:: PARENT & CHILD ::

LOVE ARISES OUT OF DEEP RESPECT AND GRATITUDE

Love is not a rational thing. It is not a syllogism: she is your mother; hence you have to love her. Wherever any kind of compulsoriness comes in, love is very delicate and disappears.

Everybody is much more worthy than he can even dream of, to receive love, to share love, to rejoice in making love your very life.

Birth is not in your hands, neither is death in your hands. Between birth and death only one thing is in your hands, and that is love. And unfortunately, that which was your only freedom is not available to everybody.

Read on…..

Everybody is worthy of much more, much more than he is receiving. But the responsibility of not receiving more is yours.

People live a closed life. They keep all their doors and windows of the heart completely shut. It happens because of a natural phenomenon that the child is so small and so helpless, and so dependent and is always in fear; everybody is bigger and more powerful. His experience of fear in the very beginning starts the process of closing the heart.

Fear is a closing process.

Love is just the opposite, the opening process. Unfortunately, the way humanity has lived, it has lived in fear. Even if it loves, it is out of fear. And a love out of fear is absolutely false. It is better to be loveless -- because at least it will go on hurting you to the point that you will have to change -- than to have a substitute false love which consoles you, deceives you and keeps you where you are, a closed being.

The child is told by the parents to love them; it is almost an order. Love cannot be ordered. If through an order something resembling love happens it is false, and deep inside there is hate because nobody wants to be ordered, manipulated. But every parent is manipulating his own children: I am your mother -- love me!

What is so great in being your mother? What is so great in being your father? If there is something great, the child will start loving you and then there will be a totally different world. The child will learn to love on his own, not because you have ordered but because of the way you are.

Love arises out of deep respect and gratitude, seeing your beauty and grandeur, seeing your unconditional love which asks nothing in response, not even love. If the parents can shower the child with love without asking for any response from him, the response will come. And this response will have an authenticity; it will come from the opening of the heart. The child will know that there is no reason to fear. These are not the people to be afraid of; you can open, and this is the beginning of a totally different life. Once you have learned that, the open heart is not only capable of receiving love from your parents, it is also capable of receiving love from the whole existence.

The whole secret is a simple thing -- the opening of the heart. But what actually has been happening is that neither of the parents loves each other. The husband loves because he is a husband; he is supposed to love. The wife loves under submission, because she has been enslaved through marriage; she has to love.

When there is some compulsoriness, the beauty of love disappears and the reality of love changes completely to its opposite. Husband and wife love each other and hate each other too, simultaneously. They hate because they have to love under compulsion, under the rules of society, convention, law. The husband can demand love; the wife can demand love, but it is a demanding love; in subtle ways they demand, not directly.

As the husband comes home... the wife was perfectly okay listening to the radio, looking at the television, singing to herself, and as the husband comes, she immediately lies down and suddenly, the headache!

The story is that Adam was constantly bothering God: first, he was alone and he had no idea that there was something missing in his life. But then he saw a bull doing something to a cow. And he ran to God and said, "What is happening? What is that bull doing to the cow?"

And God said,"You don't bother me again and again. I have told you, the bull is loving the cow." And all the animals and the birds... and Adam was again and again asking. Finally, God became tired and told him, "I will give you a wife also."

And the next day, in the morning, Adam ran after God and said, "Just a minute, please, what is a headache?"

The first night, the very first night of humanity's beginning, and the headache is the first problem that arises -- the wife had a headache.

These are ways of manipulating. When your wife has a headache, naturally you have to be loving. This is not a time to quarrel or fight or to argue or tell her things that she has done wrong. Some other time -- this is not the time; she is already suffering. The headache is a way to ask for your sympathy, but it is not love. The man will show sympathy; and sympathy is ugly in comparison to love. Always remember: all these qualities are relative.

Sympathy is good in comparison to antipathy, but sympathy is very poor and ugly in comparison to love.

You have heard about Albert Einstein's law of relativity. Somebody has reduced it to a simple maxim: the theory of relativity says that it all depends on which side of the toilet door you are. If you are inside time is going fast, and if you are outside time is going slow. It is the same time, just the door is creating the whole trouble.

Love is something that can blossom in its beauty only when unasked, when it is not demanded. When it comes on its own, even unconsciously, it has tremendous beauty. The moment you demand, it may come because the wife is dependent on you... and in certain ways, the husband is dependent on the wife. Love happens between two independent people not between two slaves of each other. And the poor children are brought up by these two persons who themselves don't know the secret of the opening of the heart.

