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Rediscovering Life: Awaken to Reality

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Rediscovering Life: Awaken to Reality

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Highlights & Notes

Just yesterday somebody told me a story. You know the famous saying, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? Well, this guy was having an affair with the doctor’s wife and was eating an apple a day, so—he got it all wrong. He got it all wrong! He was living from a fixed formula, see? A fixed position.

The human mind is such an extraordinary thing. It has invented the computer. It has split the atom. It has sent ships into space. It has not, however, solved the problem of human suffering, of anguish, loneliness, emptiness, despair.

And now, “Your life is in a mess” means you’re a victim of heartache, at least occasionally. You feel lonely. There’s emptiness staring at you. You’re scared.

The more occupied we are in the things of God, the more likely we priests are to forget what God is all about—and the more complacent we’re likely to become.

So, the first thing: Admit that your life is in a mess. And, second—this is a bit tougher, okay? You ready? Here it is: You don’t want to get out of it. You do not want to get out of the mess. Talk to any psychologist who’s worth his name and he’ll confirm that. The last thing a client wants is a cure. He doesn’t want to get cured, he wants relief.

You want to test that on yourself? I’ll give you a couple of minutes; you could do it right now. Okay, here goes. Suppose you could be blissfully happy, but you’re not going to get that college degree. Are you ready to barter your degree for happiness? You’re not going to get that girlfriend of yours, or that boyfriend. Are you ready to barter them for happiness? Huh? How about this? You’re not going to be a success, you’re going to fail and everybody is going to call you a bum. But you’ll be happy, you’ll be blissfully happy. Are you ready to barter the good opinion of people for that? I’ll give you time to think about it later.

People don’t want to get out of it. They don’t want it. “I don’t want happiness; I want fame.” And, “I don’t want happiness; I want to get that gold medal at the Olympics.”

I’ll tell you what it means to live like a king: To know no anxiety at all. To have no inner conflict at all. No tensions, no pressures, no upset, no heartache. So, then, what are you left with? Happiness, undiluted.

The Chinese put it beautifully: When the eye is unobstructed, they say, the result is sight. Don’t do anything to get sight. When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mouth is unobstructed, the result is taste. When the mind is unobstructed, the result is truth. And when the heart is unobstructed, the result is joy and love. You’ve got it all, but it’s obstructed. Drop it.

So, second major step: Recognize that you don’t want to get out of it. You want comfort. You want your little possessions. You want the little things that society has falsely taught you are essential for happiness. You want that. You don’t want to get out of the mess. Those are the things that are creating the mess.

You know, if somebody has given you a stereo set, then you received a manual of instructions along with it. Well, they didn’t give us a manual of instructions when they gave us the gift of life. Or, let’s put it the other way. They gave us the manual of instructions, but it was all wrong. So you’re not getting music, you’re getting scratchy sounds. You’re getting upset, you’re getting conflict, you’re getting loneliness, you’re getting emptiness.

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is desire. The uprooting of sorrow is desirelessness.

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment. The uprooting of sorrow means the uprooting, the dropping of attachments.

Where do you think all conflicts come from? Attachments. Where do you think greed comes from? Attachments. Where do you think loneliness comes from? Attachments. Where do you think emptiness comes from? You got it, same cause. Where do you think fears come from? Attachments. No attachment, no fear. Ever thought of that? No attachment, no fear.

You can keep the rest—what’s the use of it? Tell me, what’s the use of moving around in an airplane with a heart that is full of misery and emptiness? Tell me. I’d rather live on the ground in a jungle and be blissfully happy and dancing all day. Wouldn’t you? Maybe you wouldn’t. I don’t know.

The biggest enemy of love is attachments. Desire, in the sense of attachment. You know why? Because if I desire you, I want to possess you. I can’t leave you free. I’ve got to get you. I’ve got to manipulate you so that I can get you, if I desire you in this way. I’m going to manipulate myself, so that I can hoodwink you into allowing me to get you. Are you following what I’m saying? Clear enough? There’s no fear in perfect love. You know why? Because there’s no desire.

