The name is love, but the game is politics

Question 1:

No man is an island. This has to be remembered as one of the fundamental truths of life. I am emphasizing it because we tend to forget it. We are all part of one life force, part of one oceanic existence. Basically, because we are one deep down in our roots, the possibility of love arises. If we were not one, there would be no possibility of love.

You can like a house, but you cannot love it. You can like any thing, but ?love' is not the appropriate word to be used for liking. Love is reserved only for those who are on the same ladder of evolution.

The second thing to be remembered is that evolution functions through polarities. Just as you cannot walk on one leg, you need two legs to walk... existence needs polar opposites - man and woman, life and death, love and hate - to create momentum; otherwise, there will be silence.

The opposite attracts you on one hand and on the other hand makes you feel dependent. And nobody wants to be dependent; hence there is a constant struggle between lovers: they are trying to dominate each other. The name is love, but the game is politics.

The very effort of man is to dominate the woman, to reduce her to an inferior status, not to allow her to grow, so she always remains retarded. For thousands of years, what man has done to woman is simply monstrous: no education - she cannot read the holy scriptures. She cannot think of herself as equal to man. And she has been conditioned so deeply that even if you say she is equal, she is not going to believe it. It has become almost her mind - the conditioning has become her mind, that she is less in everything: physical strength, intellectual qualities... Man has made a society in which he has become the protector and the woman is the protected.

The Hindu scriptures say that in childhood the father should protect the girl; in youth the husband should protect the woman; in old age the son should protect the mother. But she is always to be protected, and man is to protect her. He has made her weak, uneducated, uncultured; he has stopped her movement in the society. And the worst thing he has done is, he has taken her liberty, her financial freedom, which cuts her very roots to be free. She has to be dependent; she is not capable of earning for herself.

For centuries there was a certain logic in it because the woman had to become a mother. And out of ten children, nine children were dying, so a woman was pregnant for almost the whole period of her life until menopause. How can she work? How can she earn? She is carrying a child, and she is caring for other small children, looking after them, looking after the house. In short, man made women slaves - and very cheaply, without purchasing her. You can see the irony...

In India... and I think in other countries also, in different ways, the same thing happens. In India, when a boy has been born he is welcomed with bands, dancing, singing, so the whole town knows that a boy has been born. But when a girl is born there is no celebration. The whole town knows by the silence that a girl has been born.

What is the problem for the parents? To them, a daughter or a son should be the same. But the problem is that the son is going to earn, is going to help them in their old age, is going to have the inheritance of the family. The daughter, on the contrary, is a financial loss. You feed her, you clothe her - and when you marry her you have to give a dowry. Strange - she is becoming a slave, and the parents have to pay: "Please accept my daughter as your slave." The dowry is the payment.

Ordinarily slaves are purchased, and whoever purchases has to pay. In the case of women, the parents of the woman have to pay instead - give the daughter and pay enough money.

The woman does not want - nobody wants - to be dependent. Nobody wants to be a slave. Nobody wants to be inferior because nobody is inferior. People are different; the question of superiority and inferiority is simply absurd. So she starts taking revenge unconsciously. She cannot love the man who owns her as property, who does not recognize her as a human being equal to himself.

One of the Hindu saints - I don't call him a saint, but Hindus worship him, read his book more than that of any other saint - is Tulsidas. He condemns woman in such ugly terms. He says if you want to remain in control of a woman, you have to beat her once in a while; any excuse will do. Keep her afraid. She should not be given any equality, any friendship. And this has been called - for centuries - "love."

The woman is boiling - unconsciously of course - and she explodes in small ways. Whatever she can do, she does. She cannot beat the husband because she has been told, "Your husband is your god. You cannot beat him, you have to worship him." So she beats herself. Having no choice, in anger she beats herself.

When I started criticizing Mahatma Gandhi I said that what he is doing is nothing but the age-old, feminine strategy. You cannot fight with the foreign rulers; you don't have arms, you don't have strength, and you don't have even the desire. All his nonviolence, passive resistance, is nothing but what the woman has always been doing. But nobody has given her the credit of creating a philosophy of nonviolence! She does not beat anyone when she is angry, she tortures herself. And the man who has reduced the woman to such a state also cannot love her.

Love can exist only in equality, in friendship.

The freedom of woman from man's slavery will also be a freedom for man to experience. So I say the women's liberation movement is not only women's liberation, it is also the men's liberation movement: both will be liberated. The slavery is binding them both, and there is continuous struggle.

