In Orgasm You are Part of God The Shadow Of The Whip #7

[A sannyasin asks if participating in groups together with her husband would help their relationship.]

Groups never help as far as staying together is concerned. If you want to separate, a group is very helpful, because the whole process is to make one aware of certain things that one does not want to become aware of. For example if a marriage has failed, still the mind goes on hoping. The group will make you aware that it has failed, and the hope is futile -- abandon hope. The group never gives you any hope -- it simply makes you aware of the fact that it didn't work. If it didn't work for thirty years, how is it going to work? But the human mind clings... even goes on clinging to misery just in the hope that something may turn up, something may happen. That's how you have remained your whole life, and the more you remain with a certain misery, the more difficult it becomes to get out of it.

So a group process won't help. If you want to try again, it is better not to go to the group -- it will break you immediately, because a group process is a very authentic process. It has nothing to do with your desires, with your wishes, dreams. It has no 'should'. It simply makes you aware -- of the naked fact that if something has not worked for thirty years, it is not going to work. The mind still wants to hope -- that's how you have been hoping for thirty years. You have wasted thirty years. You could have got out after three years, then these twenty-seven years you would have lived totally differently... you would have been a totally different person. But even now the same hope....

So nothing changes -- this hope is old, it is nothing new. It is not for the first time you are hoping; you have been hoping all these years. So the hope is old, and with the old hope you remain the old. So don't go through a group process if you really want to be together, because the group process has nothing to do with your marriage, nothing to do with your 'shoulds' -- how it should be, that once married then you should remain married to the person forever. The group process has nothing to do with any religion, any morality. It simply brings your naked truth to you and makes you courageous enough to accept it. So if somebody is going for a separation, I always suggest, 'Go and do a group.' But if you are going to try again with your old hope, the group will be the last thing to be suggested by me, because it is not going to help.

So just go and try again! If you want to try, you have to try. It is your life, and if you want to try it again, there is no problem about it. Go and try once more and see what happens. If things work, good... because sometimes that too happens. You may get tired, and if you really want the marriage to work, mm? you may stop creating old tricks, old games that you were playing before. If you drop them, if you really want, authentically want to make it work, and you drop all your old patterns, and you become absolutely new, at least on your side -- on the other's side you cannot do anything, but if you change completely, there is the fifty percent possibility that the other may start changing.

[She answers: This is my hope.]

So just go and try. But because of this hope, I think you will not be different. This hope is old -- this hope is not new. If you listen to me, I will tell you, 'Go without any hope, and try!' But don't go with any hope -- then at least you are doing something new. Just go without hope, because for thirty years you have been hoping, and it has not worked -- so at least drop hope!

I'm not saying don't try -- try, but this time without any hope, because when you try with a hope, you falsify, you project, you imagine; you don't see the fact of it. Hope is a poison, a drug. All these people moving on the streets, living in misery, and going back again to their misery in a vicious circle -- why are they doing all this? They are drugged by hope. They are all addicts -- hope addicts. In the morning they think they are finished. They are not going back home. They will kill themselves or do something, but they are not coming. By the evening again the hope arises. They think, 'Maybe the wife has changed, or I have changed, and who knows about tomorrow? Let us try once more.' And this way it goes on and on and on....

So abandon hope, and simply go free cf hope. You will be freer, more relaxed, because there is no need to force it to work. You know that you are not hoping for anything and so there will be no frustration. If it doesn't work there is no problem; no problem arises out of its non-working. You know beforehand that it is not going to work, so there is nothing to cry and weep and create any scene about.

If you go without hope, you are going as a new person. Murti may be surprised and that may start a chain of change. And tell him that you have not come with any hope -- you have come fully aware that the more likely possibility is that it won't work, because thirty years' experience is enough. Maybe you are such a person, he is such a person, that you don't fit. But one last experiment and this time without any hope, and with no expectations. No effort to dominate him, no effort to change him -- that you have done. This time, you have come to experiment on your own -- he will be on the periphery.

You are trying on your own If it is you who are not fitting with him, then you will do your best to fit. If it is he who is not fitting with you, then you are finished, then you are helpless. But there is no frustration in it -- just a last experiment, a last try. But make it very clear that you have not come with any hope.

If you are hoping too much, you start thinking in terms of ideals, and that is cause of much conflict. It is very difficult for a woman to think that her husband is ordinary. She thinks he is a hero, a saint or something -- all rubbish! And not only does she think, she tries to make a saint out of him. And then there is difficulty -- he is an ordinary human being. Just by being your husband, he has not decided to become a martyr or a saint or anything, mm? He is just an ordinary human being, with all imperfections, all limitations, all the flaws that human beings are prone to.

