THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...
THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...
THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...
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<strong>THE</strong> <strong>DHAMMAPADA</strong>: <strong>THE</strong> <strong>WAY</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>BUDDHA</strong>, <strong>VOL</strong>. 9-<strong>12</strong> 215<br />
the capitalist society, the bourgeois culture, the Freudian unconscious... and now you will call it growing pains.<br />
But you are simply shifting the responsibility.<br />
<strong>The</strong> real thing is that you are suffering from your expectations. When they are not fulfilled and they are never<br />
going to be fulfilled frustration arises, failure arises, and you feel neglected, as if existence does not care for you.<br />
Drop expectations for the future. Remain open, remain available to whatsoever happens, but don’t plan ahead.<br />
Don’t make any psychological, fixed ideas about the future that things should be like this and much more<br />
suffering will disappear. <strong>The</strong>se two are the root causes of suffering.<br />
And the third is: the Human Potential movement lacks something essential. It tries to help you to grow, but<br />
it has not yet been able to create a meditative space in you. So there is constant struggle, effort, will, but no<br />
relaxation, no rest. Hence the third thing to be remembered and all suffering will disappear: create meditative<br />
energy, create a meditative space within you. Western methods lack that something which is very essential.<br />
That’s why here in my commune the effort is to use all the Western methods side by side with all the Eastern<br />
methods. This may be the only place in the whole world today where East and West are really meeting, and<br />
not meeting in a diplomatic way as they meet in the UN. Here they are really merging not politically, not<br />
diplomatically, because a diplomatic meeting is not a meeting, it is only a facade, it is pseudo. It is a love meeting<br />
that is happening here. For the first time East and West are in a love affair.<br />
<strong>The</strong> West has grown a few very important methods: gestalt, encounter, primal, bio-energetics and many more.<br />
<strong>The</strong> East has also grown many methods: zazen, Vipassana, Sufi whirling, yoga, Tantra. <strong>The</strong>ir approaches are<br />
different, so different that both are only halves of one whole; hence both lack something. <strong>The</strong> Eastern methods<br />
can create a meditative space, but they make you so introverted that you start escaping from life; all Eastern<br />
methods have proved escapist in the past. You want to go to a monastery, you want to go to the Himalayas, you<br />
want to go to a cave somewhere and to live alone. <strong>The</strong>y teach you how to be alone, joyously alone but then<br />
something is missed.<br />
Life is also relationship, life is also togetherness, life is also communion. It is beautiful to be blissful when you<br />
are alone, but that is only half the story; you should be blissful also when you are together with someone. And<br />
when you are blissful with someone, the bliss reaches a higher peak. When you are alone you are like a solo flute<br />
player; when you are blissful together in relationship, the music is more like an orchestra.<br />
<strong>The</strong> West has created methods which give you more impetus to be extroverts. <strong>The</strong>y allow you methods, skills<br />
to relate, and to enjoy relationship. <strong>The</strong>y are love methods, but something is missing. You enjoy relationship,<br />
but whenever you are alone... and essentially you are alone. You are born alone and you will die alone, and at<br />
the deepest core of your being you are always alone. So on the surface you remain happy, but deep down a subtle<br />
current of misery continues. You cannot encounter yourself, you cannot face yourself, you cannot meet yourself.<br />
<strong>The</strong> West has failed because all that it has developed is extroversion; the East has failed because all that it has<br />
developed is introversion. And man is neither extrovert nor introvert.<br />
I would like it to be on record that Carl Gustav Jung’s typology is absolutely wrong. Man cannot be divided<br />
so easily into categories that somebody is an extrovert and somebody is an introvert because man is a totality, a<br />
wholeness. He has an inside and he has an outside, and both have to be nourished and both have to be fulfilled.<br />
So if you are only following Western methods you will be going through much pain because you will not be able<br />
to create a meditative space through them. If you are following only Eastern methods you will be able to create<br />
a meditative space, but you will become absolutely useless in the world, and you will miss the enrichment that<br />
comes with communion with other human beings.<br />
My effort here is to create the first synthesis between extroversion and introversion and help man to become<br />
so capable of both, together, simultaneously, so easily able to move from extroversion to introversion and from<br />
introversion to extroversion, that there is no need to divide man into such categories. Man can become so fluid.<br />
It is as simple as when you come out of your house: you don’t think that you are becoming extrovert coming<br />
out of your house. When you feel it is cold inside and outside there are no clouds and it is so sunny, you come<br />
out, but you don’t think at all. You don’t decide, ”Now I want to be an extrovert.” Or when the sun becomes too<br />
hot and you start feeling the heat, you don’t make a deliberate decision, ”I should go in. Now I want to be an<br />
introvert.” No, when the sun is too hot you simply move in! And when inside it is cold you come out. Coming out<br />
of your house or going into the house is not a problem at all, because you are free from the inner and the outer.<br />
My effort here is to help you to be free from the inner and the outer, because you are neither the inner nor the<br />
outer, you are something transcendental to both. <strong>The</strong> inner and the outer are just parts of your personality; it is<br />
the house in which you live which has an outside and an inside. But your awareness has no inside and no outside.<br />
So these three things are to be remembered: drop the past, drop future expectations, and third, create a<br />
synthesis between extroversion and introversion... and all misery disappears.