The woman has found her own strategies to harass the husband, to nag him, to put him down; the man has his strategy. And between these two fighting camps we have been hoping that love is happening. Centuries have passed - love has not happened, or only once in a while.

This is the situation of the ordinary love, which is only a name, not a reality.

If you ask my vision of love... it is no more a question of dialectics, opposition. Man and woman are different, and complementary. Man alone is half; so is woman. Only together, in a deep feeling of oneness, do they feel for the first time totality, perfection. But to attain to this perfection you have to go beyond the love/hate duality.

And you are capable of going beyond the duality. Right now they go on hand in hand in your life:

you love the same person you hate. So in the morning it is hate, in the evening it is love - and it is a very confusing thing. You don't even understand whether you love the person or you hate the person, because you do both at different times.

But this is how the mind functions, it functions through contradictions. Evolution also functions through oppositions - and those oppositions in existence are not contradictions, they are complementaries. But in the mind, contradictions are contradictions. Mind cannot conceive anything that is non-contradictory, that does not have its opposite hiding just behind it.

And we have been told, taught, programmed in such a way that even a thing like love has to be a mind thing. It is basically of the heart, but our whole society has tried to bypass the heart, because the heart is not logical, is not rational. And our minds have been trained through education that anything illogical is wrong, anything irrational is wrong, only a logical thing is right. In our educational programming there is no place for the heart; it is only mind. The heart has almost been removed from our existence, silenced. It has never been given a chance to grow, to have its potential become actual. So mind is dominating everything.

Mind is good where money is concerned; mind is good where war is concerned; mind is good where ambitions are concerned - but mind is absolutely useless where love is concerned. Money, war, desires, ambitions - you cannot put love in the same category.

Love has a separate source in your being, where there is no contradiction.

An authentic education will not teach you only the mind, because mind can give you a good livelihood but not a good life. The heart cannot give you a good livelihood, but it can give you a good life. And there is no reason to choose between the two. Use the mind for what it is made for, and use the heart for what it is made for.

Heart is the transcendence of duality.

Heart knows no jealousy - that is a mind product. Heart is so full of love that it can love without any fear of being exhausted. We can fill the whole world with love, but we are almost crippled. The heart has been simply bypassed in our growth; it does not play any role.

It is such an ugly system of education... but it is understandable. Religions, politicians, business people, warriors - all have wanted the mind to be trained. And the heart can be a disturbance - it is going to be a disturbance. If you are a soldier and if you have a heart, you cannot kill the enemy, because the moment you take up your gun to kill someone, your heart will say, "Just as you have a wife waiting for you - your children, your old mother and father - this poor man's wife must be waiting also. His children, his old mother and father, are waiting for him to return home. He has not done anything to you, and you are going to kill him. For what? - to get an award from the military academy? To get a promotion?"

The heart will be a disturbance. It is better to make soldiers forget their hearts so they can simply go on killing like robots, without any feelings.

The people who are after money don't want the heart because the heart will be a disturbance: it cannot exploit people.

My father was a small businessman... he was a very simple man. And once a customer had dealt with him - my grandfather was there, my uncles were there in the shop, but anybody who had dealt with my father would ask for him. My grandfather would say, "But we are here. What do you want?

He has just gone to take his lunch."

They would say, "We will come back. We want to deal only with him." Because he would tell them what the cost price of any item was. "And this is my profit. If you think the profit is too much, you can tell me. If I can manage to cut it, I will. I have taken the minimum profit; you can go around the market and you can see."

They said, "You are the only person who tells us the cost price. You also tell us your profit, and it is so small that we cannot even tell you to cut it a little. After all, you also have to live. But nobody else does it; even your brothers, your father - nobody talks about the cost price. They simply say, ?This is the selling price,' and we don't know how much profit they are taking."

My whole family was against my father. They said, "This is not the way to do business. This is not a charity shop. You could have made so much more money - but first you tell a person the cost price!

And he is not asking the cost price, he is asking the selling price."

My father said, "It is impossible for me to cheat a man, to exploit him. And what are we going to do with the money? Whatever we need, we have. More money brings more troubles."

But nobody was agreeing with him, and if there was a new customer, my grandfather would tell my father, "You go inside. Don't destroy this customer - let me tackle him." And my grandfather was asking double the price. If it was worth ten rupees, he was asking twenty rupees, then haggling, and somewhere near fifteen they would agree. Both were happy: he was happy because he was getting five rupees, and the other man was happy because he had brought him down five rupees.

