Darshan 27 October 1976

[A sannyasin says he feels divided between following his feelings and making more effort.] You simply follow your feelings. And who has said to you that it is easy to follow the feelings? It is the most difficult thing in the world, otherwise so many people would have been following their feelings; nobody follows. Priests have been teaching people that it is very easy to follow your feelings - it is not. I never see a person who has been following his feelings! If it were really easy you would come across many more people who follow their feelings; you don't come across them. Rarely it happens that a person is feeling-oriented and fully in tune with his feelings and his heart. People try to fight - that is easier.

To follow the feeling is the most arduous thing in the world, because when you want to follow your feeling you become an individual - that is the difficulty. You become rebellious, that is the difficulty.

Then you don't want to listen to anybody else's commandments. You don't want anything to do with scriptures, traditions, religions, churches - you want to follow your feelings.

Churches exist by confusing you. Unless they confuse you they cannot exist. The whole trade of the priest is based on confusing people about their feelings. First they confuse you; when you are confused, then of course you have to go to them and ask for advice. And their advice is more confusing, so there is a vicious circle. You have to go again and again - and the more you go, the more confused you become. By and by you lose all contact with your feeling part. Your head starts weaving its own things and completely forgets about the heart. A split arises. Listen to the feeling.

And this is also the head that says, 'This is easy to follow the feeling. Make an effort.' The head is always happy with effort, because when you are making an effort there is a possibility for the ego to grow. When you are simply following your feeling the ego has no way to survive. It starts feeling suffocated. Fight, and the ego can exist. Float, surrender, and the ego has no way there. That's why

ascetic people have the most refined egos in the world - because they fight too much. They can claim that they are superior, holier than thou, because they have been fighting with their sex, they have been fighting with their love, they have been fighting with their body, fighting with their hunger.

They have been fasting and doing this and that and a thousand and one things. They have not even been sleeping; they are averse to comfort. They have done so many things so they are holier than you - and they are simply neurotic; they are masochists. They need psychiatric treatment. Out of one hundred saints, ninety-nine need psychiatric treatment. Rarely do you come across a saint who is really healthy and holy.

So just follow the feeling. If your head says it is the easy way, let it be easy - but follow it. The easy is the difficult because the natural has become the very distant. The obvious is completely forgotten.

Far away seems to be close. Man tries to reach the moon and is not worried about reaching within himself. The moon seems to be closer than your own being. Man is ready to take all sorts of risks to go to the moon - for what? But nobody is ready to go within oneself. Maybe people think it is so easy; it is not so easy. The moon is easier, space travel is easier; inner travel is difficult. When you go out you can use technology. When you go in you cannot use any technology; no technique as such exists.

When you move into the world of the feelings, you move into chaos. Feelings are irrational; they don't have any system. When you go into feelings you don't know where you are. You can never be certain. Everything is changing, every moment - it is a flux. Everything is liquid, and nothing is certain, nothing is solid. One moment there is one thing, and another moment something absolutely new arises - even diametrically opposite. One moment it is anger, another moment it is love. One moment it is happiness, another moment you are so low, so sad. There is no consistency. The world of feelings is very contradictary; of course, very alive, but very contradictary.

One who is ready to go into it is ready to go into chaos. It needs courage. With the reason, with the head, everything is clear-cut, formulated. There is a framework and there is consistency. The head is very rational, linear. That's why so many people live in the head and nobody bothers about the heart. Of course, if you live in the head you only live for the name's sake. You live a dead life.

The head is a great machine, maybe efficient; it finds out great scientific systems and theologies and philosophies, but it has nothing to do with love, nothing to do with life. It is a mechanical thing.

People choose the head because it is really the easier... nothing is at stake.

Whenever you go towards feelings, you start feeling disturbed. You are coming close to an earthquake. You will be sitting on a volcano - it can explode any moment, and you are always moving in danger. Go with the feelings. Just do what you feel like doing and be in a deep relaxation - at least for one month, and then you tell me how you feel. For one month give it a chance, mm?

Good.

