 'Now we cannot compete with this young man. He has read the latest - and we can see that we are twenty years behind, but we cannot manage to read all that has happened in twenty years. We have to take care of the children and the wife and the whole family.

And he makes us so embarrassed. He brings facts and we know that he is right, but we cannot tolerate this constant embarrassment. And because of him, other students are losing respect. They are all thinking that we know nothing. He has created the atmosphere in the college that all the professors are idiots.'"

I said, "It is true, you have got first-class idiots."

He said, "Listen, I am giving you all the facilities for not coming to the college."

I said, "That's a perfectly good arrangement, but once in a while can I come to your temple just to participate in the worship?"

He said, "Now there is no need to bluff me. I was also surprised that nobody in my whole life had said that I was a great man. Only this young man has recognized my spirituality. You bluffed me once, that's enough."

For two years I did not go to the college, but I was going to the university library, getting ready for my post graduation so I could torture the post-graduate professors.

Today, every young person coming from the university is ahead of the older generation. His lifestyle has changed, his thinking about the world has changed, his values have changed - and the old people are constantly poking their noses into it. So the only way that has been found is to put these old people in houses for the old.

Out of duty, out of guilt, the children go to meet their parents there, but not for love, not for joy. And most often they are neglected; nobody ever goes there.

Their lives are certainly very miserable.

They have lost their jobs, and with their jobs their respect, with their jobs their worth, with their jobs the feeling that they are somebody. Their ego is punctured. They have lost their family.

Their children are grown up and don't want to live with them - because they would like their children to listen to the music of Mozart, and the children are interested in the Beatles. The old people think, "Beatles? - this is not music. This is simply madness, this is not dance!"

The gap is so big that it is unbridgeable.

The solution is sad.

The children are gone, the family is gone.

These old people's houses look sad; they seem to be waiting rooms for the graveyard - dull, depressed, dark.

Certainly there is a great problem, and this problem is going to become bigger every day.

My suggestion is: first, the moment old people retire and their families send them to the houses for the old, their marriages should also be canceled - because love can bring a new spring again. It doesn't matter whether you are fifty or sixty.

They have produced children, they have lived together; now it is time. They are departing from the family, they have departed from the job; they should depart from the marriage also - because their sadness has much to do with the situation of the husband and wife left alone. No friends, no children, no job - and they are tired of each other, they don't seem to take any interest in each other.

It should be optional: if some couple wants to live together, that is up to them, but if couples want to separate they should be respectfully separated so they can start their lives anew - and for the first time without worries. They have their pensions, money is no longer a problem; they can find new partners, new lovers.

And it has been psychologically established that if even an old man falls in love with a woman, his life is lengthened at least by ten years - because love gives juice to your roots, you again become young, you again start looking at flowers, thinking of poetry, thinking of painting, writing love letters.

So the first thing is that love should be given another chance.

And what is the harm? - if you can have two springs in your life....

And now you are more experienced. You will not reproduce children again - that phase is over, you have tortured yourself enough. You will take every care that children are not produced.

And it is a strange phenomenon: the moment somebody falls in love, many things change - his face has a different glow, his eyes become more shiny, he smiles more. He may go and dye his hair - life is taking a new beginning - get a beautiful set of teeth. He has to become a little younger.

To me, love is a kind of chemistry - it is chemistry. Your body starts functioning in a different way.

He will start thinking, if he is a man, to go for morning walks, jogging, swimming, to keep his body fit because now there is a woman. For himself he was not caring about his body, but the woman....

And the woman is going to care about her body at least twenty times more. It will be a beautiful place because then in those old people's houses, people will paint their rooms in lighter colors, not dark and sad, gloomy. They will bring flowers, they will start gardening, may go for a world tour, may go for a long trip in a boat.

Life can be joy.

They can meditate, they can study. Much that they always wanted to do and had no time to do...

now they have time, they have money. They can paint, they can sculpt.

My own idea is that special classes should be opened in every university for these old people who want to learn painting, who want to learn sculpture, who want to learn music, who want to learn dancing. They should enter the university again, a second phase of education.

I have always had the idea that the first phase of education is the preparation for life and the second phase of education should be the preparation for death.

You don't have any preparation for death, no education for death. This is a lopsided situation. A person has lived half his life, and you trained him, educated him. Now the other half should not be left barren like a desert. He should begin again, with the second part of his education. He meditates, he learns creative arts, he dances. He writes poetry, novels.

Whatever he wanted to do in life... now life has respectfully given him time to do everything that has been just a desire in his mind, just a dream. Now it can be turned into a reality.

And he should be freed from all old bondage - marriage, or any other kind of bondages - so he can start new adventures in every direction.

We can make the second part so beautiful that people who are still in the first part will feel jealous, will feel, "How long will it take for me to be retired? - because those old guys are really enjoying it.

