Ordinary love and the love of a buddha

The first question:

Question 1:

Love is not an act; it is not something that you do. If you do it, it is not love. No doing is involved in love; it is a state of being, not an act. No one can do anything continuously for twenty-four hours. If you are doing love, then of course you cannot do it for twenty-four hours. With any act you will get tired; with any act you get bored. And then, after any act, you have to relax. So if you are doing love, you will have to relax into hate, because you can relax only into the opposite.

That is why our love is always mixed with hatred. You love this moment, and the next moment you hate the same person. The same person becomes the object of both love and hate; that is the conflict of lovers. Because your love is an act, that is why there is this misery.

So the first thing to be understood is that love is not an act; you cannot do it. You can be in love, but you cannot "do" love. Doing is absurd. But other things are also implied. It is not an effort because if it were an effort you would get tired. It is a state of mind.

And do not think in terms of relationship, think in terms of states of mind. If you are in love, this is a state of mind. This state of mind may be focused on one person or it may be unfocused - on the whole. When it is focused on one person, it is known as love. When it becomes unfocused, it becomes prayer. Then you are just in love - not with someone, but just in love, as you are breathing.

If breathing were an effort you would get tired of it, and you would have to relax and then you would die. If it were an effort, then at some time you might forget to do it and then you would die. Love is just like breathing: it is a higher plane of breathing. If you do not breathe, your body will die. If you are not in love, your spirit cannot be born.

So take love as a breathing of the soul. When you are in love your soul becomes vital, alive, just like it is breathing. But think in this way. If I say to you, "Only breathe when you are near me and do not breathe anywhere else," then you will die. And the next time you will be near me you will be just dead and you will not even be able to breathe near me.

That has happened with love. We possess - the love object is possessed and the lover says, "Don't love anybody else. Only love me." Then the love is atrophied and then the lover cannot love, it becomes impossible. It doesn't mean that you have to love everyone, but you have to be in a loving state of mind. It is just like breathing: even if your enemy is there you will breathe.

That is the meaning of Jesus' saying, "Love your enemy." It has been a problem for Christianity, how to understand this saying, "Love your enemy." It seems contradictory. But if loving is not an act, if it is just a state of mind, then there is no question of enemy or friend. You are in love.

Look at it from the other side. There are persons who are continuously in hate, and whenever they try to show love they have to make much effort. Their love is an effort because their continuous state of mind is hate. That is why effort is needed. There are persons who are continuously sad; then their laughter is an effort. They have to fight against themselves. Then their laughter becomes a painted laughter - just false, imposed, put together, not coming from deep within but just arranged, no spontaneity in it but just artificial.

There are persons who are continuously in anger - not angry at something or someone, just angry.

Then love becomes an effort. On the other hand, if love is your state of mind, anger will be an effort.

You can do it, but you cannot be angry. Then you will have to create it artificially; it will be false.

If a buddha tries to be angry, much effort will be needed, and then too it will be false. And only those who do not know him can be deceived. Those who know him, they know that that anger is false, just painted, created. It is not coming from within; that is impossible. A Buddha, a Jesus, cannot hate.

Then effort is needed. If they want to show hatred, then they will have to do it.

But you do not need any effort to be hateful; you need effort to be loving. Change the state of mind.

How to change the state of mind? How to be loving? And it is not a question of time, of how to be loving twenty-four hours a day. This is absurd - this question is absurd.

It is not a question of time. If you can be loving in a single moment that is enough, because you never have two moments together. Only one moment is given. When one is lost, a second is given.

You have only one moment always with you. If you know how to be loving in one single moment, you know the secret. You need not think about twenty-four hours, or of the whole life.

Only a single moment of love and you know how to fill a moment with love. Then the second moment will be given to you, and you can fill that second moment also with love. So remember, it is not a question of time. There is a question only of a single moment, and a single moment is not part of time. A single moment is not a process; a single moment is just now.

Once you know how to enter a single moment with love, you have entered eternity: time is no more.

A buddha lives in the now; you live in time. Time means thinking of the past, thinking of the future.

And while you are thinking of the past and of the future, the present is lost.

You are engaged with the future and the past, and the present is being lost - and the present is the only existence. The past is no more and the future has yet to be: they both are not, they are non-existential. This very moment, this single atomic moment, is the only existence - here and now.

