Almost drunk with emotion

Question 1:

Dhyan Raga, there is certainly something very similar in very different emotions: the overwhelmingness. It may be love, it may be hate, it may be anger - it can be anything. If it is too much then it gives you a sense of being overwhelmed by something. Even pain and suffering can create the same experience, but overwhelmingness has no value in itself. It simply shows you are an emotional being.

This is typically the indication of an emotional personality. When it is anger, it is all anger. And when it is love, it is all love. It almost becomes drunk with the emotion, blind. And whatever action comes out of it is wrong. Even if it is overwhelming love, the action that will come out of it is not going to be right. Reduced to its base, whenever you are overwhelmed by any emotion you lose all reason, you lose all sensitivity, you lose your heart in it. It becomes almost like a dark cloud in which you are lost. Then whatever you do is going to be wrong.

Love is not to be a part of your emotions. Ordinarily that's what people think and experience, but anything overwhelming is very unstable. It comes like a wind and passes by, leaving you behind, empty, shattered, in sadness and in sorrow.

According to those who know man's whole being - his mind, his heart and his being - love has to be an expression of your being, not an emotion.

Emotion is very fragile, very changing.

One moment it seems that is all.

Another moment you are simply empty.

So the first thing to do is to take love out of this crowd of overwhelming emotions. Love is not overwhelming. On the contrary, love is a tremendous insight, clarity, sensitivity, awareness. But that kind of love rarely exists, because very few people ever reach to their being.

There are people who love their cars... Niskriya loves his camera...! That love is of the mind. And then you love your wife, your husband and your children - that love is of the heart. But because it needs change to remain alive, and you cannot allow it its changeability, it becomes stale. The same husband every day - it is such a boring experience. It dulls your sensitivity, it dulls every possibility of joy. You slowly start forgetting the language of laughter. Life becomes simply work without any joy. And one has to work because one has a wife and one has children.

I have heard...

An old couple appeared in court. The husband was ninety and the wife must have been eighty-five; they wanted a divorce.

The judge could not believe his eyes. He said, "At this age? Any moment you can pop off. What are you asking for? What will you do with the divorce? How long have you been married?"

The man said, "It must have been at least sixty years or even more."

The judge said, "I cannot believe how you lived together for sixty years, and now at the end of your life, you want a divorce? Why have you waited so long?"

The old man said, "We had to wait till all our children died! Now is the chance to be free and enjoy life."

Their whole lives they lived together - it must have been utterly stale. But the love that is of the mind is simple: you can change your camera because the camera will not create any trouble. It won't fight you, it won't have tantrums, it won't drag you to the court, it won't ask for money. It is a simple thing.

Because of this simplicity, most of the people in the world have changed from loving human beings to loving machines, all kinds of machines - it may be a car... It is simpler, you can change it any moment; there is no barrier. People have started to love animals. There are dog lovers who are carrying their dogs everywhere. It is better because you can control, you can beat your dog and still it will welcome you with its tail. It is a joyous experience.

People have other kinds of animals - birds, parrots - and they pay too much attention to them. It is not a simple fact. It shows something deeper about our existence: we cannot love human beings; it is a constant trouble.

One wife had just married and was talking to her friend. The friend said, "This man is a drunkard.

You should not have married him; it will be a constant trouble."

The woman said, "No. I will change his habits. It may take a few years, but I will make him docile, obedient. He is a good man."

The other woman said, "You are living in a fantasy. I have had a dog for five years and I have been teaching him with no effect. I tell him that trees are not toilets - he won't listen. I beat him, I don't give him food - he looks very sad. Finally, I also start feeling sympathy for the poor... but he will not change his habits. A dog is so stubborn, and you are thinking of changing a man, and that too, a drunkard!"

But the very idea that you will change your wife and you will change your husband and you will change your friend, is dangerous. It means conflict from the very beginning. It means it is going to be a struggle, not a joy, not a dance, but a fight.

People start drinking just to avoid the struggle that is waiting at home. When they are drunk then it does not matter even if the wife beats them, they are unconscious. Millions of people are drinking poison for the simple reason of avoiding those whom they had thought they loved.

A man was drinking whiskey....

His wife was tired of teaching him. Wives are great teachers! No wonder that in schools slowly, slowly men are being replaced by women. They are great teachers. They don't smoke, they don't drink, they don't go hunting... they don't do anything out of the way. They have manners and etiquette, they don't use dirty words....

When George Bernard Shaw published his dictionary - a valuable contribution to literature - three old women approached him, very angry, "You seem to be a sex maniac!"

He said, "My God, what have I done?"

They said, "Look at this book you have published."

