:: PARENT & CHILD ::

HAPPINESS: Your nature

Society makes you ambitious. From the very childhood when you go to school and ambition is put into you, you are poisoned: grow rich, become powerful, become somebody. Nobody tells you that you already have the capacity to be happy. Everybody says that you can have the capacity to be happy only if you fulfill certain conditions -- that you have enough money, a big house, a big car, and this and that -- only then can you be happy.

Happiness has nothing to do with these things. Happiness is not an achievement. It is your nature. Animals are happy without any money. Animals have no political power -- they are not prime ministers and presidents -- but they are happy. The trees are happy; otherwise they would have stopped blooming. They still bloom; the spring still comes. They still dance, they still sing, they still pour their being into the feet of the divine. Their prayer is continuous, their worship is always happening. And they don't go to any church; there is no need. God comes to them. In the wind, in the rain, in the sun, God comes to them.

Only man is not happy, because man lives in ambition and not in reality. Ambition is a trick. It is a trick to distract your mind. Symbolic life has been substituted for real life.

Watch it in life. The mother cannot love the child as much as the child wants the mother to love him, because the mother is hung up in her head. Her life has not been one of fulfillment. Her love life has been a disaster. She has not been able to flower. She has lived in ambition. She has tried to control her man, possess him. She has been jealous. She has not been a loving woman. If she has not been a loving woman, how can she suddenly be loving to the child?

I was just reading a book of R.D. Laing. He sent me his new book just two, three days ago, THE FACTS OF LIFE. In the book he refers to an experiment in which a psychoanalyst asked many mothers, "When your child was going to be born, were you really in a welcome mood, were you ready to accept the child?" He had made a questionnaire. First question: "Was the child accidental, or did you desire the child?" Ninety percent of the women said, "It was accidental; we did not desire it." Then, "When the pregnancy happened, were you hesitant? Did you want the child, or did you want an abortion? Were you clear about it?" Many of them said that they hesistated for months whether to have an abortion or have the child. Then the child was born -- they could not decide. Maybe other considerations -- maybe the religious consideration: it may create sin for them, it may create hell for them. They may have been Catholics or Hindus or Jainas, and the idea of violence, that abortion is violence, prevented them from getting an abortion. Or social considerations. Or the husband wanted it. Or they would like to have a child as a continuity of their ego. But the child was not liked. Rarely was there a mother who said, "Yes, the child was welcome. I was waiting for him and I was happy." And even of those who said this, the psychiatrist writes, "We were not certain whether they were being honest. They may have been just saying so."

Now a child is born who is unwelcome. From the very beginning the mother has been hesitating whether to have it or not to have it. There must be repercussions. The child must feel these tensions. When the mother would think to abort the child, the child must have felt hurt. The child is part of the mother's body; every vibe will reach the child. Or when the mother thinks and hesitates and is just in a limbo of what to do or what not to do, the child will also feel a trembling, shaking -- he is hanging between death and life. And then somehow the child is born and the mother thinks it is just accidental -- they had tried birth control, they had tried this and that, and everything failed and the child is there -- so one has to tolerate. That tolerance is not love.

The child misses love from the very beginning. And the mother also feels guilty because she is not giving as much love as there would have been naturally. So she starts substituting. She forces the child to eat too much. She cannot fill the child's soul with love; she tries to stuff his body with food. It is a substitute. You can go and see. Mothers are so obsessive. The child says, "I am not hungry," and the mothers go on forcing. They have nothing to do with the child, they don't listen to the child. They are substituting: they cannot give love, so they give food. Then the child grows: they cannot love; they give money. Money becomes a substitute for love.

And the child also learns that money is more important than love. If you don't have love, nothing to be worried about, but you must have money. In life he will become greedy. He will go after money like a maniac. He will not bother about love. He will say, "First things first. I should first have a big balance in the bank. I must have this much money; only then can I afford love."

Now, love needs no money; you can love as you are. And if you think love needs money and you go after money, one day you may have money, and then suddenly you will feel empty because all the years were wasted in accumulating money. And they are not only wasted! All those years were years of no love, so you have practiced no love. Now the money is there, but you don't know how to love. You have forgotten the very language of feeling, the language Or love, the language of ecstasy.

Yes, you can purchase a beautiful woman, but that is not love. You can purchase the most beautiful woman of the world, but that is not love. And she will be coming to you not because she loves you; she will be coming to you because of your bank balance.

Mulla Nasrudin was in love with a woman -- very homely and ordinary, but she had much money and she was the only child of her father, and the father was old and dying. Mulla was deeply in love with the woman, and one day he went to her very excitedly because the father was approaching death very fast -- and he said, "I am dying." Mulla said to the woman, "I am dying; I cannot live without you a single moment." She said, "That's okay, but I have bad news for you. My father has made a will, and he has given all his money to a trust and I am not going to get any money. Mulla, do you love me still?" Mulla said, "I love you, and I will always love you -- though I will never see you again. But I will always love you and I will always remember you!"

All love disappears. This is symbolic; money is a symbol. Power, political power, is a symbol. Respectability is a symbol. These are not realities; these are human projections. These are not objectives; they have no objectivity. They are not there. They are just dreams projected by a miserable mind. If you want to be ecstatic you will have to drop out of the symbolic. To be freed of the symbolic is to be freed of the society. To be freed of the symbolic is to become a sannyasin. To be freed of the symbolic you have taken courage to enter into the real. And only the real is real. The symbolic is not real.”

Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language
# 9