Question 3

"BELOVED OSHO,

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT FOR ME TO HAVE DIRECT EYE CONTACT WITH ANOTHER PERSON?"

The question is from Kirtan. There can be many reasons. One can be that your past lives have been in the Eastern hemisphere where it is thought to be graceful for a woman to keep her eyes down, not to have eye-to-eye contact. It is thought to be rude, a little violent. So in the East no woman has experienced eye-to-eye contact.

It is possible you have carried it from your past life. And it seems to me that it must be the case because you also carry the feeling that you are unworthy. That too is a teaching in the East for all women: to be a woman is to be unworthy, because from the body of the woman enlightenment is not possible. First she has to be born as a man and only then can she work towards it. And you have not been just in the East...

You may have been a nun, a Buddhist nun, a Jaina nun. They are not allowed to look more than four feet ahead of them. It looks strange even talking with them because they are not looking at you, they are looking four feet ahead on the ground. They are trying to listen to you, they may answer you, but they will not look at you. And the reason seems to be that a nun cannot have an intimate relationship with anybody.

Psychologists have discovered that if you look at somebody's eyes for just two to three seconds, it can be accepted; it is just casual. But if you look longer than that, then it is not casual; then you are trying to interfere in the very individuality of the other person. And if the other person happens to be a woman it is absolutely immoral. That is the Eastern way: that you should not look into the eyes too long.

You will be surprised to know that the Hindustani word for scoundrel is luchcha, and that will give you insight into the problem we are talking about. The word luchcha comes from lochan, and lochan means eyes. A luchcha is one who has been staring at you and has passed the casual limit. He is not a civilized man. He is behaving in an ugly way.

The Hindi, Hindustani, word for a critic is aalochak. That also comes from lochan. The critic has to look into things, not casually but as deeply as he can; only then can he find what is wrong or what is right. Criticism is possible only if you look deep enough. Aalochak and luchcha linguistically mean the same, but their use is different. Both come from staring.Now the trouble with you is you were born in the West with an Eastern mind, and the new fashion in the West is to stare eye to eye. It is thought to be honest, sincere, and there is some truth in it. If the man with whom you are talking goes on looking sideways, never looks at you directly, he shows... it indicates with certainty that he's hiding something. He is afraid to be caught and he does not want to look into your eyes because eyes are very revealing. They reveal your whole being. If somebody knows how to read your eyes, just looking into your eyes he can know much; he need not ask anything.In India, the Indian medicine called ayurveda takes it to the extreme. One of the great ayurvedic physicians, a man who has been the president of the All-India Ayurvedic Physicians, told me that if a physician cannot, just by looking into your eyes, at your tongue, feeling your pulse... if he cannot find what disease you are suffering from he is not worth calling a physician. He should move to the veterinary college.

To the allopathic physicians the ayurvedic doctors are similar to the veterinarian doctors. Animals cannot speak, so you have to figure out what sickness they have. Man can speak and you can ask him, but ayurvedic medicine says that even though man can speak, he cannot really say the real source of his disease. He may talk about symptoms -- that he has a headache or something -- but the causes have to be found by the physician. And they don't have any sophisticated means -- just the pulse beat, looking into the eyes, looking at the tongue.

To them, the tongue gives all the information about the stomach. The eyes give them all the information about the psychology of the man. And the pulse gives them all the information about the body and its state. And that's enough.You will be surprised: if you go to a real ayurvedic physician who has not got mixed up with allopathy he will not ask you what the problem is. He will simply take your pulse, look into your eyes, look at your tongue -- that's all. And then he starts prescribing the medicines that you have to take.

I asked this man, "Just by looking into the eyes what can you find out about the mind?" and he said, "Almost everything that is needed for our purpose."

An innocent man, a truthful man, a sincere man, will have a different quality -- a softness, a depth to his eyes. The superficial man will not have the depth; cunningness will show from his eyes.

So, Kirtan, if you cannot look directly into people's eyes, there is no need. You are not a physician and you don't need it. What is needed is to look within yourself, not into somebody else's eyes.

And you have a history of past lives in the East, where the woman has been brought up for centuries to be graceful. This is part of her grace -- not to look into your eyes. In the East that is done only by prostitutes. The Eastern woman has a certain way of being humble, not aggressive. Looking into the eyes of other persons is aggression, it is not grace. My own experience is that the grace that the East has developed in women has made them more beautiful.

Sometimes I have wondered... When I have seen pictures of national beauties, Miss Universes, I wondered that something seems to be basically wrong. In the East they cannot be accepted as a Miss Universe. Their whole behavior is ugly: their faces don't show grace, their eyes don't show grace, and they are almost naked walking on the stage before thousands of people. That means they have degraded themselves to be just objects of sexual perversion. All these competitions are nothing but man's inventions for pornography.

In the East it is not possible. And the farther back you go, you will find more and more grace. Today in the modern cities of the East you will not even find that grace because they are almost westernized, trying to copy the West. The real Eastern beauty is still in the interior parts of those countries, where the West has not been very influential. Their gestures, their movements, their looking -- everything has a certain superhuman quality to it.

So don't be worried about it. Don't make it a problem; use it. Rather than looking into somebody else's eyes, look within yourself. That is where real insight is needed, deep insight is needed.