2006

 January: The Slippery Slope Of Success

So, who wants to begin?

Danato: I always fall for the wrong woman.

What do you mean by the ‘wrong woman’?

Danato: She appears not to be available.

Well, many women are not available, because all the best ones are with somebody already. You have to be lucky to get somebody who has come out of a relationship. You don’t get really attractive women – attractive in all sorts of possible ways – roaming around unattended very often. So it’s quite likely that you will get attracted to women who have already attracted somebody. That doesn’t make them the ‘wrong women’, it makes them unavailable but not ‘wrong’.

One cannot tell one’s libido to only turn onto available women. It doesn’t work with those kind of values. It turns you on before any considerations of whether that woman is available for some kind of interaction or relationship with you.

If you’re looking for someone to have an ongoing relationship with, then the way you look has to be different from the natural way that one looks in our part of the world, which is just to feel a pull of energy, an attraction, a resonance towards somebody. This movement does not first consider whether the woman is available or not.

Danato: I am always deeply hurt when this happens and when I have to say ‘No’ to a woman. Last year I said ‘No’, I was the one who said ‘No’, and it hurt me just as much.

You don’t want it to hurt you and you don’t want to get hurt – are you asking me to take the hurt away?

Danato: I don’t know what happens, actually.

What do you mean, ”I don’t know what happens?” You’ve told me what happens. You get hurt if you are rejected, and you even feel hurt if you have to reject.

Danato: Hmn.

Well, the same goes for me. I don’t know about the other guys here, but I couldn’t agree more.

Danato: It’s been going on for three weeks now. It’s never been so long.

What’s never been going on for so long, your hurt?

Danato: I was lovesick.

In my long and active interaction with the female sex I have had just about every experience possible, and I have had a love sickness out of rejection for much longer than three weeks. You’re just a beginner! I find what you are saying in response to what I said rather childish. You sound like one of my kids, saying, ”I don’t want it to be like this. Mummy, Daddy please take it away.” It is the same for everybody. Your attitude seems to be, ”I have this real longing to have a relationship with a woman and the ones that I am attracted to are either not available or they don’t want it.” As I said, the movement of attraction does not take into account the availability of the woman or the man at all, it just moves. It moves towards somebody who is attractive to you, and could well be attractive to many other people too, and particularly to one person that she may be having a relationship with, which means she’s not available so you’re going to get a rejection – at least on the level that you want a companion, partner or relationship.

So it’s going to happen that it won’t work out the way you want, by the very nature of things. Feeling hurt at being rejected is just about a universal response to rejection, and being hurt at rejecting might not be quite so universal but it’s certainly extremely common. This is how life is.

If you want to have somebody who is available then you can try the Internet. People use it if they are also looking for a relationship. You may meet somebody that way or through an advertisement. I read English magazines like ‘The Spectator’, which is a serious, cult magazine about politics, life and everything. Every week there’s a whole page of men and women seeking partners – ”Forty year old, beautiful, very attractive, nice figure, working in advertising seeks man between forty and fifty, must be tall” (chuckles) or whatever it might be.

People who are really successful in life can’t find someone who fits and who is available, so they look at magazine adverts or the Internet. Then you meet somebody and you go for a date, and you think, ”The person I’m seeing right now is not my type at all,” and you sit down and you talk, and suddenly, maybe, you find that you have things in common. Never mind that the libido is not moving instantly. You find another level of connection which is not the libido moving, but some other part of you – emotional, intellectual, or whatever – and you find that there’s some harmony between you and the other person. Maybe you have to do it ten times, and with the eleventh person there’s some harmony.

There are also services where you go to an office and they take your particulars – the things that you like to do, your interests – and they try and match you up with somebody.

Then there’s what still happens in India, that families decide to put their children together in marriage. Sometimes the bridal couple don’t even see each other until the wedding, or maybe a week before. It’s all settled by the family. Part of this arrangement is the consideration of the financial situation or people being of the same caste.

Behind this there’s the religious consideration, which is based on a statement in their bible which says, ”It is not for the sake of the wife that the wife is loved, it is for the sake of the self or the atman in the wife that the wife is loved. It is not for the sake of the husband that the husband is loved, it is for the sake of the atman in the husband that the husband is loved.” In other words they’re saying we are all divine, we all come from God, everyone has the self which is resonant with the divine and it’s that which you love in the other person, not what your mind or your heart might say it prefers.

I’m not suggesting you do that but it is not always the choice the libido makes that is the most favourable for a long term relationship. One can get to know somebody then discover that one gets on with them very well. It’s more important for a relationship that you have things in common rather than that you feel sexually, or physically attracted to each other.

If the way that you’re trying to meet and get together with somebody is not working – partly for the reasons that I’ve already outlined – then maybe you have to consider other approaches to find somebody. An additional problem comes when you get a bit desperate, which you sound. When you’re almost afraid of rejection because of the hurt it will bring. This gives off a certain energy, which doesn’t help a potential relationship to flourish, unless you’re lucky enough to find somebody who is also a bit desperate. Then manipulation comes in – who is the more desperate? One of them tries to get power out of the fact that the other one’s more desperate than they are, and then disaster strikes.

