Fear and the Four Stages of Love
Fear is a negativity, an
absence. This has to be understood very, very deeply. If you
miss there you will never be able to understand the nature
of fear. It is like darkness. Darkness does not exist, it
only appears to be. In fact it is just an absence of light.
Light exists; remove the light - there is darkness.
Darkness does not exist, you cannot remove darkness. Do
whatsoever you want to do, you cannot remove darkness. You
cannot bring it, you cannot throw it. If you have to do
something with darkness, you will have to do something with
light, because only something which has an existence can be
related to. Put the light off, darkness is there; put the
light on, darkness is not there - but you do something with
LIGHT. You cannot do anything with darkness.
Fear is darkness. It is absence of love. You cannot do
anything about it, and the more you do, the more you will
become fearful because then the more you will find it
impossible.
The problem will become more and more complicated. If you
fight with darkness you will be defeated. You can bring a
sword and try to kill the darkness: you will only be
exhausted. And, finally, the mind will think: Darkness is so
powerful, that's why I am defeated.
This is where logic goes wrong. It is absolutely logical
that if you have been struggling with darkness and you could
not defeat it, could not destroy it; it is absolutely
logical to come then to the conclusion that darkness is
very, very powerful. I am impotent before it. But the
reality is just the opposite. You are not impotent, darkness
is impotent. In fact darkness is not there - that's why you
could not defeat it. How can you defeat something which is
not?
Don't fight with the fear otherwise you will become more and
more afraid: and a new fear will enter into your being, that
is: fear of fear, which is very dangerous. In the first
place fear is absence and in the second place the fear of
fear is the fear of the absence of absence. Then you go into
a madness. You have taken a wrong step.
Fear is nothing but absence of love. Do something with love,
forget about fear. If you love well, fear disappears. If you
love deeply, fear is not found. Whenever you have been in
love with someone, ever for a single moment, was there any
fear? It has never been found in any relationship - if even
for a single moment two persons are in deep love and a
meeting happens, they are tuned to each other, in that
moment fear has never been found. Just as if the light is on
and darkness has not been found There is the secret key:
Love more.
If you feel there is fear in your being - love more. Be
courageous in love, take courage. Be adventurous in love,
love more, and love unconditionally, because the more you
love the less will be the fear. And when I say love I mean
all the four layers of love: from sex to samadhi.
Love deeply.
1. Sex
If you love deeply in a sexual relationship much fear will
disappear from the body. If your body trembles in fear, it
is the fear of sex; you have not been in a deep sexual
relationship. Your body trembles, your body is not at ease,
at home.
Love deeply - a sexual orgasm will dispel all fear out of
the body. When I say it will dispel all fear I don't mean
that you will become brave because brave people are nothing
but cowards upside down. When I say all fear will disappear
I mean there will be no cowardice and no bravery. Those are
two aspects of fear. Look at your brave people: you will
find that deep inside they are afraid, they have created
just an armour around them. Bravery is not fearlessness, it
is fear well-protected, well-defended, armoured.
When fear disappears you become fearless. And a fearless
person is one who never creates fear in anybody, and who
never allows anybody to create fear in him.
Deep sexual orgasm gives body at-homeness. A very, very deep
health happens in the body because the body feels whole.
2. Love
Then the second step is love. Love people - unconditionally.
If you have some conditions in the mind then you will never
be able to love - those conditions will become barriers.
Because love is beneficial to you why bother about
conditions? It is so beneficial, it is such a deep
well-being that - love unconditionally; don't ask anything
in return. If you can come to understand that just by loving
people you grow in fearlessness, you will love! For the
sheer joy of it!
Ordinarily people love only when their conditions are
fulfilled. They say: You should be like this - only then
will I love. A mother says to the child: I'll love you only
if you behave. A wife says to the husband: You have to be
this way, only then can I love you. Everybody creates
conditions; love disappears.
Love is an infinite sky! You cannot force it into narrow
spaces: conditioned, limited.
