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If this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it. Trees are happy and animals are happy and birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Being miserable, man becomes very special, extraordinary.

Misery makes you capable of attracting people’s attention. Whenever you are miserable you are attended to, sympathized with, loved. Everybody starts taking care of you. Who wants to hurt a miserable person? Who is jealous of a miserable person? Who wants to be antagonistic to a miserable person? That would be too mean.

The miserable person is cared for, loved, attended to. There is great investment in misery. If the wife is not miserable the husband simply tends to forget her. If she is miserable the husband cannot afford to neglect her. If the husband is miserable the whole family, the wife, the children, are around him, worried about him; it gives great comfort. One feels one is not alone, one has a family, friends.

When you are ill, depressed, in misery, friends come to visit you, to solace you, to console you. When you are happy, the same friends become jealous of you. When you are really happy, you will find the whole world has turned against you.

Nobody likes a happy person, because the happy person hurts the egos of the others. The others start feeling, “So you have become happy and we are still crawling in darkness, misery and hell. How dare you be happy when we all are in such misery!”

And of course the world consists of miserable people, and nobody is courageous enough to let the whole world go against him; it is too dangerous, too risky. It is better to cling to misery, it keeps you a part of the crowd. Happy, and you are an individual; miserable, you are part of a crowd — Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, Arabian, Japanese. Happy? Do you know what happiness is? Is it Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan? Happiness is simply happiness. One is transported into another world. One is no more part of the world the human mind has created, one is no more part of the past, of the ugly history. One is no more part of time at all. When you are really happy, blissful, time disappears, space disappears.

Just look into your misery, watch, and you will be able to find what the reasons are. And then look into those moments when once in a while you allow yourself the joy of being in joy, and then see what differences are there. These will be the few things: when you are miserable you are a conformist. Society loves it, people respect you, you have great respectability, you can even become a saint; hence your saints are all miserable. The misery is written large on their faces, in their eyes. Because they are miserable they are against all joy. They condemn all joy as hedonism; they condemn every possibility of joy as sin. They are miserable, and they would like to see the whole world miserable. In fact only in a miserable world can they be thought to be saints. In a happy world they would have to be hospitalized, mentally treated. They are pathological.

You have to learn how to be happy, and you have to learn to respect happy people and you have to learn to pay more attention to happy people, remember. This is a great service to humanity. Don’t sympathize too much with people who are miserable. If somebody is miserable, help, but don’t sympathize. Don’t give him the idea that misery is something worthwhile. Let him know perfectly well that you are helping him, but “This is not out of respect, this is simply because you are miserable.” And you are not doing anything but trying to bring the man out of his misery, because misery is ugly. Let the person feel that the misery is ugly, that to be miserable is not something virtuous, that “You are not doing a great service to humanity.”Be happy, respect happiness, and help people to understand that happiness is the goal of life only creative people are happy. Happiness is a by-product of creativity. Create something, and you will be happy. Create a garden, let the garden bloom, and something will bloom in you. Create a painting, and something starts growing in you with the growing painting. As the painting comes to the finish, as you are giving the last touches to the painting, you will see you are no more the same person. You are giving the last touches to something that is very new in you.

Love and lots of it dear ones

Suresh

Photo copyright Suresh Gundappa 2006
Down through the centuries two types of people have not been allowed sex. One is the saint, another is the soldier. The soldier is not allowed sex because the politicians came to know that if he is allowed sex he loses the urge to fight, he becomes less angry. It is difficult to fight when you are sexually satisfied. So many wars are possible because people are sexually very much unsatisfied. And politicians are very much afraid; they are afraid of what is going to happen to their politics if people become sexually satisfied. The whole of their politics depends on war. If war disappears, politics disappears. Then the government will be just an organization like the post office and the railway. It has some utility, but no power. War gives power, and the politician cannot allow war to disappear. The politician goes on talking about peace and goes on preparing for the war — talks about peace, prepares for the war. And sometimes things move to absurd extremes: he prepares for war so that there should be peace in the world. For peace — to protect peace — he prepares for war.

Politicians cannot allow you to be satisfied in your love. Once you are satisfied in your love you are useless as a soldier. You have to be kept unsatisfied so anger remains burning in you and you are ready to fight — for any excuse — foolish things. People can fight for a piece of cloth they call their national flag. Have you watched this? These national flags seem to be more a symbol of death than of life. When somebody dies they lower it down. And millions of people have died because of national flags. In a better world they should be completely burned and they should disappear. They are ugly.