We are working, earning; they are simply relaxing, taking sunbaths on different beaches around the world, with different women."

The old people have to defeat the young - there is no need to be defeated. Right now they have taken a very defeatist attitude. They should take it as a challenge: "Now we will prove that old age is not a misery, that it can become a tremendously beautiful experience."

In fact, it has to be more beautiful than the first phase, because the first phase was only a preparation for the second.

And the second is the preparation for the eternal.

Question 2:

The scientific approach and the approach of art certainly have that difference.

Art is intuitive, more of the heart, more subjective, more intimate.

Science is objective, not intimate at all; it has nothing to do with your intuition or your feeling, nothing to do with your heart. In fact, it has nothing to do with you at all.

If you heat water, it will evaporate at one hundred degrees. Who heats the water does not matter - whether it is a man or a woman, whether it is a boy or an old man, a Tibetan lama or a Catholic monk. Water simply follows an objective rule; it is not concerned with the person who is boiling it.

There may not be any person at all; it can be boiled just by pressing a button, a machine can do it.

So that is certainly one of the differences.

Art is a totally different matter.

First, it is not objective; it is something that is born within you. Then you project it onto something outside - it may be a painting.

Vincent Van Gogh painted a single painting for one year continuously. He rejected it hundreds of times. He was painting the sun, and every day he would reject it. And his friends were tired; they said, "Nobody has painted the sun so much - and you have painted so many paintings so beautifully but you go on rejecting them."

I am bringing him in because I want to tell you that he had a certain inner criterion, he had a certain inner painting of the sun. And it was not being projected exactly as he had it in him - that was the rejection; otherwise, there was no question.

That is the difference between a painting and photograph.

A photograph is part of science, a painting is not.

One very rich woman asked Picasso how much he would take to make a portrait of her.

He said, "What do you want - a photograph or a painting?"

She said, "I don't understand the difference. What do you mean?"

He said, "A photograph is a simple thing. You will be sitting there, and I will make a drawing of your face, of your body, on the canvas. I will be simply functioning like a camera. It will be a photograph - although everybody will say it is a painting.

"But if you want a painting then you have to be ready, because in the painting I will not be a camera; in the painting I will be subjectively involved. So the outcome will not be just your picture; it will be a picture processed through my subjectivity. It may not even look similar to you."

The woman said, "I would like a painting because photographs can be done by cameras very easily and cheaply. You are asking one million dollars, so let it be a painting."

It was a painting.

And when the woman looked at it she could not believe what it was.... She said, "Just one thing I want to ask: just tell me where my nose is?"

Picasso said, "I don't know anything about it. Do you ever ask a camera? You just look at the picture and find out. I have processed you through my subjectivity and this is what happens. I will try to find out where your nose has gone, where other things are - they must be somewhere. But I refuse to sell it."

The woman was shocked. She said, "Why?"

He said, "You cannot appreciate a painting. Your question was so stupid. And I have worked so hard on your painting, I have put my whole soul into it, and you are worried about your nose! I am not going to sell it. You need only a photograph, which you can recognize."

A photograph is prose.

A painting is poetry. It becomes mysterious because it passes through man's innermost feelings. It takes a new birth. It is not a reproduction. Another incident....

A man purchased a Picasso painting, and paid a million dollars. But when you pay a million dollars, you want to be certain that it is an authentic Picasso.

One critic said, "Don't be worried, it is an authentic Picasso because I was staying with him when he painted this. I am a witness. You can purchase it without any fear."

He purchased it, but he said, "You will have to come with me to see Picasso because I want to hear it from him that it is an original, authentic."

The critic said, "There is no problem." They went.

The critic was a friend of Picasso, and he said, "You must remember, I was staying with you when you did this painting."

He said, "I remember it perfectly well, but this is not authentic, this is not original. I have done it."

The critic said, "Are you going mad? On one hand you say you have done it, and on the other hand you say it is not authentic, not original. What do you mean?"

Picasso said, "I have painted the same painting before, and it is hanging in a museum. You can go and see - that was authentic, that was original. This painting... I was not getting any new ideas, and there was a customer who wanted a painting. So I simply copied my own painting - but it is a copy.

It does not matter who copies it, whether Picasso copies it or somebody else does, it is a copy. It is not authentic, it is not original. I am not involved in it at all, it is not part of my subjectivity. The first painting is. They are exactly alike, you cannot find any difference - but I made the difference, and the difference is significant."

The scientific approach is about objects, which are common.

Because art is personal, subjective, it can never be common. You may not agree on one painting - two persons may not agree at all that it is beautiful. To somebody it may be ugly, to somebody else it may be beautiful. It is a personal phenomenon.

But I was talking about more fundamental differences.