Naturally, they start from the very beginning. The mother goes on saying, "He is your daddy, smile!" as if these things can be ordered. Smile... and the poor child has to smile. Now what is there in this dodo you call daddy that the poor child has to smile? And the poor child does not understand what this fellow has done that he has to smile. But he has to smile; that smile becomes, naturally, a Jimmy Carter smile, absolutely false. The child starts becoming a politician; he smiles because he knows that way he is appreciated, thought to be a beautiful child. If he does not smile, he is thought to be unworthy, and nobody wants to be condemned as unworthy. That's how, slowly, the child starts learning false things: false smiles, false love, false respect.

In a more conscious and authentic world, the husband and the wife should first learn how to remain independent and yet allow love to pass through. They should not come too close. Kahlil Gibran is right when he says to the lovers, "You should stand like the pillars of a temple -- far apart, yet supporting the same roof." Your love should be supported by you, but you should leave enough gap for each to have his own individual territory, his own individual space, his own individuality.

You should not trespass on each other. But what to say of trespassing? Husbands and wives become detectives, FBI agents -- against each other. They are continuously looking out of the corners of their eyes: What is happening? This is not love. This is domination; this is pure animal sexuality. A child is born out of this situation, and unfortunately has to be brought up by these people. They themselves don't know what love is; they missed the train. Now they will train the child to miss the train. And this goes on from generation to generation.

ust the other day, there was a question from Veena -- how to open the heart? It is just like somebody asking how to open the eyes. If you were forced from the very beginning and ordered to open the eyes, perhaps you would have retaliated by closing them. That would have been your assertiveness, your individuality, and you may have forgotten completely how to open the eyes. Now, do you think there can be some training to open the heart, some discipline, some technique? That will be another mistake. You can pretend that your heart is open. That's all that will happen by your discipline and training and technique.

What is needed is a deep understanding of why the heart is closed. There is no need to be worried about opening it. Just knowing why it is closed, you will come upon all those fears that have closed it. Now those fears are not there, but once you have closed the doors and the windows, they have remained closed.

Now nobody is forcing you; now you are grown up enough. You can assert yourself; you can be an individual. You can say to your father, "If you are lovable, I will love, but not because you are my father." You can say to your mother, "Create the quality of lovableness and I will love you -- not only I, but others also will love you -- but not because you are my mother."

Love is not a rational thing. It is not a syllogism: she is your mother; hence you have to love her. Wherever any kind of compulsoriness comes in, love is very delicate and disappears.

Everybody is much more worthy than he can even dream of, to receive love, to share love, to rejoice in making love your very life.

Birth is not in your hands, neither is death in your hands. Between birth and death only one thing is in your hands, and that is love. And unfortunately, that which was your only freedom is not available to everybody.

Prem Neera, you are saying, "Am I worthy of so much?" You are worthy of much more. Just learn to be receptive, just learn to be humble, just learn to be simple, just learn to be trusting. Even if the whole world deceives you, still trust, because that is their problem if they are deceptive; it is not your problem.

What happens? A single man deceives you and you start distrusting the whole of humanity. Do you see the absurdity of it? Even if the whole of humanity deceives you, I say to you, still trust -- because trust is much more valuable; it has an intrinsic value. It does not depend on whether people are trustworthy or not. And if you can trust in spite of their untrustworthiness, you may create a revolution in their hearts also, because they are also as human as you are.

They are also victims of the same society and the same pattern as you are. You are fortunate if you have opened one window. You are fortunate if by accident a door has been flung open. You are fortunate not to be part of the closed humanity.

Now, this little opening has to be made bigger. In fact, a moment has to come in the life of love when all the windows and doors disappear; not only that, but all the walls disappear also.

You are just under the open sky, under the stars and you will be showered from all directions, all dimensions, with so much immense love and blissfulness that you cannot believe why it is happening to you.

It is the only miracle in the world. Walking on water is not a miracle; it is just a stupidity. Turning water into wine is not a miracle; it is a crime. The only miracle I am aware of is a completely, totally open heart. No situation, no condition can close it.

Meditation will help you. Meditation is almost a golden key, a master key which opens many doors.

The Invitation

# 10

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