You’re sitting there, as you often do when I talk to you, as if you’re saying, ”I don’t want what you’re telling me, I want something else, Michael.” So, why don’t you tell me what is sort of answer you want? Then I’ll see if I can give it to you, or I’ll give you the opposite, I don’t know. What kind of answer do you want?

Danato: I think what you’ve done is given me the whole thing back and that’s the right answer.

Good. Anybody else?

Yes, Risaria.

Risaria: Michael, would you say something about trying to get things right, perfectionism.

I’m all in favour. I just hope to God it works with your editing, that you get it right, because at the moment it’s pretty hopeless. I can’t believe that you went to school and had a normal education, and that you deal with words in your job, because the way that you’ve tidied up my talks, in parts, is horrific. So I hope all my comments, and all the work I’m having to do now to get you into shape will work, and that you’ll do the job right. I’m all for getting things right, absolutely.

It’s difficult to get life right, difficult to get oneself right, but getting a job right is comparatively easy. Usually a job has a shape, life has no shape. Forget life, it takes ten thousand lifetimes to try and get life right. But to get a job right, most jobs anyhow, is comparatively easy. Use your intelligence, use your commitment, use your energy, use the teaching that comes your way, listen to people who know about the job. There is much available to help you both from yourself, and from others to do a job properly. Applied intelligence has a form, it has an outline, it has a border. But life, that’s tough, it’s ten thousand times more difficult to get life right than to get a job right.

If you can do one job really right, you can do any job right. If you do it properly and absolutely fully then what you’ve learnt from that you can apply to any job, and you can do any job. But you have to make it a priority when you’re working, to get the job done properly, and not just do it and get it over with. That’s no way to learn how to do a job, to be always looking at the end of a job. You have to look at the guts of the job and put your own self into it, and that is wonderfully satisfying.

Yes.

Participant: I have a question in a similar direction. In my life there have been several situations where I had to fulfil a job or a task. I started, kept improving and came close to success, then one problem destroyed it. The result – no success. This happened several times in life, both in a job and in relationships. What is this? How can I get out of it?

It sounds like sabotage.

Participant: Sabotage, from inside?

Yes, the inner saboteur. Success is a great responsibility. Success is being at the peak, and when you sit there on the peak then everybody can see you and so you have many expectations. If you’ve reached the peak of the mountain, where do you go from there? So it’s best not to arrive. We fear completion because then what are we going to do? It’s like death. Death is a completion. We all fear death. When life is completed we don’t maybe feel as if we’ve completed life, but life is going to be completed. I think that reflects in our daily lives and success is like a little death. There’s a famous English saying, ”Nothing succeeds like success” meaning that the more you succeed the more you can succeed, or as my teacher used to say, ”Nothing fails like success” then you know what to do.

Participant: Your point is that you stop before you have success and start something new? The better way should be to do something, have success, then start something new. Why not have success that way?

Well, if you’ve never had success then you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know if it will be like that. Who knows, if you have success you might retire. If you have success in a relationship then you think, right that’s it now I’m going to sleep, everything’s alright. If you have success in a job and there’s nothing left to go for, you go to sleep, and then you don’t feel yourself in action. To feel oneself striving, trying to get somewhere, trying to achieve something is a positive feeling, because it makes us feel involved and alive. If you really achieve ultimate success then what are you going to do next?

It can even happen with enlightenment. I’m told that Osho, in the last few years of his life, would spend his time watching videos all day, and experimenting with different kinds of stimulants – because after many years of doing his fantastic work he got bored. Where do you go after that? After being a master to tens of thousands of people where is the incentive to go on?

Success is like a mini-enlightenment. If we identify with the movement towards achieving something – harmony in a relationship, success in business –then, when you reach the goal, what has happened to the one who was trying to reach the goal? He dies! The one who is trying to achieve something, when he achieves it, dies. If it dies, you die, because you identify with it.

The whole universe is on the move, expanding. The whole world is on the move, whole nations are on the move trying to get somewhere. Everybody is really on the move to get somewhere. So it’s natural that people identify with getting somewhere, and if you identify with getting somewhere you’re going to have a deep fear of reaching something where there’s no movement anymore. The whole trouble in the world comes because people can’t just sit in an armchair, in their room, and enjoy being alive.

That is the negative saboteur. There’s also a positive saboteur. The positive saboteur, which was very active in my early life, says this is not the right relationship for you, this is not the right job for you, this is not the right career for you, this is not the right activity for you – so I’m going to get you out of it by making it fail. There are many things that I set my heart on, and desperately wanted, and either I sabotaged it, through something like we described, or some event happened to sabotage it. I was very upset and hurt and disappointed, and now I look back and I say, ”Thank God that I was not successful at this or or that otherwise I would not be doing what I’m doing now.” That’s the positive saboteur.

Take your pick.

4 Suits Darshan, 25th January 2006