I used to sit, when I was free, just outside the shop. And when the man was leaving, very happy that he had haggled well, I would say, "You are a fool! This thing that you have purchased costs only ten rupees. If you had purchased it from my father, you would have got it for twelve rupees, because he would not ask more than that. You have lost three rupees, and you are still looking happy."

He would say, "I have been cheated!"

I would say, "You haggled, you tried in every way. You enjoyed, and you were coming out smiling."

And the man would say, "You have destroyed my whole joy. Who are you?"

I said, "I am no one, I am just sitting here to tell new customers to ask for my father. Don't deal with anybody else; otherwise your pocket is going to be cut."

My grandfather would be very angry with me, and say, "Who are you? Are you an agent for your father?"

I said, "I am nobody's agent. I simply see what is going on and what should not be going on. You moved my father inside, but you forgot that I was sitting outside."

The heart will mismanage everything that the society wants: exploitation, manipulation, domination, obedience, dependence, sacrifice - the list can be miles long. If the heart is allowed to grow side by side with the mind, the mind cannot manage to do atrocities, murders. But even religious leaders are not ready for the heart. They talk about love, but it is all talk, mere talk. They have destroyed the source from where love arises, and then they talk about love and give sermons about love.

There was a small church in my town, but there were not many Christians. I used to go into the church, and the priest was very much surprised because I was the only non-Christian who had ever entered the church. We became friends.

I said to him, "You talk so much about love, but I see you beating your wife, I see you continually quarreling with your neighbors. I have even seen you hitting a dog who was not doing anything to you. He was going on his own way and he just passed you - I don't know what came over you that you hit the dog. A strange Christianity!"

He said, "You don't know that dog."

I said, "I know that dog because I also live here. He has never hit anybody. And if he bites you that will be perfectly right, because without any cause you have hit him."

He said, "You don't understand. These vagabond dogs" - and in India you will find them everywhere, they belong to nobody - "if you don't hit them and you don't kick them, they take advantage. They will follow you, they will wag their tail, they will persuade you. Before you know it they will come to your house, and naturally one thinks to give them something to eat..."

They are almost starving, because in India you cannot kill them. The municipal committee, the corporations, cannot simply give them poison and finish them. If nobody is the owner they should not be left around, but in India you cannot kill anybody. And he was rationalizing his kick.

I said, "I don't think your rationalization is right. You really wanted to kick. You were angry with something; the poor dog became unnecessarily the object. He had not done anything."

He said, "How do you know about it?"

I said, "It is simple. The dog was going on its own way - I was watching. He was not doing anything to you, he had not even looked at you. He was a Hindu dog, and you are a Christian priest - he did not even bark at you. There is no dialogue possible. You hit him, and he is starving. There must be something in you that wanted to hit, it didn't matter whom. You wanted to be violent."

He said, "Perhaps you are right. I was angry with my boy but I cannot hit him, because if I hit him he disappears from the house for days. Then we are all in trouble. We have to report to the police, and now even the police become angry and say, ?In the whole city it is only your son who gets lost. It is not a big place, nobody is kidnapping anybody, and for what should your son be kidnapped? - you are a poor priest. You must have been misbehaving with him.' "

He said, "It is true. I wanted to hit him because he had broken some statue we had of Jesus Christ."

I said, "You should think of your Jesus Christ - I have listened to you - he says, ?Love your enemies.'

I think he forgot to say, ?If somebody breaks a statue of me, love him.' A statue is broken, nothing much - you can't have a very valuable statue."

Man is angry about many things. In life, he is in a struggle. He does not always succeed, everybody cannot succeed - he is angry. He comes and throws his anger over his wife, his children, and these are the people he believes he loves.

Even religious leaders don't want your heart to open to reality, because it will bring a great transformation in your actions, in your thoughts, and they don't want that. They want you to be bound to the tradition, to the old. Whether it is right or wrong does not matter; it has respectability because it is ancient.

The heart knows nothing of the past, nothing of the future; it knows only of the present. The heart has no time concept. It sees things clearly, and love is its natural quality - no training is needed.

And this love has no hate as a counterpart.

I was talking about a love that goes beyond love and hate. Love that comes from the mind is always love-hate. It is not two words, it is one word - lovehate - not even a hyphen dividing them. And a love that comes from your heart, which is beyond all dualities...