So if you don't hope, you will not create an idea that he is a saint or he has to be a saint. This is my experience -- that out of a hundred cases, it is seventy to eighty percent of the time women are who are responsible for destroying their marriage, because they are the more dreamy of the partners in the game. They dream too much, they romanticise too much. They have great ideas of how the husband should be, and these ideas cannot be fulfilled. If the husband tries to fulfill them, he will be almost on the gallows! He will be under such a strain that he will drop dead because it will be moving out of his normality, his naturalness. So that is impossible. And if he tries to be natural, as he is, and as he should be, then the woman is not satisfied.

Men look for physical beauty in women, and women look for something spiritual, something moral in men. They can tolerate a very homely looking person -- that is not difficult; they don't bother about physical beauty much, but something of a psychological grace, something of spirituality. That's why women become easily attracted to spiritual people -- very easily. They have a knack, a feeling, for where spirituality is. That's what they have been continually hankering for. They wanted to see all that in their husband: maybe he is a Jesus or a Buddha. He is not!

And the problem is, if you get Buddha as a husband, you will not be satisfied then too, because he will be too much of the other world; then there is a problem. So impossible is the hope. In the first place, it is not possible that you can find a Buddha for a husband. In the second place, if it happens at all you will not be satisfied, because he will be so other-worldly, so cool, that he will not have any passion.

What a woman is hankering for is the impossible: the man should be rooted in the earth, and should be from the beyond... should be like a Buddha, and yet a husband. This is not possible. Either Buddhas escape, leave their wives and go to the Himalayas, or even if they remain in their houses they become statues, they become so cool. Then too they are almost dead; the wife is a widow. The husband is alive, but the wife is a widow! Then too it is not satisfying.

So look at this: maybe it is your hoping too much, desiring too much, that has destroyed and corrupted the whole relationship.

And always remember that at the source of your misery you must be there, not the other one. If Murti is suffering, that will be his misery -- it has nothing to do with you -- but if you are suffering, it is your responsibility. So this time, go without hope. Go with no idea of changing Murti -- that you have tried. This time go and accept him totally as he is -- howsoever hard it is. If you really want it to work, then accept him as he is, and tell him, 'I have come without any expectations this time. You be as you are -- you be natural. I have dropped all idealism. Just be natural. And if something has to be done, then I have to do it, because now it is my decision to try once more, so it is my responsibility.' If you go with this idea, there is a possibility it may work. But if you go with hope, you go with the old.

I was thinking that when you go I was going to say to you to go without hope. Go completely free, and then the experiment will have beauty to it, and then he will not feel that you have come back again, and just the whole old story starts again. He will not feel that. So from the very beginning just make everything clear. The first moment you see him, tell him everything.

And if it doesn't work, then simply say good-bye and come back. Then forget all about it. Mm? start anew.

But I have a feeling it can work, mm? Let me hope, but you go without hope! Mm? Good!

[A sannyasin says: My life is rather changed since I've been here. But there is something going wrong, because I feel I'm not at all interested in sex and relationship, and I cannot really be transcending sex through meditating because I've never really been in touch with the in-things, so perhaps I'm avoiding something.]

I have been watching you. There are two problems -- in fact, just two aspects of the one problem. One aspect is that you are very much afraid that maybe you are going to lose your interest in sex forever; that is one. That is absolutely unbased. There is no need to be afraid of it. When in the beginning one starts meditating, it happens. It is the same energy that was involved in sex. The same energy starts moving towards meditation. So for the time being, for a period of at least six, twelve weeks at the most, one feels as if one is not interested in sex, in love. Once the meditation has settled, for the first time you will know that now your sexual quality is totally different -- very deep-going. It is becoming more loving, more tender, soft. It is losing violence and neurosis. It is no more an obsession -- it is a flowering, very natural.

For the first time you will see what sex should be. Ordinarily people are just obsessed by sex. It is not a natural thing. It is almost like a burden... a constant worry about it. It is more like a performance; it is more like a duty that one has to do. If you do it, you don't gain much. If you don't do it, you feel you are losing much; maybe you are missing something. So it is a very vicious circle -- and that's what has been up to now.

So before sex becomes normal and natural, there will be a time in which you will lose interest -- in that time don't be afraid. You are not going to become a buddhist nun -- don't be afraid, mm? And by chance you had to listen to Buddha lectures, mm? so that created much fear in you -- that I am trying to make a buddhist nun of everybody. No, you are not going to become a nun, and I am not in favour of nuns -- that is again another neurosis.

A few are neurotically in favour of sex; a few are neurotically against it. A natural person is neither for nor against. It is not a problem at all. One is simply as attuned to natural things as one is attuned to breathing. One is neither for breathing nor against breathing. One does not even think about it. Sex should be exactly that way.

So within a few weeks it will settle. Now these few weeks will be difficult, and if you don't put your energy into meditation more, it will take a longer time to settle. If you put your whole energy into it... the body is ready to, that's why the interest in sex has disappeared. The body is ready to take the jump -- you are apprehensive. Relax and take the jump. Within a few weeks meditation will settle and there will be no need for this much energy to be engaged there. Then your energy can become available again for sex, and it will be on a new, higher altitude. It will become more meditative.