This is a deep problem for the whole humanity. It has been a
problem. When you fall in love everything looks beautiful,
because in those moments you don't put conditions. Two
persons move near each other unconditionally. Once they have
settled, once they have started taking each other for
granted, then conditions are being imposed: You should be
like this, you should behave like that - only then will I
love: as if love is a bargain.
You don't love out of your fullness of heart, you are
bargaining. You want to force the other person to do
something for you, only then will you love. Otherwise you
will betray your love. Now you are using your love as a
punishment, or as an enforcement. But you are not loving.
Either you are trying to withhold your love or you are
giving your love but in both cases love in itself is not the
end; something else is.
When you do such things you are forgetting that when you
love it is beneficial to you, not only to others. In the
first place love helps those who love, in the second place
it helps those who are being loved.
And as I see it, people come to me, they always say: The
other is not loving me. Nobody comes and says: I am not
loving the other. Love has become a demand - the other is
not loving me! Forget about the other! Love is such a
beautiful phenomenon, if you love you will enjoy.
And the more you love, the more you become loveable. The
less you love and the more you demand that others should
love you, the less and less you are loveable, the more and
more you become closed, confined to your ego. And you become
touchy. Even if somebody approaches you to love you, you
become afraid, because in every love there is a possibility
of rejection, withdrawal.
You protect yourself. You don't allow anybody to love you
and you don't love others. Then there is fear. Then you are
alone in the world, so alone, so lonely, not connected.
What is fear then? Fear is a feeling of no contact with
existence Let this be the definition of fear: a state of no
contact with existence is fear. This comes up because you
are brought up in such a way that you don't allow love to
happen. The whole of humanity has been trained for other
things, not for love.
To kill, we have been trained: and armies exist. Years of
training to kill! To calculate, we have been trained:
colleges, universities exist. Years of training just to
calculate so that nobody can deceive you and you can deceive
others. But nowhere is there any opportunity available where
you are allowed to love - and love in freedom.
In fact, not only that, the society hinders every effort to
love. Parents don't like their children to fall in love. No
father likes it, no mother likes it; whatsoever their
pretensions, no father, no mother likes their children to
fall in love.
The family is against love. You must have heard that the
family is the source of love, but I tell you a family is
against love. The family has existed by killing love, it has
not allowed love to happen.
The society does not allow love because if a person is
really in deep love he cannot be manipulated. You cannot
send him to war; he will say: I am so happy! Where are you
sending me? And why should I go and kill strangers who may
be happy in their home? And we have no conflict, no clash of
interests...
If the young generation. moves deeper and deeper in love,
wars will disappear because you will not be able to find
enough mad people to go to war. If you love, you have tasted
something of life; you would not like death and killing
people. When you don't love you have not tasted something of
life; you love death.
Fear kills, wants to kill. Fear is destructive, love is a
creative energy. When you love you would like to create -
you may like to sing a song, or paint, or create poetry, but
you would not take a bayonet, or an atom bomb, and go
rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown
to you, who have done nothing; who are as unknown to you as
you are unknown to them.
The world will drop wars only when love enters into the
world again. Politicians don't want you to love, the society
does not want you to love, the family doesn't allow you to
love: they all want to control your love energy because that
is the only energy there is. That's why there is fear.
If you understand me well drop all fears and love more and
love unconditionlly - and don't think that you are doing
something for the other when you love, you are doing
something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to
you. So don't wait; don't say that when others love, you
will love - that is not the point at all.
Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people - you will be
fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more
blessedness through it.
And when love goes deeper fear disappears; love is the
light, fear is darkness.
3. Prayer
And then there is the third stage of love - prayer.
Churches, religions, organized sects - they teach you to
pray. But in fact they hinder you from praying because
prayer is a spontaneous phenomenon, it cannot be taught. If
you have been taught a prayer in your childhood you have
been debarred from a beautiful experience that may have
happened. Prayer is a spontaneous phenomenon. Religions,
organized churches, have destroyed it. They have given you
readymade prayers. Prayer is a spontaneous feeling.