[The encounter group is present. A participant says: I feel really good inside, and I can go inwards and feel energy all over my body. But I don't seem to be able to... I don't seem to be expressing outwardly.] No. Then don't be in a hurry. Let it be centred and settled. You will be able to express; expression is never the problem. First the experience has to be there. Expression follows the experience automatically on its own accord. Once you have something to say, you will find the way to say it.

The basic thing is, have you something to say? Then you will find the way. Then it is better to say that it will find the way to be expressed. So that is not to be worried about. Don't think about it right now - right now feel it more and more.

Go to the inside well-being that you are feeling again and again. Enter into it from different doors...

touch it in different moments. Suddenly walking on the road, close your eyes and touch it. In the marketplace, somebody insults you - close your eyes and touch it; see whether it is still there or gone. Something sad happens; try to touch it. Something happy happens; again feel whether you have lost it in happiness. Is it lost in the fever of happiness or is it still there?

So first go on trying to touch it again and again and feel it. The more you feel, the more it will become settled, crystallised, defined. And one day suddenly you will see that it is coming in your expression, in your relationship, in your communications. It is pouring itself on its own accord - not that you have to do something about it. Let there be poetry in your soul and you will start singing one day or other.

Let there be dance in the soul and you will dance.

The body always follows - it is a beautiful slave - but that is not the point. Right now if you start thinking about it, you will create trouble, and in that trouble you may lose contact with what is happening. So for the moment tackle one thing at one time. We will see about expression later on. First experience it more and more, mm?... go deeper into it. There are many layers of it - you have touched only the first layer. There are depths within depths.

This well-being is just like a chinese box - you open one box, there is another box; you open that, then there is another box. Or like an onion - you peel it, another layer. You peel it, and there is an even more fresh, young and virgin layer. You go on, you go on, you go on, and one moment comes when the whole onion disappears and only emptiness is left in your hand. That is the real thing:

emptiness is left in your hand. Suddenly you have disappeared. Suddenly you cannot find yourself.

You look around here and there and you are not.

From that moment expression will take its own course. Never try to force it. When the energy is available it finds its own way.

[Another group member said he could not get in touch with his feelings, his anger. His sexual interest disappeared when he recently split up with his girlfriend.] Nothing to be worried about - you have become a buddhist! Don't be worried! (laughter) I am speaking for you every day. There are very few buddhists here, and I need them! (laughter) Perfectly good - at least I can rely on you! (laughter) Sometimes it happens with meditations that we can feel like this, because sexuality, anger, jealousy, hatred, are all on the same track. It is the same energy that you have been using as sex. Then you start meditating, and the same energy is involved in a new effort. It starts taking a new route; it starts disappearing from the sex route. It is a diversion of the same energy. And by coincidence, at the same moment the girl left you. So that was a blessing, otherwise she would have tried to force your energy into the old pattern. You are really fortunate. Women never leave in such beautiful moments! They cling in such moments. They may leave you when you are full of sex but they never leave you when you are not full of sex - then they cling.

It was simply good. The girl left you, so that door was closed, and the meditation camp started - and you have done really well. Very few people do it so totally. Very few people feel impotent when they meditate, but this happens to rare people. The whole energy has moved, and it has moved in such a sudden way that certainly you feel as if you have gone impotent.

You have not gone impotent - meditation never makes anybody impotent - but if the energy moves in a sudden shift, it feels like that. Don't be worried about it. Take it very positively - it is a very positive phenomenon. And use this opportunity, otherwise you may become miserable: 'What is happening?' - and particularly to a western mind it looks like misery. If it happens to an Indian, he will feel so grateful to God. and he will think, 'What beautiful karmas have I done in my past life?'

Because whenever an Indian feels that there is some sex desire, he feels that he is a sinner; evil thoughts are coming to him.

Now in the West the swing has moved to the other extreme. If you don't feel sexual, you feel that something has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. Neither sex nor the disappearance of sex, is wrong. Sex is beautiful, a natural thing, but not the end. There is more to life than sex. That 'more' is trying to happen to you. Once it has happened the sex energy will become available again. Then it will be your choice: if you want to move into sexuality you can. But now it will never be an obsession - it will be your choice. Do you see the difference?