Attachment means, “I gotta get you.” It means, “Without you, I will not be happy. If I don’t get you, I won’t be happy. I cannot be happy without you.” There, you’ve got the formula for divorce. There, you’ve got the formula for quarrels. There, you’ve got the formula for friendships falling apart. “I cannot be happy without you. I need you for my happiness. By damn, I’ll do everything to manipulate you, to get you.”

Love means, “I’m perfectly happy without you, darling, it’s all right.” It means, “And I wish you good, and I leave you free. And when I get you, I’m delighted; and when I don’t, I’m not miserable.” Well, what do you know? I have learned to be self-sufficient. I’m standing up on my own two feet, not leaning on you. And you know, if I get money, that’s wonderful; and if I don’t get money, I’m not depressed. I’m happy. You know something else? When you go away, I don’t—maybe it’s too soon to say this here, but anyway, I’ll risk it—I don’t miss you. I don’t feel pain. Where there is sorrow, there is no love. Tell me, when you grieve, whom are you grieving for? Whose loss? That’s self-pity. Oh, don’t call it that. You’re telling the truth now.

Here’s a secret formula for you. If you were not actively engaged in making yourself miserable, you would be happy. You see, we were born happy. All life is shot through with happiness. Oh, there’s pain; of course, there’s pain. Who told you that you can’t be happy without pain?

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment/desire. The uprooting of sorrow is the dropping of attachment. How does one drop attachment? You only look and see that it is based on a false belief—the belief that, without this, I cannot be happy. That’s false.

Does the dropping of attachments mean detachment from the material world? No. One uses the material world, one enjoys the material world, but one doesn’t make one’s happiness depend on the material world. What I’m saying is, you really begin to enjoy things when you’re unattached because attachment brings anxiety. If you’re anxious when you’re holding on to something, you can hardly enjoy it. So, what I’m offering you is not a withdrawal from enjoyment; it’s a withdrawal from possessiveness, from anxiety, from tension, from depression at the loss of something.

Happiness is a state of nonattachment.

I’m not saying that we don’t care about other people. We care very much. We’re very sensitive to them. But we’re not controlled by their approval or disapproval.

The need to win drains us of power. If we don’t need to win, we have so much more energy. So, no one joins in the human enterprise of human dreams and visions and goals so marvelously and so creatively as the person who is unattached. Unfortunately, we’ve come to associate nonattachment with not caring, with not enjoying, with asceticism.

“For peace of heart, resign as general manager of the universe.” I’m not the general manager; I do what I can. I plunge in, and the result is left to God, to life, to destiny.

I think it was John Lennon who said, “Life is something that happens to us while we’re engaged in something else.” Oh, beautiful. Beautiful. Life is something that happens to us while we’re busily engaged in something else. Worse: Life is something that happens to us while we’re busy suffering all sorts of other things.

Listen to this: Nothing in reality, nothing in life, nothing in the world, upsets you. Nothing has the power to upset you. Did anyone tell you that? All upset exists in you, not in reality. You can underline the word all. All of it. All of it. All of it. All upset is in you, not in life. Not in reality. Not in the world. It’s in you.

Reality is not upsetting. Reality is not problematic. If there were no human mind, there would be no problems. All problems exist in the human mind. All problems are created by the mind. Somebody said to me in Denver last summer, “Wouldn’t there be some problems that exist in reality and not in me?” I said to him, “If we take you out of there, where’s the problem?” No problem. Now, to me, this is a truth so simple a seven-year-old child could understand it. But I’ve met people who are doctors and all sorts of other things, and they never understood it. Never understood it. They just took it for granted that problems exist in the world. Problems exist—by “problem,” I mean something that upsets you, okay? I’ll repeat that. By problem, I mean something that upsets you. People think that the problem exists in the world. They think that it exists in other people. They think that it is in life. No, no, no. It’s in them. As simple as that. Nothing has the power to upset you.

If this doesn’t happen, I’m not going to be happy, well, what do you know? We upset ourselves.

