Question 2

BELOVED MASTER,

SOMETIMES THERE IS SUCH A FEELING OF NOT BELONGING ANYWHERE THAT EVEN MY ORANGE AND MY MALA ARE NO CONSOLATION. ARE WE REALLY SO ALONE, OR AM I JUST BEING NEGATIVE AND CLOSED WHEN I FEEL THAT?

The question is from Astha.

The first thing: you don't belong anywhere -- that is reality. All hankering to belong is deceptive. The very idea to belong creates organizations; the very idea to belong creates the church -- because you cannot be alone, so you want to drown yourself somewhere in a crowd.

A sannyasin is one who has accepted his aloneness. It is fundamental; it cannot be drowned. By becoming a sannyasin you are not becoming a part of a certain organization -- this is not an organization at all. By becoming a sannyasin, you are becoming courageous enough to accept a certain fact: that man exists in aloneness. And it is so fundamental, there is no way to escape from it. It is as fundamental as death. In fact, death is nothing but bringing you the news that you were alone, and now you are alone.

What is death? For the whole life you were deceiving yourself that you were with somebody -- you belonged to this family, to this clan, to this society, this culture, to East, to West; you belonged to this organization, to this party... to crowds and crowds you were belonging. And you were feeling very good -- "I am not alone."

Then comes death. Shocks you. You start clinging, you start crying, you feel very helpless. A sannyasin will not feel helpless when death comes. A sannyasin will feel perfectly happy when death comes, because death has nothing to shock him with. The sannyasin knows that he is alone. Death cannot take anything away. Death can take away only those deceptions which you have put in your life.

To become a sannyasin means you have negated death. You have said, "Now you can come, and you won't find anything to destroy -- I have destroyed all that myself." Sannyas is voluntary death, it is spiritual suicide. It is a declaration that "I am alone, and my aloneness is so fundamental that there is no way to lose it."

For moments you can forget -- you can fall in love with a woman or a man and you can create the idea, the illusion, that you are together. Both are alone. When two persons fall in love and get married and start living in a house, only two alonenesses are living together, that's all. They are not together: nobody can be together. Togetherness cannot happen, and it is good that it cannot happen, otherwise you would have lost your soul -- then you wouldn't have any center.

Two persons in love touch each other's being, but their beings remain crystal-clear, separate. Yes, their boundaries overlap... but their centers remain far away. They don't lose their soul -- otherwise love would not be such a beautiful thing. Lovers are not together in the sense that they are lost into each other; lovers are together in the sense that two alonenesses are together -- holding each other's hand, knowing perfectly well that they are alone; sharing with each other their aloneness, their beauty, their silence, their love -- but knowing well that they are alone. The fact is so fundamental that it cannot be changed.

People try to avoid. Just as they try to avoid death, they try to avoid aloneness. A Sufi parable...

There was a merchant in Baghdad who went his servant to market to buy provisions, and in a little while the servant came back white and trembling and said, "Master, just now in the marketplace I was jostled by a man in the crowd, and when I turned I saw it was Death. He looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse and I will go to Samarra, and there Death will not find me."

The merchant lent his horse, and the servant mounted and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and saw Death standing in the crowd, and he came to Death and said, "Why did you make a threatening gesture to my poor servant when you saw him this morning?"

"That was not a threatening gesture, sir," Death said. "It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

You cannot escape. If you are going to die in Samarra, you will reach there somehow.

You cannot escape death and you cannot escape aloneness. Try as you will -- try, but all efforts fail. Nobody has ever succeeded in avoiding aloneness, because aloneness is your being. When you are avoiding aloneness you are avoiding yourself -- how can you avoid yourself? How can you escape from yourself? In trying to escape, you miss -- you miss the beauty of being alone. In fact, you start thinking of yourself as lonely because you have missed the beauty of aloneness.

Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, loneliness is ugly. They don't mean the same, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Aloneness is such a beautiful experience. You ARE -- pure, uncontaminated by anybody else's presence; no shadow falling on you -- a clarity, unclouded... your being pure, virgin -- nobody has ever travelled in that territory. It is virgin territory. It is of tremendous beauty, silence, bliss.

Loneliness is an ugly idea. Loneliness is the idea which comes when you try to escape from yourself and cannot escape. Then you fall into loneliness -- you miss the other. You don't see your presence, you miss the other's presence -- your whole focus is wrong. You don't look into yourself, you look outside. You say, "Some friend should be here... or should I go to the restaurant? or should I go to some club or to the movie-house or watch TV? What should I do?" You don't look in, you look out. You wait for the other, your eyes are searching for the other... and the other is not.