Everyone is in search of that love. But he is searching with the mind, and hence he is miserable.

Every lover feels failure, deception, betrayal. But nobody is at fault; the reality is that you are using a wrong instrument. It is as if somebody is using eyes to listen to music, and then freaks out that there is no music. But eyes are not meant for listening, nor are ears meant to see.

Mind is a very businesslike, calculating mechanism; it has nothing to do with love. Love will be a chaos, it will disturb everything in it.

Heart has nothing to do with business - it is always on holiday. It can love, and it can love without ever turning its love into hate; it has no poisons of hate.

Everybody is searching for it, but just through a wrong instrument; hence the failure in the world. And slowly slowly, seeing that love only brings misery, people become closed: "Love is all nonsense."

They create a thick barrier against love. But they will miss all the joys of life; they will miss all that is valuable.

Just change the instrument.

There is a song in Urdu... there are songs which cannot be played on every instrument. The right instrument is needed for a certain kind of music. Love is a music, and you have the instrument. But because the heart is starving, your life is misery. And you go on making it more miserable because you go on making the same mistake - a wrong instrument and you are trying to play music for which it is not made.

Question 2:

The sutra is so important. Buddham sharanam gachchhami was always there, undeclared. It was happening, there was no need to say it.

To be with a master, there is no other way except buddham sharanam gachchhami: I go to the feet of the awakened one. Only in such humbleness do you become part of the master's experience and his life. Sangham sharanam gachchhami was not destroyed in the commune in America. The commune is destroyed, but the sutra cannot be destroyed.

If you love the master, you cannot avoid loving all those who love your master. How can you avoid it? You have chosen a master, somebody else has also chosen a master; suddenly you become aware that you are both on the same path, you are connected through the same master, the same energy. The commune can be destroyed, the physical component, but not its spiritual content.

And those who think that in America they have destroyed the commune are just befooling themselves: the commune has spread all over the world. Now we can declare the whole world as our commune. It is out of our generosity that we allow other people also to live there, in the hope that sooner or later they will become part of the commune! They are our sources, because from where are we going to get new sannyasins? Our sannyasins are so understanding that they are not going to create children; they have no time. Sitting silently, doing nothing... children are not born by themselves! Something will have to be done, and our sannyasins are not interested in doing anything. So no children, just grass growing.

So we will need new sannyasins. And there are so many people who don't know the secret of sitting silently, doing nothing, waiting for the spring and enjoying the grass growing. They never sit silently, they are always doing something or other - they will produce children for our sannyasins, so we allow them to remain on the earth. Otherwise, we have covered the whole planet.

So nothing is destroyed, and it is impossible for the concept to be destroyed. Even if just you few people are here, it becomes the sangham; it becomes a gathering of fellow travelers. Your love for the same master creates a strange kind of unity. You are not directly related to each other, but you are related through me to each other. Directly, you can sometimes come into conflict, but through me you cannot come into conflict; I will be neutralizing your conflict.

Dhammam sharanam gachchhami - that is the last part of the sutra. That is our search, that is our seeking. Dhammam means truth, ultimate truth. The first two steps are just to help you towards the third.

There is a group of Sufis who simply call themselves the Seekers. There is another group of Sufis who simply call themselves the Builders. They have beautiful names; you cannot imagine that they have anything to do with religion. But the Builders are building to reach to the ultimate star; the Seekers are searching... and they have chosen these names so the religious authorities don't get offended.

If you go to the Middle East and you simply tell anybody, "I want to go to some Sufi school," they will shrug their shoulders because nobody knows what you mean. To enter a Sufi school is difficult, unless by chance you come across a person who is connected and who can take you to the master.

But you will be puzzled, because Sufi masters, just to avoid unnecessary persecution, unnecessary harassment, live in a very ordinary way. Somebody is a weaver, somebody is a potter, somebody sells perfumes, somebody does some other thing - and you cannot think that this man is a Sufi master. And in the night, in some friend's house, you will see the same man sitting with his disciples.

And you cannot believe it, because this man, although he is the same, is radiating something that was not there when you had seen him as a perfume seller or a potter or a weaver. The Sufis have methods to prevent people from seeing them as masters, so that their work can continue silently underground.

The work is the same, whoever is doing it.

It is dhammam sharanam gachchhami - a longing to know the truth, to be the truth.

A man is not really a man if this longing is not in his being.