When I say the science of hypnosis is not the art of hypnosis, my meaning is that the art is always invented, it has no reality in existence. It is invented by the artist.

You can find statues of horses with flying wings. Nowhere in reality are there horses with flying wings - there are wings and there are horses, you can combine them. But that is your invention, not a discovery.

Art is invention. Science is discovery.

Science only discovers that which is already there, and art creates.

Science is never creative; it only finds out whatever is the case. Art creates out of nothing.

Hypnosis is not an art. It is a science; you can discover the principles - they are exactly the same anywhere on the earth. In any age, at any time, in any culture, in any society; those principles are there to be discovered. They are already there; you only have to discover them.

A painting by Picasso or the poetry of Rabindranath or a musical composition by Yehudi Menuhin are not already there. It is Yehudi Menuhin who creates it, it is Rabindranath who composes it - because it is subjective, personal and invented.

You can have different opinions about art, but you cannot have different opinions about science.

Opinions don't matter; science is factual.

Art is fictional. Art has beauty, and tremendous genius is needed to create it. The artist is almost like a god creating the world.

If the story is true that God created the world, then it is an art, then God is an artist, not a scientist - because to be a scientist he will have to discover the world... the world is already there, and then he discovers it.

I want hypnosis to be understood as a science and not as an art for this basic reason: discovery and invention.

Question 3:

The question is not only about conscious love.

The basic thing is consciousness.

A conscious person does everything consciously - love or painting or dancing or making a cup of tea; it does not matter what. Consciousness prevails over all your actions, just as unconsciousness prevails over all your actions. You love unconsciously, you hate unconsciously, you do everything unconsciously.

So the whole problem has to be reduced to these two words: consciousness and unconsciousness.

Love can be a good example.

People say they love, but they don't know what they are saying, they don't know what they mean - because they love a car, they love a woman, they love a certain brand of cigarette, they love the football matches. It is difficult to figure out what they mean by love.

Unconscious love is simply a magnetic pull towards something, irresistible. But you are not going towards the object of love, you are being pulled. You are fast asleep. In your whole life, you are behaving like a somnambulist. There are many people who wake up in the night without waking up; they get up, not wake up. And they will do things, and they will go back to sleep and in the morning they will not remember what they have done.

Many times when people think that their houses are haunted by ghosts, it is just that somebody in the house is a somnambulist who does things in sleep - sets fire to things, throws things away, and goes to his bed and sleeps well. And in the morning he is as puzzled as everybody else - not that he is deceiving anybody, just he has no remembrance.

Your life - which one minute is full of love, the next minute all the love disappears.... Not only that, it can turn into hate; you were ready to die for the person and the next moment you can kill the person.

According to Gurdjieff, and according to those who have awakened, the whole of humanity is asleep, sleepwalkers. Things are happening but you are not the doers because you are not conscious enough to do something.

You fall in love. You cannot say that it is a conscious decision on your part. Perhaps the woman's hair is just like your mother's hair. Every male child loves his mother, that is his first love object.

The baby girl loves her father, that is her first love object. And slowly slowly, the father and mother become imprints - the mother becomes imprinted on the boy, the father becomes imprinted on the girl.

And when the boy falls in love with a woman, his unconscious mind signals him, "Here comes your mother." You don't hear it. And nobody can be exactly like your mother, so there can only be some similarity - the way the woman walks, the face of the woman, the eyes of the woman, the way she talks. Anything can trigger in you the old figure waiting in your unconscious, deep in the well inside you.

The same happens to the girl - the way the man walks, just the sound of his boots, may remind her of her father. Any small thing can trigger it, and suddenly you feel a great love arising in you. But because it is only fragmentary, it cannot be very lasting. It can be lasting if you don't ever meet - then you will never come to know about the other fragments. So the most successful lovers in the world are those who never meet. They make the most romantic, beautiful stories - no quarrel, no nagging, no fighting. And they never come to find out that "This is not the woman made for me and I am not the man made for this woman" - they never come close enough to know this.

But unfortunately, most lovers get married.

That is the most unfortunate accident in life.

That destroys the whole beauty; otherwise they would have been Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad, Soni and Mahival - great lovers of history. But all those great lovers never met, never lived in a one-room apartment in Bombay.

Once two persons are together, then other fragments of their lives are bound to surface. You have to become acquainted with the whole woman you have got; the woman has to become acquainted with the whole man she has got - and there is the trouble, because then slowly you find that the fragment you love is very small in comparison to the fragments you hate. Now just the color of the hair does not help, nor the face nor the eyes nor the nose - nothing helps.

In the West, women have been asking me - -because their love lives are not going well.... Nobody's love life is going well, it simply does not happen. So those poor women were asking if they should get their nose fixed by a plastic surgeon - because the husband is continuously talking about her nose, that it looks Jewish. And he is so much against Jews - the moment he sees the nose, all love disappears. The poor woman is ready to fix her nose.