Did you hear that expression? Something has upset you. That’s the way the English language is. That’s the way all languages are. “Something upset me.” Nothing upset you. The accurate way to speak would be, “I upset myself on the occasion of something.” But who speaks like that? You say, “You upset me.” No. “Your behavior caused me to get upset.” We hate that, don’t we? We love to make the world responsible, or people responsible, or life responsible, or God responsible: “You did it.” Not the upset.

Do I need to upset myself in order to swing into action and do something about it? You know, there’s an assumption that if you don’t upset yourself, if you don’t train people to upset themselves, they’re not going to do anything.

But you know, lots of people cannot even conceive of swinging into action without their first upsetting themselves. It’s something like this: You’re standing in a line. Somebody breaks into the line. Now you want to take action. That’s fine. You want to say it’s wrong. You’re right. You want to do something about it. You want to push them away. That’s fine. But you know what you’re doing? You’re saying, “You’ve misbehaved, so I’m going to punish myself.”

Plunge into the din of battle and keep your heart at peace at the lotus feet of the Lord. But there’s a fear, see. The people who trained us, the people who programmed us, feared that if we didn’t upset ourselves, we wouldn’t do anything. It never occurred to them that when you upset yourself, you have less energy to do something and you have less perception. You’re not seeing things right anymore. You’re overreacting.

Nothing in this entire world has the power to upset you. Nothing. As a matter of fact, nothing has ever upset you. Nobody has ever hurt you. You stupidly hurt yourself.

Maturity is when you no longer blame anyone. You don’t blame others, you don’t blame yourself. You see what’s wrong, and you set about remedying it. That’s one pretty good sign of maturity.

Think of something that until now you would have said has upset you. I asked you to think about it a little while ago; go back to that thought. And understand that it wasn’t that thing or that person that upset you. It was your programming. It wasn’t their meanness, it wasn’t their disapproval, it wasn’t their rejection, it wasn’t their failure. It was your programming that upset you. And see what happens to you.

Funny how this thing gets depleted. It keeps going down. Because as long as I’ve got an enemy out there who’s upsetting me, I’m demanding that my enemy change. I’m refusing to give up my upset unless that thing has changed. Am I clear enough? If I think someone is upsetting me, then as long as he’s there and he’s indulging in the behavior that I say is upsetting, I’m refusing to give up my upset unless he reforms, he changes, he disappears, he gets away or whatever.

Gee, that’s another mind-blowing thing: Don’t fix it. Let it be. Let it be. It will go away. It really will. But don’t we need to know where this programming comes from? It helps to know, but it’s not necessary.

When something happens that we commonly say upsets us, it isn’t this thing that upsets us. Life is not rough on us. Life is easy. It’s our programming that is rough on us. Life is easy. Life is delightful.

So it isn’t this thing outside that’s causing the upset. It isn’t you that are causing the upset. It’s your programming.

I mean, when the letter isn’t received, it’s sent back to the person who wrote it. You don’t receive it, it goes back. You know why you got insulted or why you were upset by the insult? Because you took it, that’s why. Silly, why did you take it? “You mean that it’s possible not to take it? You mean, you call this being human—living like a little monkey? Anyone pulls a little string and you jump?” I’ll tell you what it means to be human. You know what it means to be human? It’s something like this: A guy buys a newspaper every day from a newspaper vendor. The newspaper vendor is always rude to him. So a friend of his says, “Why do you buy your paper from this guy? He’s always rude to you. Why don’t you buy it from someone else just next door?” Says this guy, “Why should the vendor decide where I buy my newspaper? Why should he have the power to decide that?” Now, you’re talking about a human being. Otherwise, you’re talking about monkeys. You could control them; just twist their tail a little and they act in predictable ways. Programming. Programming.

If you’re understanding it, you know that it comes from your programming, not from you, not from them. It’ll take care of itself, it really will.