Let your prayer be a spontaneous phenomenon. If even your
prayer cannot be spontaneous, then what will be? If even
with God you have to be readymade then where will you be
authentic and true and natural?
Say things that you would like to say. Talk to him as you
would talk to a wise friend. But don't bring formalities in.
A formal relationship is not a relationship at all. And you
have become formal with God also. You miss all
spontaneousness.
Bring love into prayer. Then you can talk! It is a beautiful
thing - a dialogue with the universe.
But have you watched? If you are really spontaneous, people
will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start
talking, or to a flower, a rose, people will think you are
mad. If you go to the church and talk to the cross or to the
image, nobody will think you are mad, they will think you
are religious. You are talking to a stone in the temple and
everybody thinks you are religious because this is the
authorized form.
If you talk to a rose - which is more alive than any stone
image, which is more divine than any stone image; if you
talk to a tree - which is more deeply rooted in God than any
cross, because no cross has roots, it is a dead thing that's
why it kills; a tree is alive, with roots deep into the
earth, branches high into the sky, connected with the whole,
with the rays of the sun, with the stars - talk to the
trees! That can be a contact point with the divine, but if
you talk that way people will think you are mad.
Spontaneousness is thought to be madness. Formalities are
thought to be sanity. Just the opposite is the reality. When
you go into a temple and you simply repeat some crammed
prayer you are simply foolish. Have a heart-to-heart talk!
And prayer is beautiful. You will start flowering through
it. Prayer is to be in love - to be in love with the whole.
And sometimes you get angry with the whole and you don't
talk; that's beautiful. And you say: I will not talk, enough
is enough, and you have not been listening to me! A
beautiful gesture. Not dead. And sometimes you drop praying
completely, because you go on praying and God is not
listening.
It is a relationship with deep involvement in it. You get
angry. Sometimes you feel very good, feel thankful,
grateful; sometimes you feel put off; but let it be a living
relationship; then prayer is true. If you just go on like a
gramophone and repeat the same thing every day, you are not
doing any prayer, it is not prayer.
I have heard about an advocate who was a very calculating
man. Every night he would go to bed, look at the sky and
say: Ditto. Just like the other days. And go to sleep. Only
once he prayed - the first time in his life - and then:
Ditto. It was like a legal thing; what was the point in
saying the same prayer again?
Whether you say ditto or you repeat the whole thing it is
the same. Prayer should be a lived experience, a
heart-to-heart dialogue. And soon, if it is hearty, you will
feel that not only are you talking, but the response is
there. Then prayer has come into its own, come of age. When
you feel the response, that not only you are talking - if it
is a monologue it is still not prayer - it becomes a
dialogue, you not only speak, you listen.
And I tell you the whole existence is ready to respond. Once
your heart is open the whole responds.
There is nothing like prayer. No love can be as beautiful as
prayer. Just as no sex can be as beautiful as love, no love
can be as beautiful as prayer.
4. Meditation
But then there is the fourth stage which I call meditation. There dialogue also ceases. Then you have a dialogue in silence. Words drop, because when the heart is really full you cannot speak. When the heart is too overflowing only silence can be the medium. Then there is no other. You are one with the universe. You neither say anything nor listen to anything. You are with the one, with the universe, with the whole. A oneness. This is meditation.
These are the four stages of love
On each stage there
will be a disappearance of fear. If sex happens beautifully
the body fear will disappear. The body will not be neurotic.
Ordinarily - I have observed thousands of bodies - they are
neurotic. Bodies gone mad. Not fulfilled. Not at home.
If love happens, fear will disappear from the mind. You will
have a life of freedom, at ease, at-homeness. No fear will
come, no nightmares.
If the prayer happens, then fear completely disappears,
because with prayer you become one - you start feeling a
deep relationship with the whole. From the spirit, fear
disappears; the fear of death disappears when you pray -
never before it.
And when you meditate even fearlessness disappears. Fear
disappears, fearlessness disappears. Nothing remains. Or,
only the nothing remains. A vast purity, virginity,
innocence.