Once the energy has worked its way into new chakras it will become available again, because it has not gone anywhere - it is simply working, moving into a new space. Once it has broken the path, it will be there but now there will be a change - a great change, a blissful change. You can be sexual if you want to be, otherwise there will be no obsession. And when sex is just a choice, there is no neurosis in it. When you have to be in it and you cannot get out of it, then it is a bondage. You should feel blessed.

And that may be the cause of why you cannot get in touch with your anger, because sexuality, anger, jealousy, hatred, are all on the same track. Teertha, this has to be understood. This can happen to many people in meditation camps, and it will be happening more in the future. They are all on the same track. If energy disappears from sex, it disappears from anger also. Not that anger has completely gone, but energy is no more available for it. It is there - when energy will start moving on the same track again, he will be able to be angry, but then too it will be his choice. If he wants to be angry, he can be. And who wants to be angry? Once it is a choice, who wants to be angry? A great freedom is going to happen if you go on working positively.

Right now don't get into any relationship, otherwise it will be a great contradiction in your being.

Right now be a buddhist monk, and listen to whatsoever I am saying (in the morning discourses) very carefully - it is for you. When I say 'monk', you remember - I am talking about you. Just go on meditating, and feel very happy. Drop that western concept that when sex disappears there is nothing left in life; life is finished. Even old people go on pretending.

Just the other day I was reading.... One man, eighty-five years old, went to his psychiatrist and said, 'What is happening to me? I am becoming impotent and I cannot make love to my wife. Something has to be done.'

The psychiatrist said, 'You are eighty-five, now it is time to get out of it.'

But the man says, 'It is not the time, because I have a friend who is ninety-five, and he says that he still makes love to his wife every day.'

The psychiatrist said, 'Who is preventing you? You can also say that. Nobody is preventing you!'

Even at the age of ninety-five people go on pretending and saying. The western attitude about sex is not true - neither is the eastern attitude. In fact as far as sex is concerned, up to now on the earth no sane society has existed - either people are against it or too much for it. A sane person is one who takes things as they are: neither condemns them nor values them too much. Sex is good, healthy, hygienic, but there is more to life than sex. And when that more opens its door for the first time, you are really moving into a meaningful existence, into some sort of significance. Otherwise you are in a rut.

Simply meditate. Don't become involved with women otherwise you will feel in difficulty and you will start pulling your energy towards a sexual track. That will be dangerous; it can create very great conflict in your being. Simply enjoy as you are. And right now anger will not be available, and all other feelings which are connected with sex will all disappear. New feelings will arise. You will be able to feel compassion more, sympathy more. You will be able to feel silence more. You will be able to feel more calm. and quiet. Enjoy these. These exist on this track - a calmness, a very collected feeling, an indifference, as if nothing matters. Mm? The world seems to be very distant, and you are alone. Enjoy this aloneness, and meditate.

[A sannyasin said that today: Something strange is happening in my body, as if I want to leave it behind me... something funny is happening. It's sort of annoying me, and frustrating.] Mm, mm. When did you start feeling it?

[Today - after this afternoon's work.] Today? Don't stop it. Even if it is very strange and weird, let it, allow, let it happen. That may be something important that is happening. Sometimes it can happen. In a group process you can become so aware that a great distance arises between you and your body. You start feeling as if you are getting out, or getting away. The identification becomes loose; that's what is happening. You are feeling a little loose - but it is very good. The identification has to be completely broken. One has to be so capable that if one wants to jump out of the body, one can. The body should be just like a dress: you can be in, you can be out. Nothing to be worried about. But I can understand, in the beginning it can be very strange.

Join the music group, mm? and in music, simply feel as if you are not the body. Let the body dance separately, and you dance separately. It can actually happen. You can see your own body dancing there - but don't get scared, I am here! That is my whole purpose of being here. Mm? Good!