I said, "Don't unnecessarily torture your nose. He will find something else, this is just an excuse.

Right now he may become accustomed to this nose, but if you fix it then every time he sees you he will see that this woman has a fixed nose, she is really a Jew behind the nose. It will be very difficult for him to forget this. And the money is going from his pocket to fix your nose. You just leave it as it is."

In fact, for centuries a wrong concept has been prevalent: that lovers should like each other in every possible way. That is absurd. Lovers should make it clear - "These are the things I don't like." Both should make it clear, that "These are the things I don't like, and these are the things I love." And there is no need to quarrel about it every day because that quarrel is not going to change anything.

They have to learn to accept that which they don't like - a kind of co-existence, a tolerance. This is for the lovers who are not awake.

A conscious love is a totally different thing. It has nothing to do with love as such, it has something to do with meditation, which makes you conscious. And as you become more and more conscious, you become aware of many things. One: that it is not the object of love that is important. It is your loving quality, your lovingness that is important, because you are so full of love you would like to share it. And the sharing has to be unconditional. You cannot say, "I will not share if your nose is Jewish" - what has sharing to do with noses?

Conscious love changes the whole situation.

Unconscious love is centered on the object of love.

Conscious love is centered in oneself, it is your lovingness.

Unconscious love is always addressed to one person; hence there is always jealousy - because the other person also knows that unconscious love is always centered on one person, that it cannot be shared. If you start loving somebody else, that means you have stopped loving the first person.

That's the jealousy, the continuous fear that your lover may start loving somebody else - as if love is a quantity.

Conscious love is a quality, not quantity.

It is more like friendliness - deeper, higher, with more fragrance, but similar to friendliness. You can be friendly to many people, there is no question of jealousy. It does not matter that you are friendly to five persons or ten persons or ten thousand persons; nobody will feel deprived because you love so many people and his share is going to be less and less. On the contrary, as you are able to love more people, your quality of love becomes mountainous. So whoever you love gets more love if your love is shared by many people. It dies if it is narrowed. It becomes livelier if it is spread over a vast area - the bigger the area, the deeper are its roots.

Consciousness gives everything a transformation. Your love is no more addressed to anybody in particular. It does not mean that you stop loving. It simply means you become love, you are love, your very being is love, your breathing is love, your heartbeats are love. Awake you are love, asleep you are love.

And the same is true about everything else - your understanding, your intelligence, everything goes through the same change. You become the center of the whole existence, the center of the cyclone, and everything radiates from you and reaches anybody who is able to receive it.

It is not a question of loving someone for certain reasons; it is love simply out of abundance - you have so much that you have to share it, you have to radiate it. And whoever receives it, you are grateful to the person.

Conscious love makes you a doer, a being, a soul.

In unconscious love, you are just an emptiness - dark and dismal, hungry and thirsty. In unconscious love, you are a beggar. You are begging for love, because love is nourishment.

And this is hilarious: You are begging for love, the other person, whom you are in love with is also begging for love - two beggars holding their begging bowls before each other, and both begging bowls are empty.

Conscious love makes you an emperor. You don't beg; you simply give. And you give because now you see that the more you give the more you have. So whoever accepts your love, you are grateful to the person.

The whole earth can become full of love, an ocean of love, but only with conscious people.

With unconscious people, it is just a disgusting place, nauseating... everybody pretending to be loving, and nobody is loving. Everybody is trying to exploit the other, and the other is doing the same to him. And because both are empty, sooner or later they are going to start quarreling: that "You deceived me," that "You cheated me," that "You betrayed me," that "You are not the woman you pretended to be," that "You are not the man you were showing yourself to be." But with beggars this is going to be the problem.

I have heard about a beggar who used to sit by the side of a bridge. One day he asked, "Give something to a blind, helpless old man."

So they gave him one rupee. He looked at the rupee and he said, "This is not real, this is false."

They said, "But you are blind!"

He said, "I am not blind. The man who usually sits here is blind. Today he has gone to see a film.

He is my friend, I am just sitting in his place."

But everybody in this whole world of unconsciousness is a beggar, trying in every possible way to snatch some love, some attention, some sympathy - because love is a necessary nourishment.

Without love, you cannot live; just as food is necessary for the body, love is necessary for the soul.

And everybody is suffering without love, because without love your souls are dying.

But what we are doing is not right.

The right way is to bring consciousness to yourself.

And from consciousness there will be many revolutions in many dimensions. Love will be one of the most important dimensions, and you will find the golden key of how to get love from the whole existence.

The secret is: whatever you have, give it, share it.

Once the universe knows that you have become a sharer, then all the sources of the universe become available to you. They are inexhaustible.

Okay, Maneesha.