When you cling,
Life gets destroyed.
When you hold on to anything,
You cease to live.
It's all over the Gospel pages.
And one attains this,
My dears,
By understanding.
Understand.
Understand another illusion that happiness is not the same as excitement.
It's not the same as thrills.
That's another illusion.
A thrill comes from the fulfillment of a desire,
Of a craving.
It breeds anxiety,
And sooner or later,
It brings its hangover.
When you have suffered sufficiently from this,
Then you're ready to see it.
You're feeding yourself on thrills.
This is like feeding a race horse with delicacies.
You're giving it cake and wine.
You don't feed a race horse on that.
This is like feeding a human being on drugs.
You don't fill your stomach on drugs.
You need good,
Solid,
Nutritious food and drink.
Now you need to understand this for yourself,
And there is another illusion that someone else can do this for you.
That some savior or guru or teacher can do this for you.
Not the greatest guru in the world can take one step for you.
You've got to take it yourself.
Saint Augustine says so marvelously,
Jesus Christ himself could do nothing for many of his hearers.
That lovely Arab saying,
The nature of the rain is the same,
And yet it produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden.
It is you who have to do it.
No one else can help you.
It is you who have to digest your food.
It is you who have to understand.
No one else can understand for you.
It is you who has to see.
Nobody can see for you.
And if what you seek is truth,
Then you must do this.
You can lean on no one.
Or another illusion,
The illusion that it is important to be respectable.
It is important to be loved and to be appreciated.
That's false.
It is important to be important.
That's false.
That we have a natural urge to be loved and to be appreciated and to belong.
That's false.
Drop your illusion and you will find happiness.
We have the natural urge is to be free.
The natural urge is to love,
But not to be loved.
You know,
Sometimes I get a client in some of my psychotherapy sessions,
And one very common problem is nobody loves me.
How could I be happy?
And I explained,
You mean you never have any moment where you forget the fact that you're not loved and you let go and you're happy?
Of course she has.
She goes to a movie and she's all absorbed in the movie,
And it's a comedy and she's roaring with laughter.
And in that blessed moment,
She's forgotten to remind herself,
Nobody loves me,
Nobody loves me.
And she's happy.
Then she comes out of that theater with her friend and her friend goes off with her boyfriend,
Her own boyfriend,
And this girl's all alone.
And she thinks,
All my friends have their boyfriends.
I've got no one.
I'm so unhappy.
Nobody loves me.
This is like in India.
Lots of our poorer people are beginning to acquire transistors,
Which is quite a luxury.
Everybody got a transistor.
I don't have a transistor.
I'm so unhappy.
But until everybody acquired a transistor,
You were perfectly happy without one.
Until somebody told you that you wouldn't be happy unless you were loved,
You were perfectly happy.
You become happy not by being loved,
My dears,
Which means by being desired,
By being attractive to someone.
That's what you mean by being loved.
You become happy by contact with reality.
That's what brings happiness.
By a moment-to-moment contact with reality.
That's where you find God.
That's where you find happiness.
But most people are not even ready to hear that.
Another illusion,
The belief that reality external events have the power to hurt you.
That other people have the power to hurt you.
They don't.
It is you who give it to them.
Another illusion,
You are all those labels that people have put onto you,
Or that you have put onto yourself.
You're not.
You're not.
So you don't have to cling to them.
You know,
The day somebody tells me I'm a genius and I take that seriously,
I'm in big trouble.
Can you understand why?
Because I'm going to be tense now.
I've got to live up to it.
I've got to maintain it.
I've got to keep it.
I've got to find out after every lecture.
Did you like the lecture?
Do you still think I'm a genius?
See?
So what you need to do is smash it.
Smash it and you're free.
Smash it and you're free.