We’ll begin backwards. First, when somebody jumps into the line ahead of you, may you take action? Go right ahead and take action. Take all the action you want. Yes, it’s okay. The point is, you’re taking action to right a wrong; you’re not taking action to relieve an upset feeling. You see the difference? That’s a big difference. I’m sorry to say, frequently we take action not only to right something that is wrong but also to relieve upset feelings. That’s bad.

And third, is it we who liberate ourselves or is it Christ’s grace? Christ’s grace is available to everybody. But you know, having Christ’s grace available to you doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get anywhere. You’ve got to do something. You remember the story of that guy who lit his pipe and burnt his beard, and they said, “You burnt your beard.” He said, “I know, but can’t you see, I’m praying for rain?” Well, yes; I mean, the rain is available, but you’d better pay attention to what you’re doing.

So, the idea is, unfortunately, that God’s grace is available to everyone. The tragedy of the human race is not that there is a shortage of God’s grace; it’s that there’s a shortage of proper understanding. We got wrong ideas that need to be corrected.

For this, what is needed is not an educational background, but wisdom, understanding, and intelligence, which are acquired by cutting, scraping, melting, questioning, doubting. If you never question, if you never doubt what they taught you, you never doubt what your culture gave you, how will you understand all of this?

Do you blame your programming? No, you don’t blame your programming; you understand it. Now, it’s like saying, “You blame the devil”—poor devil, I mean, we’re blaming the devil. Take responsibility. But one must take responsibility wisely, okay? Remember how I said the upset is not in reality, it’s in you; remember that? Don’t keep blaming reality—it’s in you. But shall you blame yourself? It’s not mature to blame yourself when you’re not to blame; you’re not doing it deliberately. This comes from your programming. So that’s what I mean. You’re not blaming your programming, you’re understanding it. That’s where it comes from.

This is responsibility—to understand. And as a result of understanding, to be freed from

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment. The uprooting of sorrow is the dropping of attachment. The understanding that attachment is a false belief—the false belief that anything or any person can make you happy. True happiness is caused by nothing. True happiness is uncaused. If you ask the mystic why he or she is happy, the answer will be, “Why not?” No block, no obstruction. Why not?

Have you ever thought that if something causes your happiness, when you lose that something then your happiness will be destroyed? Has it ever occurred to you that if something causes your happiness you will become possessive of that thing? That you will become anxious lest you lose it? Whatever that thing be—learning, reputation, good health, life itself. Yet how interesting: the rediscovery of life. You will never live until you stop clinging to life. Let go. When you cling, happiness dies. If your happiness depends on anyone or anything, that’s not happiness. That’s anxiety. That’s tension. That’s pressure. That’s fear.

I’m going to say something that’s perfectly scandalous, but it’s true: You’re not here to change the world. You’re here to love the world. And, by damn, you don’t want to love the world, you want to change it. You know what it means to love? To love is to see. To see. How can you love what you don’t even see? And how can you see when there’s any strong emotion—here comes another shock—positive or negative, coming in the way?

I’ll tell you what you need. There’s only one need. This comes from many years of reflection. There’s only one need, there’s only one emotional need, and that is to love. To love. No other need.

They’re so stupid, believe me. If you just tell them you like them, they’ll like you. That’s how stupid people are. These are computers, machines with mechanical reactions. “Why don’t you buy your newspaper somewhere else? Look how rude he is.” “Why should he decide where I buy my newspaper? Why should his behavior decide what I do with my life?” Isn’t that beautiful?

Oh, we’ve got to depend on one another, they’ll tell you grandly. Of course, we’ve got to depend on one another. That’s how society grows. We share the labor, we share our caring. That’s marvelous; I have nothing against that kind of dependence. The evil is where you depend on another for your happiness. To depend on another for learning, for technical skills, for food—that’s fine. For more cooperation in the world, that’s wonderful. But to depend on another for your happiness, that’s evil. Now, you cannot love.

You know what “loneliness” means? It’s a desperate need for people, to the point that you’re unhappy without people. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality—by understanding that you don’t need people. At last you can enjoy other people because you don’t need them.

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