In that twelve-hundred-page book, there were three words which people think are dirty.

George Bernard Shaw said, "You are great scholars. You must have read twelve hundred pages of a dictionary to find out three words. Are you the sex maniacs or am I the sex maniac?"

... The wife was tired of teaching the husband. Finally she tried another way. She said, "Now I myself am going to drink if you don't stop."

The husband was a little shocked thinking that it would be very difficult - two drunkards in the home both teaching each other not to drink. It is a very rare experience. He tried saying, "No. It does not look good in a woman."

A woman is a pious being, a religious being. Just look in the church; it is filled with women. Only a few men go there - just to find some woman if they can. Their interest is not in the crucified Jesus - who is interested in criminals and who is interested in a boring sermon?

... The man said, "It does not look good."

The woman said, "I am determined. Either you stop or I am going to start."

The man said, "My stopping is impossible. If you are stubborn just take a little taste."

He gave her a little cup full of whiskey. These things don't taste good. The woman took one sip and threw the cup and said, "My God! It is almost poison."

And the man laughed and said, "And you always thought that I was enjoying...! It is not a joy. You do your work. It takes long practice and great guts. It is not for you."

But why do people drink? To avoid those whom they love or at least think they love.

Two men are sitting in a bar, every day. Late at night when the bar is due to close, the barman has to almost push them out. They go on drinking and drinking. One day, just before they started drinking one man asked the other, "We are the only two real drinkers; the others are just learners, immature.

Can I ask why you drink so much?"

He said, "I have to, otherwise I cannot face my wife. When I am utterly drunk I have so much courage I could face a lion! And when I am absolutely drunk I go home, I hit my boot on the doors, open the door, throw things here and there, make great noise, enter my wife's room, give her a good hit on the hips and say to her, 'Darling, how about it?' - and she pretends to be deeply asleep!

"It is because of her I have to drink. Since I got married, I have not married my wife, I have married this alcohol. But what is the reason for you? You are also in the same position?"

The other said, "No. I am not married. I am a bachelor."

The other man said, "Bachelor? It is unbelievable. Being a bachelor, what are you doing here?

Drinking late in the night and you are just a bachelor?"

The bachelor said, "What else to do? In the house there is nothing but darkness. Sitting alone one becomes bored. Here it is very colorful and so many strange things happen every day. I started as what you call an amateur, but slowly, slowly... Now I am a perfect drunkard."

There are people who are drinking because they have wives, and there are people who are drinking because they don't have any wives. It is a strange world. One does not know on what logical basis it is being run, whether there is any logic at all in life or it is absolutely absurd.

Raga, you have to take your love out from the emotional grip where it has been since your birth, and you have to find a route to your being. Unless your love becomes part of your being, it is not much different from pain, suffering, sadness.

Emotions are not going to help you become an integrated individuality. They are not going to give you a granite soul. You will remain just like a piece of dead wood moving in the stream here and there, not knowing why.

Emotions blind man exactly as alcohol does. They may have good names like love, they may have bad names like anger, but once in a while you need to be angry at someone, it relieves you. You will see dogs making love on the roads, and people hitting them with stones. Now those poor fellows are not doing any harm to anybody and they are performing a biological ritual that you perform - they just don't have to hide in houses - and they do so well. A crowd will move around them throwing stones, beating them... strange behavior!

People need to be angry once in a while, just as once in a while they need to be in love, and once in a while to hate someone. It doesn't matter. That's why people like Adolf Hitler can manage to find followers, on the grounds that it is because of the Jews that the world is in misery - so we have to erase the Jews from the earth and there will be no problem. All the problems are created by a Jewish conspiracy. He killed six million Jews and not a single problem of the world is solved. Now the world has more problems than it had before, but he convinced people like Martin Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the contemporary world. Martin Heidegger was a follower of Adolf Hitler and also believed that it was the Jews...

Just now I have received information from Japan, although in Japan there are not many Jews...

There may be more Jews here in this place than in the whole of Japan! Here you can suspect that you are surrounded by the Jews; still, they don't have any conspiracy or anything. Two books have appeared - again the same logic or illogic - claiming that because of the Jews the world is in trouble, that there is a world Jewish conspiracy, and unless Jews are eradicated completely, the world will never be at ease. And those two books have become best-sellers in Japan!

Man gathers anger, rage, hate, and then it is only a question of finding some opportunity so that he can express his destructiveness. Any excuse will do.

Religions give good causes. One worries that if there is only one God, then the Jews are killing the Mohammedans, the Mohammedans are killing the Christians, the Christians are killing others - and it goes round and round everywhere in the name of God!