If you know to be loving, you know the secret. And you will never be given two moments together, so you need not bother about time.

A single moment is always - and it is always in the shape of now. Remember, there are not really two types of "nows." This single moment is the same; it doesn't differ in any way from the moment that has gone before it, and it doesn't differ in any way from the moment that is going to follow it.

This atomic now is always the same. That is why Eckhart says, "It is not that time passes. Time remains the same. Rather, we go on passing." Pure time remains the same; we go on passing. So do not think about twenty-four hours, and then you need not think of the present moment.

One thing more. Thinking needs time; living doesn't need time. You cannot think in this very moment.

In this very moment, if you want to be you will have to cease thinking, because thinking is basically concerned with either the past or the future. Of what can you think in the present? The moment you think, it has become the past.

A flower is there - you say this is a beautiful flower. This saying is now no more in the present; it has become the past. When you come to grasp something in thinking, it has become the past. In the present you can be, but you cannot think. You can be with the flower, but you cannot think about it. Thinking needs time.

So in another way, thinking is time. If you do not think, there is no time. That is why in meditation you feel a timelessness. That is why in love you feel a timelessness. Love is not thinking, it is a cessation of thought. You are! When you are with your beloved, you are not thinking about love, you are not thinking about the beloved. You are not thinking at all. And if you are thinking, then you are not with your beloved, you are somewhere else. Thinking means absence from the now... you are not there.

That is why those who are too much obsessed with thinking cannot love, because even when they are there, even if they reach to the original divine source, even if they meet God, they will go on thinking about him and they will miss him completely. You can go on thinking about and about and about, but it is never the fact.

A moment of love is a timeless moment. Then there is no question of thinking how to love twenty- four hours. You never think about how to live twenty-four hours, how to be alive twenty-four hours.

Either you are alive or you are not. So the basic thing to be understood is not time, but now - how to be here and now in a state of love.

Why is there hate? When you feel hatred, go to the cause of it. Only then can love flower. When do you feel hatred? When you feel that your existence, your life, is in danger, when you feel that your existence can be annihilated, suddenly hate surges in you. When you feel that you can be destroyed, you start destroying others. That is a safety measure. It is just a part of you that is struggling for survival. Whenever you feel that your existence is in danger, you are filled with hatred.

So unless you come to feel that your existence cannot be in danger, that it is impossible to annihilate you, you cannot be filled with love. A Jesus can be in love because he knows something which is deathless. You cannot be in love because you know only that which belongs to death. And every moment death is there; every moment you are afraid. How can you love when you are afraid? Love cannot exist with fear. And fear is there, so you can only create a make-believe that you love.

And again, your love is really nothing but a safety measure. You love so that you will not fear.

Whenever you believe that you are in love, you are less afraid. For the moment you can forget death. An illusion is created in which you can feel that you are accepted by the existence; you are not denied, rejected. That is why there is so much need of love and of being loved.

Whenever you are being loved by someone, you create around you an illusion that you are needed by the existence - at least by someone. You are needed by someone, so you are not just futile. You are not just accidental - you are needed somewhere. Without you the existence will miss something.

That gives you a feeling of well-being. You feel a purpose, a destiny, a meaning, a worthiness.

When you are not loved by anyone you feel rejected, you feel denied, you feel meaningless. Then you feel there is no purpose, no destiny. If no one loves you and you die, there will be no feeling of your absence, it will not be felt that you are no more. No one will feel that you were, and now you are no more.

Love gives you the feeling of being needed. That is why in love one becomes or feels less afraid.

Whenever love is not there you become more fearful, and in fear, as a protection, you become hateful. Hate is a protection. You are afraid of being destroyed; you become destructive.

In love, you feel that you are accepted, welcome - not an uninvited guest, but rather that you are invited, welcome, waited for, received, that the existence is happy that you are. The one who loves you becomes the representative of the whole existence. But this love is basically fear-based. You are protecting against fear, against death, against the inhuman indifference of existence.

Really, existence is indifferent - at least on the surface. The sun, the sea, the stars, the earth, they are totally indifferent to you; no one is worried about you. And it is apparently clear that you are not needed. Without you everything will be as good as it is with you; nothing will be lost. Look at the existence superficially: no one, nothing, cares about you. They may not even be aware of you. The stars are not aware of you; even the earth which you call Mother is not aware of you. And when you die, the earth will not be sad. Nothing will have changed; things will be as they are and as they always have been. With you or without you, there is no difference.