When the other is not, you feel lonely. When you ARE, you feel alone. So Astha, this has to be understood deeply: you cannot belong anywhere, belonging is not possible. You can love, but you cannot belong. You cannot get attached. You can love, but you cannot possess and you cannot be possessed. Your freedom is ultimate: nobody can possess you, nobody can make you a slave. You cannot become anybody's shadow. That is the meaning when I say "your aloneness is ultimate." Once you understand it, you start cleaning the ground -- you start forgetting the idea of loneliness; you don't get confused with the idea of loneliness.

What is meditation, after all? It is going into your aloneness. It is moving into the deepest core of your being, where nobody else has ever entered, will ever enter -- where you, and only you, can enter. That is your privacy, your subjectivity.

You ask: "Sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere..." Good, that feeling is not wrong. That feeling simply brings the reality. You can create a fiction, but the reality goes on asserting itself again and again. Your fictions cannot dissolve reality -- they may hide it for a moment or two, and then reality asserts itself again and your fictions are broken.

"Sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere..." You don't belong. The WHOLE is yours -- you don't belong anywhere... because to belong anywhere will be very limited. All is yours: the whole God, the whole sky is yours. You don't belong anywhere -- belonging will be a limitation, a finitude: the infinite is yours.

"... that even my orange and my mala are no consolation." I have never meant them to be consolations. I don't give you any consolation, I take all consolations away. I am here to shatter all consolations. I am not here to pat your back and sing a lullaby so that you can sleep well and dream beautiful dreams. No, I have to shock you into awareness so that you see the reality. Sweet dreams won't help. Even if the reality is bitter, it is reality -- and one has to learn the ways of it. If it is bitter, it simply says you have not learned its ways -- hence it appears bitter. Learn the ways and reality becomes sweet.

But you cannot substitute by sweet dreams. That's what people have been doing down the ages: life after life, people are trying to get consolations. Truth has to be sought, not consolation. The orange, the mala, the sannyas, are not consolations -- not at all.

"Are we really so alone?" Yes... more so than you know. You have not yet penetrated it; just the periphery... and you become afraid and you start escaping into the other. Gather courage -- take a plunge into your being. Let us be acquainted with our own center. Let us ask only one question sincerely: Who am I? All else is meaningless. Unless this question is answered, all your love affairs, friendships, all are nonsense. Unless this question is answered, nothing is answered.

Go into your aloneness with only one quest: Who am I? And don't seek consolations -- because cheap consolations are available, and the mind is very clever in supplying them. When you ask: Who am I? the mind can immediately supply an answer -- mind is very clever. Mind says, "You are God. You are a soul, an immortal soul." These are the ideas put by the magician into the heads of poor sheep. The magician suggested to a few that they were lions, to a few that they were eagles, to a few that they were men, to a few that they were even magicians. The magician hypnotized the sheep and told them, "You are immortal souls: nobody can ever harm you. How can you be harmed?" The magician suggested to them: "I am for you. I am the best master you can ever find, and I exist for you, and I will do whatsoever is needed, and I will always do whatsoever is good for you. Even if I kill you, I will be killing you just for your sake."

You have been given these ideas by the society; your mind is nothing but a projection of the society. It is society within you -- the penetration of the society inside you; it is a miniature society. You have been told things, and you have believed them -- and when you ask the question "Who am I?" if you are a Hindu the Upanishad will speak from the head: the Upanishad will say, "AHAM BRAHMASMI -- I am the Brahma himself." This is not your answer; this is the answer taught by the magician.

I am not saying the answer is wrong or right, I am simply saying it is not your answer -- and when the answer is not yours it is wrong. I am not saying whether the answer is right or wrong per se, I am simply saying it is not yours -- hence it is wrong. It may be that when you really enter into your innermost core, there you will find AHAM BRAHMASMI -- but that will be a totally different thing. Now it is not from the magician, not from the outside, not from the Upanishad, not from the society, not from the priest; now it is arising in your own being.

Maybe, if you are a Christian and you ask, "Who am I?" the answer comes floating -- a beautiful lullaby: "The Kingdom of God is within you"... and you are very happy. Don't be deceived by the magician of the Vatican -- these things won't help. Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan is not the question. And I am not saying the question is wrong or right; I am simply saying it is not yours, hence wrong.

Only YOUR authentic response will be the true answer. So go deep with only one question; let this be your only key, and unlock all the doors inside... and go on penetrating, go on penetrating. One day, when there is nobody left -- not a shadow of the outside -- when you are tremendously in the inside, when you are just a subjectivity, a pure virgin consciousness -- there is the answer. And it is not an answer which comes in a verbalized form it is an existential experience... and you know that your aloneness is your soul.

Mahavira -- one of the great masters of the world -- has named the ultimate state KAIVALYA. KAIVALYA means absolute aloneness... his word is of tremendous beauty. He says: When you reach to your innermost core you become absolutely free; and that state is of pure aloneness -- KAIVALYA. and out of that is wisdom, and out of that is light, and out of that is compassion: everything is born out of that -- so don't avoid aloneness.