In fact, Mohammed had written on his sword: My Religion Is Peace. That is the meaning of Islam, that is the name Mohammedans give to themselves. And these peaceful Mohammedans have killed so many people, not only people, but have destroyed so many temples and so many beautiful statues because they don't believe in statues. It is perfectly okay... who is saying that you should believe?

The statue is not following you insisting, "Believe me." If you go to ancient Indian temples, you will see the destruction that Mohammedans have caused.

In the name of God, that there is only one God and he has no statue, they have destroyed much beautiful sculpture which would take hundreds of years to make. That may be your idea, so you should not have any statue, but who are you to interfere with somebody else whose idea is that there is a God and who has as many statues as you can conceive?

Hindus believe in hundreds of gods - but what is the harm? That is their business, their problem. If they are doing something stupid, you can enjoy, but it is not right to destroy their statues.

But the reality is that the labels of 'God' and 'religion' are all superficial. In reality people are angry and they don't have objects to show their anger, so they go on collecting anger, hate, rage... and then there is a limit. It explodes like bombs - anything will do!

In India Mohammedans and Hindus were fighting. Now Sikhs and Hindus are fighting because the Indian constitution has accepted Hindi as the national language. Although forty years have passed, they have not been able to impose Hindi as a national language because every other group which speaks a different language starts fighting.

In the south there are different languages, in the north there are different languages - and in the name of languages, riots go on happening.

I used to live in a city...

They destroyed all the boards on the shops - anything on which English was written, and forced people to write the boards on their shops in Hindi. And now it is a very very difficult problem, because trains pass from one province to another province. In one province they will paint the name in one language, and the train will enter into another province and they will paint it in their language.

It was a constant trouble and fight, and trains were delayed for days because unless their writing is complete... In each compartment the passengers have to write down the name in their language, and whoever prevents them... immediately there is going to be killing...!

Trains were set on fire because people were resisting. Buses were set on fire because the board was not in the language which the people spoke. But buses have to travel all over the country. Now if entering every state - India has thirty states - the buses and trains have to change... it will become a tremendous and hilarious job - but any excuse is enough...!

Emotions are dangerous in the sense that they overwhelm you and they are almost alcoholic.

Paddy gets an invitation to his rich cousin's wedding in Dublin. At the reception he feels a bit self- conscious in his country clothes so he spends most of his time in the corner drinking whiskey. Finally, he decides to join the party, and asks the most important looking lady guest to dance a Viennese waltz with him. Paddy is angrily refused.

"There are four reasons why I won't dance with you," says the guest. "First, you have had too much to drink. Second, the band is not playing a waltz. Third, I am not a woman. Fourth, I am the archbishop of Dublin!"

But when they are drunk, people start seeing things....

The hostess at a kid's birthday party goes up to little Ernie, "How come," she asks, "your little brother is so shy? He has not moved from that corner all afternoon."

"He is not shy at all," insists Ernie. "It is just that he has never had to wear a necktie before and he thinks he is tied to something."

Just a little more awareness is needed and all your overwhelming things will start disappearing. A man is really clean and clear when he never gets overwhelmed by anything, when he is always alert and aware and himself, and is not lost in any emotion, whether it is love or anger or anything else.

Young Herbie, on vacation in Florida, is getting frustrated because he cannot attract any girls. Every day on the beach he watches as Bernie Bernstein, an older man, is surrounded by young, beautiful women.

One evening Herbie approaches him at the bar and asks Bernie for some advice.

"Well," says Bernie, "the first thing is to get a smart haircut, then buy yourself a skimpy swimsuit instead of those baggy shorts. And for a finishing touch, put a rolled up pair of socks in your swimsuit. It works every time!"

Herbie follows the advice, but has no luck. The next evening in the bar he complains to Bernie, "Ah eh," says Bernie, "I saw you on the beach. The haircut looks great and you bought a fantastic looking swimsuit, but the next time, try putting the socks in front!"

Just a little awareness about what you are doing...

Ruthie Finkelstein goes to buy shoes, wearing a miniskirt with no underwear underneath. The shoe salesman is overcome by the sight and says to her, "I would like to fill your pussy with ice cream and eat it all out!"

"That is the most disgusting thing anyone has ever said to me," she cried. "I am going to tell my husband and he is going to beat you up!"

Ruthie stomps home and tells her husband Moishe, who happened to be reading his newspaper.

"Honey," he says, "I am not going to fight with that man for three reasons. First, you have a whole closet full of shoes and we really can't afford any more. Second, you were provoking the man by not wearing any underwear. And third, I don't want to mess with anyone who can eat that much ice cream!"

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.