You have been taught that you belong to this country and you have to die for this country. Nobody belongs to any country. The whole earth is ours — and the earth is undivided. It is divided only on the political maps. The earth is undivided. Where do you suppose Mexico ends and US begins? The earth is one.

But politics will not allow you to have that feeling of oneness. Otherwise politics disappears. Politics is needed, the politician is needed, only because there is war. Now this is a vicious circle. And if war is to continue, people have to be starved; they should not become sexually satisfied. They should remain angry, boiling within, ready to burst any moment. Watch people. They are ready to fight. Just anything will do — politics, religion. Any nonsense will do and they are ready to kill each other.

Politics is in the service of death.

And your so-called religions are also in the service of death.

All the great mystics want you to love life.

Love and lots of it dear ones

Suresh

Photo copyright Suresh gundappa 2006

Dr. Frank Rudolf spent his whole life with some primitive tribes of the Amazon doing research on a very strange phenomenon. I would like to tell you about it so that you can understand more easily what idol worship was meant for. Most primitive communities have known for a long time of a particular process. Rudolf studied this and reached surprising conclusions.

Certain primitive tribes believe that it is possible to make a person suffer from a particular disease through a look-alike clay idol which represents him. They believe that even death can be brought about in this way. For thirty years Dr. Rudolf tried to find out how it is possible to transmit disease and death through an earthen representation of someone. Rudolf approached the subject skeptically and scientifically, and hundreds of times he actually saw with his own eyes disease and death being transmitted, even if a person was a thousand miles away.

His long study convinced him of the truth of such happenings. There were three things which he came to know after experimenting on himself. Firstly, it was not necessary for the clay idol to exactly resemble the person in whom disease or death was to be invoked. It is difficult even for an expert sculptor to make a clay idol which is exactly like a particular person, but it is not necessary; what is important is to establish mentally the shape and form of the person on the earthen representation.
Rudolf wrote that what seemed unbelievable actually happened during his experiments.

Before his very eyes he saw some tribesmen compel a tree, through an earthen replica of it, to dry up and wither. The tree, which had been lush, green and healthy, withered, and its leaves became dry. In spite of being watered, within a month the tree became diseased and died. What happened to a tree could happen to a person.
I am talking about these findings of Rudolf because idol worship is a similar experiment but on a large scale. If we can transmit disease or death to a person there is no reason why we cannot establish or re-establish a relationship with those who are dead. It is possible that we can take a jump from the idol into that which is all-pervading and unmanifest.

Do you know why you close your eyes in prayer? You close your eyes during sex, during deep pain. During deep laughter and just when you feel totally tired. It’s not accident some of your best moments can be recalled by your closed eyes. In closed eyes you move from definite to indefinite. You move from form to formless. That’s why across the world irrespective of your religion your deepest prayer is same with closed eyes. Enlightened masters always maintained that God or Godliness is same, but it’s the interpretation which led to religions. I agree with them because I always feel like closing my eyes every time I entered a Mosque, church or temple. When I closed my eyes I always find eternal consciousness of nature.

That’s why child in women’s womb is remembered by closed eyes of the child. This position of womb is always formed in a deep sleep or by a hot milk at the late night.

Closing of eyes is really significant science. Every time you close your eyes your focus on definite item disappears. In other words you are focus less and formless. When you are formless and focus less your energy moves inwards. That’s why when you reach a prayer hall, be it temple or church or mosque or something else you feel like closing your eyes.
The whole basis of idol worship is the relationship between your mind and the cosmic mind. What is needed is just a bridge between the two, and that bridge can be made. The idol is an attempt to create that bridge. Only something which is manifest, like the form of an idol, can become the bridge — because it is not possible for you to establish a direct link with the formless.
Howsoever much one may talk about the formless and the unmanifest, it is mere talk and doesn’t convey anything to you. Whatever experiences your mind has are all experiences of some form and shape; you have no experience of the formless, and words cannot convey anything about that which hasn’t been experienced.

You will go on talking about the formless and continue to live with the form. So if you want to establish a relationship with the formless, you have to make something which on one side has a form and on the other is formless. That is the secret of the idol.
Put differently, we can say that worship is the art of making the idol disappear. It is the art of slowly dropping the manifest and entering into the unmanifest.

Love and lots of it dear ones

Suresh

Photo Copyright Suresh Gundappa 2006

Why does the wife look dominating? She looks dominating because you are also struggling for domination. If you are not struggling for domination she will not look dominating. It is a struggle, because you are after the same goal. And what is wrong if the children follow the mother? But you would like the children to follow you — hence the struggle.”