You feel you are just an accident. You were not needed; uninvited you have come... just a chance product. This creates fear. This is what Kierkegaard calls "anguish." There is a subtle continuous fear - you are not needed.

When someone loves you, you feel that a different dimension has come into existence. Now at least one person will be there who will weep, who will feel sorry, who will be sad. There will be tears; you will be needed. At least there will be one person who will always feel your absence if you are not. At least for one you have gained a destiny, a purpose.

That is why there is so much need of love. And if you are not loved, you are uprooted. But this love is not the love I am talking about. This is a relationship and a mutual creation of illusion - a mutual illusion: "I need you, you need me. I give you this illusion that without you my purpose, my meaning, my life will be lost; you give me this illusion that without me everything will be lost. So we both are helping each other to be in an illusion. We are creating one separate, private existence in which we become meaningful, in which the whole indifference of this vast space is forgotten."

Two lovers live in each other; they have created a private world. That is why love needs so much privacy. If you are not in privacy, the world goes on impinging upon you. It goes on telling you that whatsoever you are doing is just a dream, and this is a mutual illusion. Love needs privacy because then the whole world is forgotten. Only two lovers exist, and the indifference, the total indifference of existence, is forgotten. You feel loved, welcomed. Without you nothing will be the same. At least in this private world nothing will be the same without you.Life is meaningful.

I am not talking about this love. This is really illusory. It is a cultivated illusion, and man is so weak that he cannot live without this illusion. Those who can, they live without this illusion. A buddha can live without this illusion, and then he will not create it.

When it becomes possible to live illusion-lessly - to live without illusion - a second, a different dimension of love comes into being. It is not that one person needs you. It is coming to understand, to realize that you are not different from this existence which looks so indifferent. You are part of it, organically one with it. And if a tree is flowering, it is not separate from you. You have flowered in the tree and the tree has become conscious in you.

The sea and the sand and the stars, they are one with you. You are not an island, you are organically one with this universe. The whole universe is within you and the whole of you is in this universe.

Unless you come to know it and feel it and realize it, you will not get that love which is a state of mind.

If you come to realize this, you will not need to create a private illusion that someone loves you.

Then there is meaning, and if no one loves you, no meaning is lost. Then you are not afraid at all because even death will not annihilate you. It may annihilate the form, it may annihilate the body, but it cannot annihilate you because you are the existence.

This is what happens in meditation. This is for what meditation is meant. In it you become a part, an opening. You come to feel, "Existence and I are one." Then you are welcomed, and there is no fear and there is no death. Then love flows from you. Then love is not an effort - you cannot do anything except love. Then it is like breathing. Deep inside you breathe love; in and out you breathe love.

This love grows into devotion. Then ultimately you will even forget, it just as you forget your breathing.

When do you remember your breathing? Have you observed? You remember only when something is wrong. When you feel any difficulty, then you know that you have been breathing; otherwise there is no need even to be aware of it. And if you are aware of your breathing, that shows that something is wrong with your breathing process. There is no need of being aware of the breathing process.

Silently it goes on.

So when you are aware of your love, the love that is a state of mind, it means that something is still wrong. By and by even that awareness is lost. You simply breathe love in and out. You have forgotten everything, even that you love. Then it has become devotion. That is the ultimate peak, the ultimate possibility - you may call it anything.

Love can become devotion only when this awareness is lost, forgotten. It doesn't mean that you have become unconscious, it only means that the process has become so silent that there is no noise around it. You are not unconscious of it, but you are not conscious of it either. It has become so natural. It is there, but it does not create any disturbance inside; it has become so harmonious.

So remember, when I am talking about love, I am not talking about your love. But if you try to understand your love, it will become a step toward growing into a different kind of love. So I am not against your love. I am simply stating the fact that if your love is fear-based, it is just ordinary, animal love. And no derogation, no condemnation is implied; it is simply a fact.

Man is afraid. He needs someone who gives him the feeling that he is welcomed, he need not be afraid. At least with one person you need not be filled with fear. This is good as far as it goes, but this is not what Buddha or Jesus called love. They called love a state of mind, not a relationship. So go beyond relationship, and by and by just be loving. First you will not be capable of it unless you move into meditation. Unless you come to know the deathless within, unless you come to know a deep unity between the inner and the outer, unless you feel that you are existence, it will be difficult.