Sex and meditation are not opposite things. Sex is a sort of meditation, and meditation is a sort of sexual experience. In fact this is my statement: that people have become aware about meditation only because of sex. The first meditator must have come to know about meditation through sex -- there is no other way. Meditation is born out of deep sexual experience, because that is a natural way to meditate. That is the only natural way available in which you can move totally, without holding anything. You can simply go beyond the mind. Thinking stops in a deep sexual experience -- and time too. One is aware neither of time nor of mind. One is simply a presence -- one is not even aware of the body. One is -- without body, without mind. In a deep sexual experience, one forgets whether one is man or woman. And when the orgasm really showers, you are part of God.

Sex is a great natural blessing. And through sex people have experienced their first glimpses of meditation. Only then, by and by, they developed the meditation techniques. And once a person becomes able to move into a deep meditative technique suddenly he knows the experience is the same. Then it is for you to choose -- both are available. If you feel like moving into sex and relating to somebody -- good! If you don't feel like it, you can have the same experience through meditation. Meditation is in fact an inner auto-eroticism. In sex the other is needed, and because of the other there are a thousand and one complexities.

In meditation the other is not needed. Your own inner woman and man meet in a deep communion and dissolve. The same happens inside the heart, in your innermost core of being. So right now put all your energies into meditation. And don't be afraid!

The day you want your sex back, I will just move my hand and it will be back. You just tell me -- the day you want it back, it will be back; there is no problem in it. It is very simple. In fact, to take somebody away from sex is very difficult. To bring them back to sex is very simple -- because it is a fall, it is downhill. So it is very simple. It is just a push and your car goes downhill without any petrol. So don't be worried. But put more of your energies into meditations. Good. Very good!

[A sannyasin says: Last time you told me not to be afraid to feel anything. And I felt the bottom of many things and the top of many things. I felt fear all through my body... And love. A lot of fear and sadness -- and love too.]

Good. Everybody has great fear deep down. We never go that deep so we don't become aware of it. When a child is born, with the birth, death is born. So the first experience of life is entangled with death. Once a child is born only one thing is certain -- that he will die; nothing else is certain. He may succeed in the world, may not succeed; he may remain a bachelor or may get married; he may earn much money or become a sannyasin. Nobody knows, nothing is certain. But one thing is absolutely certain -- that he will die... maybe after seventy years, sixty years, or twenty years or a hundred years; that is irrelevant, time is not relevant. One thing is absolutely certain: once you are born, you will die.

So the first circle around the child is of death. And it remains there -- the fear of death. So you do many things, mm? You get involved in many things, occupied in many ways, but behind it all somewhere, death waits. And when you start encountering your inner feelings, fear will arise again. Don't be escaping from it -- accept it. If it is so, it is.

If you accept it and still go on looking deeper, you will find that behind fear is death, and you will pass through an experience of death. That's why sadness is just lurking behind fear. That is the shadow of death. And if you can live with death too, you will penetrate into a new world that is of life. So the first centre is life, the first circle around life is death, and of course with death is sadness, fear, and then layer upon layer like an onion.

If you go on peeling an onion, the onion of man, these things will happen. But finally at the very core of it is life, so one just has to go on digging.

One day suddenly, all layers are broken, there is a break-through, and you are standing face to face with life, with eternal life. Call it God, truth or whatever.

So, good! Don't be disturbed by it; you are on the right track. But accept these things -- there is no need to escape from them or hide yourself somewhere.

[She answers: But I felt myself fighting so much... so many no's inside me.]

That may be because of fear. Fear always says 'no'. It is only fearlessness which says 'yes'. To say yes, one needs to be very brave. To say no is nothing, even a coward can say no. To say yes, one needs great intelligence; to say no, no intelligence is needed. That fear may be the cause of all your no's. But stick to it. Don't waver here and there, and don't look sideways -- go on looking into it. It will be painful, but if you can prolong this process for a few days more, one day suddenly you will see that fear has gone and there is death, darkness... abysmal dark, an infinite darkness and you are lost in it as if you are dying.

When death is there, fear will disappear -- this is one of the most beautiful things. When a person is really facing death all fear disappears because now there is no point. Fear is always of the future. If somebody comes with a dagger and puts it on your heart, you will not be afraid. In that moment you will simply look like a child, innocent, there will be no fear at all. But if somebody says, 'I will kill you tomorrow', the whole night you will be afraid because tomorrow is in the future.

So go on facing this fear, and one day suddenly there will be a great explosion of darkness. Christian mystics have the right name for it: they call it 'the dark night of the soul'. If one can pass through the darkness of the soul, then there is the mom, the dawn, the sunrise, and one is for the first time, really alive. But one has to pay for it -- and for all these things a price is to be paid. It is not cheap -- it is arduous and hard. Just go on with it. Mm?