That’s what
has been taught: Be desireless! But what can you do? You can go on cutting
desires; the more desires are cut, the poorer your life becomes. If all desires
are destroyed, then you have committed suicide, spiritual suicide.
No, desire is
the energy of life, desire is life. Then WHAT DO I mean when I say be free of
desire?
The second is
my meaning: to be free, totally free, to have or not have desire. Desire should
not
be an
obsession – that is the meaning. You should be capable... for example, you see
somebody’s beautiful house, newly built, and a desire arises in you to have
such a house. Now, are you free to have this desire or not? If you are free, I
will say you are desireless. If you say, ”I am not free.
This desire
persists. Even if I want to drop it, I cannot drop it – it haunts me. I see
dreams of that
house, I
think about it. I am afraid to go on that road, because that house creates
jealousy in me, that house creates disturbance in me.” If you say, ”I am not
capable of either having or not having the desire,” then you are not in a
healthy shape – then desires are your masters, you are a victim. And you will
suffer much because there are millions of things going around, and if so many
desires take possession of you, you will be torn apart.
That’s how it
is happening: somebody has become the prime minister, now you want to become
the prime minister; somebody has become very rich, now you want to become very
rich; somebody has become a famous writer, now you want to become a famous
writer. And somebody is something else... and somebody is something else... and
all around there are millions of people doing millions of things. And from
every nook and corner a desire arises and jumps on you and takes possession of
you, and you are not capable of saying yes or no you will go mad. That’s how
the whole of humanity is mad. All those desires are pulling you into so many
directions.
You have
become fragmentary, because many desires have possessed parts of your being.
AND those
desires are contradictory too. Then it is not only that you are fragmentary:
you become a contradiction. One part of you wants to become very rich, another
part of you wants to become a poet – now, this is difficult. It is very
difficult to become rich and remain a poet. A poet cannot be that cruel; it
will be very difficult for him to become rich.
Money is not
poetry: money is blood, money is exploitation. A poet worth the name cannot
exploit.
And a poet
worth the name will have some vision of beauty. He cannot be so ugly himself as
to
deprive so
many people just for his desire to hoard money.
Now, you want
to become a politician, and you also want to meditate; you want to become a
meditator too. This is not possible. Politicians cannot be religious. They can
pretend to be religious, but they cannot be religious. How can a politician be
religious? – because religion means non-ambitiousness and politics is nothing
but pure ambition.
Religiousness
means: I am happy as I am. Politics means: I will be happy only when I am at
the top – I am not happy as I am. I have to run and rush, and I will destroy if
it is needed. If by right means, okay; if not, then by wrong means – but I have
to be at the top, I have to prove myself.
A politician
naturally suffers from an inferiority complex. A religious man has no complex –
inferi-ority or superiority.
Politicians
pretend to be religious because that pays in politics. Morarji Desai pretends
to be religious – that pays in politics. Now, look at the disgusting thing
Jimmy Carter has done: he came to India and he asked, first thing in India,
three hours for prayer. He knows India is a religious country – three hours for
prayer?! Prayer is nothing to be bragged about. You can do it in your bedroom –
three minutes are enough – three seconds are enough – just a single moment is
enough – because prayer has nothing to do with time: it needs intensity. Now, a
three-hour prayer! think of God also a little bit: listening to Jimmy Carter
for three hours... poor old man! Nobody thinks of God. And what will you be
saying for three hours? You will bore Him to death! But he knows that India is
a religious country, people will be impressed by the idea.
And what can
Jimmy Carter do for three hours, what will he pray for three hours? A
politician can-not pray even for three minutes; he will be thinking all the
time about politics.
To be
religious means to be non-ambitious, to have no ambitions of being somewhere
else,
somebody else
– to be herenow!
Now, if you
have these two ideas together, that you want to be a politician and you also
want to be a meditator, you will be in difficulty – you will drive yourself
crazy. If you are honest, you will go mad; if you are dishonest, then you will
not go mad – then you will become a hypocrite. That’s what your politicians
are.
And I am not
saying that all those who are in reli-gion are not politicians: out of a
hundred there
are also
ninety-nine who are politicians. They are there in a different kind of
politics: the religious politics. They have THEIR hierarchy and the priest
wants to become the Pope – again it is politics. Or, the sinner wants to become
the saint – again it is politics, again it is inferiority complex; again, once
you have started doing something holy, religious, saintly, you will carry
around yourself that ego of ’holier than thou’. Then you will have a
condemnation of others in your eyes; then everybody is doomed and only you are
going to be saved. Then you can look at others with pity: These people are
going to hell. This is again politics.
A religious
man knows no ego. He is not even humble – remember – he is so egoless he is not
even humble. Humbleness is also a pretension of ego; the humble person is also
TRYING to be humble and trying to prove that ”I am humble”; or even may have
ideas deep inside his heart that ”I am the MOST humble man in the world.” Again
it is the ego!
Many desires
will take possession of you and many will be contradictory and you will be
pulled apart and you will start falling into pieces, you will lose integrity,
you will no more be an individual.
WHAT IS
DESIRELESSNESS?
Now, these
are the two things: you know desireless-ness, then you have to cut your life
completely, then everything has to be cut. Then you become a Jain monk – just
an empty shell utterly discontented with everything, with yourself; uncreative,
no celebration, no flowers ever bloom. Or you know desirefulness: then you
become torn apart. Both are ugly states.
The right
thing to do is to be so totally free from desire that you can choose, that you
are always
able to
choose: to have or not to have. Then you are really free. And then you will
have both the
creativity,
the celebration, the joy of desires, AND the silence and the peace and the
calmness of desirelessness.
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