So these techniques of meditation are just to help you grow from relationship into a state of mind.

And do not think of time at all, time is irrelevant for love.

The second question:

Question 2:

Many basic points are to be understood. One, you are your body. Right now you are just your body and nothing else. You may have notions about the soul, the ATMAN, etc - those are simply notions, just ideas.As you are right now you are just a body. And do not go on deceiving yourself that you are the deathless soul, the immortal atman. Do not go on deceiving yourself. That is just an idea, and that idea too is fear-based.

You do not know whether the soul exists or not; you have never penetrated to the innermost core where one realizes the deathless. You have only heard about it, and you cling to the idea because you are afraid of death. You know death is real, so you go on wishing and believing that something in you must be there which is deathless. This is a wish fulfillment.

I am not saying that there is no soul, I am not saying that there is nothing which is deathless. No, I am not saying that. But as far as you are concerned, you are just the body with an idea that there is a soul which is deathless. This is just in the mind, and this too you have collected because of the fear. That is why the weaker you will become, the older, the more you will become a believer in the immortal soul and God. Then you will go to the church or the temple or the mosque. If you go to the mosque or the church or the temple, you will find that old men, just on the verge of death, are gathered there.

Youth is basically atheistic; always this has been so. The younger you are, the less theistic. The younger you are, the more you are an unbeliever. Why? Because you are still strong and you feel less fear, and you are still ignorant of death. Death is far away somewhere, it happens only to others.

It happens only to others, not to you. But the older you grow, you will by and by begin to feel that now it is going to happen to you also.

Death comes near, and one begins to believe. So all beliefs are fear-based. All beliefs are fear- based! And one who believes because of fear is really deceiving himself. You are the body right now - this is a fact. You do not know anything about the deathless, you know only about the "deathful." But the deathless is there; you can know it. Believing won't do, only knowing can help.

You can realize it, but just ideas are of no use unless they become a concrete experience.

So do not be deceived by ideas and do not take ideas and beliefs for experiences. That is why tantra always starts with the body - because that is a fact. You have to start from the body because you are in the body. And that too is not right. When I say you are in the body, that too is not right. As far as you are concerned you ARE the body, not IN the body. You do not know anything about what is in the body, you know only the body. That experience of something beyond body is still far away.

If you go to metaphysicians, to theologians, they are going to start with the soul. But tantra is absolutely scientific. It starts from where you are, not from where you can be. Starting from where you can be is absurd - you cannot start from where you can be, you can start only from where you are.

Tantra has no condemnation against the body. Tantra is a total acceptance of things as they are.

Christian theologians, and those of other religions also, are condemnatory, against the body. They create a dualism, a dichotomy, that you are two. And the body is the enemy, the evil for them, so fight with it. This duality is basically wrong, and this duality will divide your mind into two and will create a split personality.

Religions have helped the human mind to be schizophrenic. Any division will divide you deeply, and you will become two, or you will become many. And everyone is a crowd of many divisions, with no organic unity and with no center. You are not an individual as far as the meaning of the word is concerned. The word means indivisible: 'individual' means indivisible. But you are just divided into many things.

Not only are your mind and your body divided, your soul and your body are divided also. The nonsense has gone so deep that even the body is divided: the lower body is evil and the upper body is good. It is stupid, but it is there. Even you yourself cannot feel at ease with your lower body. Some uneasiness creeps in. There is division and division and division...

Tantra accepts everything. Whatsoever is, is accepted wholeheartedly. That is why tantra could accept sex totally. For five thousand years tantra has been the only tradition which has accepted sex totally, the only one all over the world. Why? Because sex is the point where you are, and any movement is going to be from the point where you are.

You are at the sex center; your energy is at the sex center. And from that point it has to move up, far beyond. If you reject the center itself, then you can go on deceiving yourself that you are moving, but you cannot move. Then you are rejecting the only point from where movement is possible. So tantra accepts the body, accepts sex, accepts everything. And tantra says, wisdom accepts everything and transforms it; only ignorance rejects. Only ignorance rejects - wisdom accepts everything. Even a poison can become a medicine, but only through wisdom.

The body can become a vehicle to that which is beyond body, and sex energy can become a spiritual force. And remember, when you ask, "what are the reasons that the body is given so much importance in tantra?" why do you ask? Why?