Try to understand! Everybody is trying to dominate. That is the nature of the ego: to make every effort to dominate the other — whether the other is husband, wife, or children, or friends, makes no difference — to dominate, to find ways and means to dominate.
And if everybody is trying to dominate and you are also trying to dominate there will be struggle. The struggle is not because others are trying to dominate; the struggle is because you are not trying to understand how the ego functions.
You drop out of it! The others cannot be changed, and you will be unnecessarily wasting your life if you try to change the others. That is THEIR problem. They will suffer if they are not understanding, why should you suffer? You simply understand that everybody is trying to dominate, “I drop out of it, I will not try to dominate” …your struggle disappears. And a very beautiful thing happens.
If you don’t try to dominate, the wife starts feeling foolish, and by and by she starts looking silly to herself — because the other is no more there to fight. When you fight you strengthen the other’s ego, and this is a vicious circle.
When you don’t fight then the other feels he is fighting alone, in a vacuum: fighting with the wind or fighting with a ghost, but not fighting with anybody. And then you give an opportunity for the other also to see, to understand. Then the wife cannot throw the responsibility on you, she has to carry her own responsibility.
The same is the problem with everybody because human nature functions similarly, more or less; the differences are only of degrees. If you try to understand, you become a dropout. Not that you drop out of the society, not that you become a hippie and go and make a commune — that is not the point. Psychologically you are no more in these trips of egos, domination, aggression, violence, anger. You are no more part of it. Then a distance is created, a detachedness. Now you can look at things and you can laugh… how foolish man is! And you can laugh… how ridiculous you have always been!
Stop Dominating and start realxing. slowly you will see whatever you wanted to achieve thru dominating you can attain much more in Love. This understanding of Love and life is enough to arrive at Beloved’s home. Infact you life can be love affair with everyone.

Love and lots of it dear ones

Suresh

Copyright Suresh Gundappa 2006

Let your life be as multidimensional as possible, don’t live one-dimensionally. Monks, nuns and the so-called priests have all lived, down the ages, one-dimensionally. They live a very narrow life; they move as trains move, on fixed rails. They go on doing the same ritual, the same prayer, day in, day out, year in, year out, life in, life out; they go on repeating. Their whole life moves in circles. And they are not rich, they cannot be — richness comes by living life in all its dimensions.

A religious person should explore in every possible way, should try to experience life in all its tastes, sweet and bitter, good and bad. The really religious person will be very experimental. He will experiment with music, he will experiment with dance, he will experiment with poetry, with painting, with sculpture, with architecture. He will go on experimenting with everything, everything that becomes available; he will be a child exploring everything. And that makes your inner life rich.

Do you know, all great discoveries are made by people who are not one-dimensional. One-dimensional people can never make discoveries; it is impossible, because a discovery happens only like crossbreeding. A mathematician starts writing poetry: now you can be certain something is on the way. His whole training is that of a mathematician, his approach is that of mathematics, and he starts writing poetry. Now, no poet can write poetry like this; this is going to be something new, because something of the mathematics is bound to filter in. And mathematics and poetry having a meeting is a crossbreeding.

Scientists say children that are born out of crossbreeding are stronger, more beautiful, more intelligent. But man is so stupid that he never learns. Now everybody knows that it is good to bring an American bull for an Indian cow; that is perfectly beautiful and that is being done. But as far as man is concerned we remain stupid. It would be beautiful if people marry different races, different backgrounds, different cultures. A Siberian marrying someone in Africa — then something is really going to happen, some miracle.

All great discoveries up to now have been made by people who were trained for something else, but were courageous enough to enter into arenas where they were amateurs. Less courageous people remain clinging with the thing that they know best. Then they go on doing it their whole life. And the more they do it, the more efficient they become; the more efficient they become, the less capable of trying anything new.

When a man has done many kinds of work — has been a cobbler, has been a carpenter, has been an engineer, has been a painter and a musician — naturally he is very rich. Each woman that he has lived with has imparted some color to him, and each work that he has done has opened a new door into his being. Slowly slowly, many doors of his being are opening; his consciousness expands, he becomes huge, enormous.

You are your experience. Hence, experience more. Before settling, experience as much as possible. The real person never settles; the real person always remains homeless, a wanderer, a vagabond, a vagabond of the soul. He remains continually in search, he remains an inquirer, a learner — he never becomes learned. Don’t be in a hurry to become learned, remain a learner. To become learned is ugly, to remain a learner has tremendous beauty and grace in it, because it is life itself.

Love and lots of it dear ones

Suresh