You are born as a body; you live as a body; you become ill as a body; you are treated, given medicine, helped, made whole and healthy, as a body. You become young as a body, you will become old as a body, you will die as a body. Your whole life is body-centered - centered around the body. You will love someone. You will make love to someone and you will create other bodies; you will reproduce other bodies.

What are you doing the whole life? Preserving yourself. What are you preserving with food, with water, with shelter? The body is preserved. What are you doing by reproducing children? The body is being reproduced. The whole life, ninety-nine point nine percent, is body-oriented. You can go beyond, but that journey has to be through the body, by the body, and you have to use the body. But why do you ask? Because the body is just the outer thing. Deep down the body is a symbol of sex.

So those traditions which are against sex will be against the body. Those traditions which are not against sex can only be friendly toward the body. Tantra is absolutely friendly, and tantra says that the body is sacred, holy. For tantra, to condemn the body is a sacrilege. To say that the body is impure or to say that the body is sin is nonsense for tantra - a very poisonous teaching. Tantra accepts the body - not only accepts it, but says that the body is holy, pure, innocent. You can use it and you can make it a vehicle, a medium, to go beyond! It helps even in going beyond.

But if you start fighting with body, you are lost. If you start fighting with it, you will become more and more diseased. And if you go on fighting with it, you will miss an opportunity. Fighting is negative; tantra is a positive transformation. Do not fight with it - there is no need. It is as if you are sitting in a car and you start fighting with the car. Then you cannot move because you are fighting with the vehicle - which has to be used, not fought against. And you will destroy the vehicle by your fighting, and then it will be more and more difficult to move.

The body is a beautiful vehicle - very mysterious, very complex. Use it, do not fight with it. Help it. The moment you go against it you are going against yourself. It is as if a man wants to reach somewhere, but he fights with his own legs and cuts them. Tantra says, know the body and know the secrets of it. Know the energies of it and know how those energies can be transformed - how they can be moved and turned into different dimensions.

For example, take sex, which is the basic energy in the body. Ordinarily, sex energy is just used for reproduction. One body creates another body and it goes on. The biological utility of sex energy is only in reproduction. But that is only one of the uses, and the lowest. No condemnation is implied, but it is the lowest. The same energy can do other creative acts also. Reproduction is a basic creative act - you create something. That is why a woman feels a subtle well-being when she becomes a mother: she has created something.

Psychologists say that because man cannot reproduce like woman, because man cannot become a mother, he feels a certain unease, and to destroy that unease or to overcome it he goes on creating other things. He will paint, he will do something in which he becomes a creator, in which he becomes a mother. That is one of the reasons why women are less creative and men are more creative - because women have a natural dimension in which to be creative. They can become mothers and they can have a fulfillment, an easy fulfillment. A deep biological creativity is felt.

But man lacks that and feels somewhere an imbalance. He wants to create, so he will substitute something. He will paint, he will sing, he will dance. He will do something in which he also becomes a mother. Sex energy, psychologists say now - and tantra has always been saying that - is always the source of all creation. So it happens that if a painter is really deep in his creation, he may forget sex completely. When a poet is very involved with his poetry, he will forget sex completely. He need not force any BRAHMACHARYA, any celibacy, upon himself.

Only monks, non-creative monks living in a monastery, need to force brahmacharya - because if you are creative, the same energy which moves through sex moves into creation. You can forget it completely, and there is no need to make any effort to forget it because that is impossible. You cannot make any effort to forget anything, because the very effort will make you remember it again and again. That is futile - in fact, suicidal. You cannot try to forget anything.

That is why those who force themselves to be brahmacharis ,celibates, become simply cerebral sex perverts. Then sex revolves in the mind: the whole thing goes on in the mind - not in the body, but in the mind. And that is worse, because then the mind becomes totally mad. Any creativity will help sex to disappear.

Tantra says, if you move into meditation sex will disappear completely; it can disappear completely.

The whole energy is being absorbed at higher centers - and your body has many centers. Sex is the lowest center, and man exists at the lowest center. The more energy moves higher, the more the higher centers begin to flower. When the same energy comes to the heart, then it becomes love.

When the same energy comes higher still, new dimensions and new experiences begin to flower.

And when the same energy is at the highest, at the last peak in your body, it has reached that which tantra calls SAHASRAR - the last chakra in the head.

Sex is the lowest chakra and sahasrar is the highest, and between these two the sex energy moves.

It can be released from the sex center. When it is released from the sex center you become a cause to reproduce someone else. When the same energy is released from the sahasrar, from the head into the cosmos, you give a new birth to yourself. It is also reproduction, but not biologically. Then it is spiritually a reproduction; then you are reborn. In India we used to call such a person "twice-born"

- DWIJ. Now he has given himself a new birth. The same energy has moved.

Tantra has no condemnations, only secret techniques for how to transform. That is why tantra talks so much about the body - it is needed. The body has to be understood, and you can start only from where you are.

The third question:

Question 3:

Love becomes attachment because there is no love. You were just playing, deceiving yourself. The attachment is the reality; the love was just a foreplay. So whenever you fall in love, sooner or later you discover you have become an instrument - and then the whole misery begins. What is the mechanism? Why does it happen?

Just a few days ago a man came to me and he was feeling very guilty. He said, "I loved a woman. I loved her very much. The day she died I was weeping and crying, but suddenly I became aware of a certain freedom within me, as if some burden had left me. I felt a deep breath, as if I had become free."

That moment he became aware of a second layer of his feeling. Outwardly he was weeping and crying and saying, "I cannot live without her. Now it will be impossible, or the life will be just like death. But deep down," he said, "I became aware that I am feeling very good, that now I am free."

A third layer began to feel guilt. It said to him, "What are you doing?" And the dead body was lying there just before him, he said to me, and he began to feel a great deal of guilt. He said to me, "Help me. What has happened to my mind? Have I betrayed her so soon?"

Nothing has happened; no one has betrayed. When love becomes attachment, it becomes a burden, a bondage. But why does love become an attachment? The first thing to be understood is that if love becomes an attachment, you were just in an illusion that it was love. You were just playing with yourself and thinking that this was love. Really, you were in need of attachment. And if you go still deeper, you will find that you were also in need of becoming a slave.

There is a subtle fear of freedom, and everyone wants to be a slave. Everyone, of course, talks about freedom, but no one has the courage to be really free, because when you are really free you are alone. If you have the courage to be alone, then only can you be free.

But no one is courageous enough to be alone. You need someone. Why do you need someone? You are afraid of your own loneliness. You become bored with yourself. And really, when you are lonely, nothing seems meaningful. With someone you are occupied, and you create artificial meanings around you.

You cannot live for yourself, so you start to live for someone else. And the same is the case with the someone else also: he, or she, cannot live alone, so he is in search to find someone. Two persons who are afraid of their own loneliness come together and they start a play - a play of love. But deep down they are searching for attachment, commitment, bondage.

So sooner or later, whatsoever you desire happens. This is one of the most unfortunate things in this world. Whatsoever you desire comes to happen. You will get it sooner or later and the foreplay will disappear. When its function is done, it will disappear. When you have become a wife and husband, slaves to each other, when marriage has happened, love will disappear because love was just an illusion in which two persons could become slaves to each other.

Directly you cannot ask for slavery; it is too humiliating. And directly you cannot say to someone, "Become my slave."He will revolt. Nor can you say, "I want to become a slave to you," so you say, "I cannot live without you." But the meaning is there; it is the same. And when this - the real desire - is fulfilled, love disappears. Then you feel bondage, slavery, and then you start struggling to become free.

Remember this. It is one of the paradoxes of the mind: whatsoever you get you will get bored with, and whatsoever you do not get you will long for. When you are alone, you will long for some slavery, some bondage. When you are in bondage, you will begin to long for freedom. Really, only slaves long for freedom, and free people try again to be slaves. The mind goes on like a pendulum, moving from one extreme to the other.

Love doesn't become attachment. Attachment was the need; love was just a bait. You were in search of a fish named attachment: love was just a bait to catch the fish. When the fish is caught, the bait is thrown. Remember this, and whenever you are doing something, go deep within yourself to find out the basic cause.

If there is real love, it will never become attachment. What is the mechanism for love to become attachment? The moment you say to your lover or beloved, "Love only me," you have started possessing. And the moment you possess someone you have insulted him deeply, because you have made him into a thing.

When I possess you, you are not a person then, but just one more item amongst my furniture - a thing. Then I use you, and you are my thing, my possession, so I won't allow anyone else to use you. It is a bargain in which I am possessed by you, and you make me a thing. It is the bargain that now no one else can use you. Both partners feel bound and enslaved. I make a slave of you, then you in return make a slave of me.

Then the struggle starts. I want to be a free person, and still I want you to be possessed by me; you want to retain your freedom and still possess me - this is the struggle. If I possess you, I will be possessed by you. If I do not want to be possessed by you, I should not possess you.

Possession should not come in between. We must remain individuals and we must move as independent, free consciousnesses. We can come together, we can merge into each other, but no one possesses. Then there is no bondage and then there is no attachment.

Attachment is one of the ugliest things. And when I say ugliest, I do not mean only religiously, I mean aesthetically also. When you are attached, you have lost your loneliness, your aloneness: you have lost everything. Just to feel good that someone needs you and someone is with you, you have lost everything, you have lost yourself.

But the trick is that you try to be independent and you make the other the possession - and the other is doing the same. So do not possess if you do not want to be possessed.

Jesus said somewhere, "Judge ye not so that ye should not be judged." It is the same: "Possess not so that ye should not be possessed." Do not make anyone a slave; otherwise you will become a slave.

So-called masters are always slaves of their own slaves. You cannot become a master of some one without becoming a slave - that is impossible.

You can only be a master when no one is a slave to you. This seems paradoxical, because when I say you can only be a master when no one is a slave to you, you will say, "Then what is the mastery?

How am I a master when no one is a slave to me?" But I say only then are you a master. Then no one is a slave to you and no one will try to make a slave out of you.

To love freedom, to try to be free, means basically that you have come to a deep understanding of yourself. Now you know that you are enough unto yourself. You can share with someone, but you are not dependent. I can share myself with someone. I can share my love, I can share my happiness, I can share my bliss, my silence, with someone. But that is a sharing, not a dependence.

If no one is there, I will be just as happy, just as blissful. If someone is there, that is also good and I can share.

When you realize your inner consciousness, your center, only then will love not become an attachment. If you do not know your inner center, love will become an attachment. If you know your inner center, love will become devotion. But you must first be there to love, and you are not.

Buddha was passing trough a village. One young man came to him and said, "Teach me something:

how can I serve others?" Buddha laughed at him and said, "First be. Forget others. First be yourself and then everything will follow."

Right now you are not. When you say, "When I love someone it becomes an attachment," you are saying you are not, so whatsoever you do goes wrong because the doer is absent. The inner point of awareness is not there, so whatsoever you do goes wrong. First BE, and then you can share your being. And that sharing will be love. Before that, whatsoever you do will become an attachment.

And lastly: if you are struggling against attachment, you have taken a wrong turn. You can struggle.

So many monks, recluses, sannyasins are doing that. They feel that they are attached to their house, to their property, to their wives, to their children, and they feel caged, imprisoned. They escape, they leave their homes, they leave their wives, they leave their children and possessions, and they become beggars and escape to a forest, to a loneliness. But go and observe them. They will become attached to their new surroundings.

I was visiting a friend who was a recluse living under a tree in a deep forest, but there were other ascetics also. One day it happened that I was staying with this recluse under his tree, and a new seeker came while my friend was absent. He had gone to the river to take a bath. Under his tree the new sannyasin started meditating.

The man came back from the river, and he pushed that new man away from the tree and said, "This is my tree. You go and find another, somewhere else. No one can sit under my tree." And this man had left his house, his wife, his children. Now the tree had become a possession - you cannot meditate under his tree.

You cannot escape so easily from attachment. It will take new forms, new shapes. You will be deceived, but this will be there. So do not fight with attachment, just try to understand why it is there.

And then know the deep cause: because you are not, this attachment is there.

Inside, you your own self is so much absent that you try to cling to anything in order to feel safe. You are not rooted, so you try to make anything your roots. When you are rooted in your self, when you know who you are, what this being is which is in you and what this consciousness is which is in you, then you will not cling to anyone.

That doesn't mean you will not love. Really, only then can you love because then sharing is possible - and with no conditions, with no expectations. You simply share because you have an abundance, because you have so much it is overflowing.

This overflowing of yourself is love. And when this overflowing becomes a flood, when by your own overflowing the whole universe is filled and your love touches the stars, in your love the earth feels good and in your love the whole universe is bathed, then it is devotion.