Spirituality and the World Situation

 It's Fear or Love

It seems to me that human beings have a major choice to make: whether to identify with the personality or to look for some other way of being in the world, in life. And if you choose to identify with the personality, then you’re always going to be in trouble, because since the personality doesn’t have any real existence, you have to be extremely careful to protect it; you have to stay in control.

All those who strongly identify with the personality, in my experience, have a very strong control mechanism. You have to check on everything that comes before you: “Is this dangerous? Does it threaten me in some way?” Or even on a lower level of control, “Is it going to suit me? Is it going to fit into my arrangements? Is it harmonious with what I identify with? And if not, I have to avoid it. And if I can’t avoid it, I have to close.”

Furthermore, you have to manipulate people. You have to try to get them to give you what you want, not what they want to give you. You cannot allow them just to be the way they are, because it may be dangerous, it may be threatening, it may be difficult, it may create problems for you, it may undermine your personality. So you can’t just say, “Okay, go ahead - I receive you,” you have to say, “No, no, not that. This is okay, but not that. And don’t behave like that, and don’t look at me like that, and don’t do this and don’t do that, because when you do that I feel threatened, and then I can’t be with you.” And then, of course, people feel that you’re doing that to them and so they distance themselves from you. So already being cut off from many people because of being in your shell or the personality, the way that you behave from that shell creates even greater alienation, because people feel that you’re not open to them, you’re only open to them if they fit with what you want them to be.

So there’s really no way out of controlling on the level of control. You may have a tremendous desire to connect with people in a way that you haven’t yet been able to in your life, you may feel really cut off from people, you may envy other people who have an easier relationship with others, and you feel very sad about that, and you want to change, but as long as you are based on this polarity of control you can never succeed. And the only way you can get out of that is that you use so much energy controlling yourself and trying to manipulate everything that you exhaust yourself. And then maybe when you are in your ancient times, you start to get exhausted, and you let go the control, and then somehow you can become a little softer, and more mellow, more open. That’s the only way out from that pole - just exhaustion.

So if you’re the controlling type, and you’re going to go on controlling, then I have given you your inevitable destiny.* (chuckles)*

Another big thing that happens from that position is that you have a big duality of good and bad: what’s good for you, what’s bad for you, what’s right for you, what’s wrong for you, what is good and what is evil. That duality is bound to follow, because you are standing in a separate place and you are judging from there according to what feels okay to you and what doesn’t feel okay to you. Now it’s worth pointing out briefly - I’m not going to go into this now - that often the greatest evil in the world is caused by those who say they are fighting evil. So, for example, Adolf Hitler wanted to cleanse the world of what he felt was contamination. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists - he wanted to wipe them all away, so that we would be left with some pure strain of humanity. In his eyes, he was getting rid of that which was evil. And he was the creator of perhaps the worst evil that’s ever happened on this planet.

It was the same with Stalin. He wanted to rid the country of intellectuals, and he wanted to rid the country of the rich landowners, so he would have just the peasants who were owning the earth which they felt belonged to them, and to this aim of trying to purify Russia he had to destroy millions of people.

It was the same with Mao. When he took over control of China he had to get rid of all sorts of elements which he felt were contaminating the pure peasant race. The same with the Khmer Rouge. Exactly the same. “Take away all these people who have corrupted our lands so that we can start from the beginning again with the pure native, the pure land-man, the basic, ordinary family.” So again, they wiped out millions of people.

And Bin Laden sees America standing for the extreme expression of the Western view of life. He sees America as the evil empire. And America, or at least the people who are running the country, see him and all his people as the peak of the ‘axis of evil’, so each one is seeing evil in the other. If you take some prominent statement by Bin Laden about America, and you change the principles from America to the Moslem fundamentalists, then you read the statement and you say, “Well, Bush said this.” It is exactly the same. So they’re both actually mirroring each other, because they’re both fixed in this duality of good and evil. And of course, one’s own side is always the good, and the enemy of one’s side, or the one that one sees as the enemy, is bound to be the evil. This is how the duality is bound to split. And this is the inevitable outcome of taking the standpoint of saying, “The way that I see things is true, and anybody who disagrees with me is false, and I can’t make contact with anybody else if they don’t somehow harmonise with the way I see things.” It’s just the individual situation extrapolated on to a national scale or an international scale.

So as long as almost all human beings make this choice of building a personality, becoming attached to it, becoming attached to the point of view that that personality gives you based on your education, your culture, your upbringing and so on, these things are bound to be like they are. So really, this confrontation that’s happening now between the West and certain aspects of Islam was inevitable. In some way Bin Laden and Bush are, in a way - don’t get me wrong, in a way - innocent, because they’re just spokesmen for a certain attitude. So if one is not going to be just another person stuck in that syndrome of good and bad, right and wrong, me and others - the control, the manipulation, the wanting things to suit me and only things to happen to me that are agreeable to me, and wanting to hold on to that identity - then one has to look for another way of being, because the outcome of being in that place is inevitable.

And there is another way. And that is what spirituality means, to me. It doesn’t mean, really, enlightenment; it doesn’t mean having great experiences of bliss; it doesn’t mean satoris; it doesn’t mean Oneness with everything. Well, it does in a way, but it’s not specifically to do with certain kinds of experiences that you can have on the Path. It is about being open. Firstly, it is about being open. Being open says, “I’m not just something enclosed in a bubble.” Being open is saying, “I’m connected with everything.” Being open is an admission that we are all interdependent.

I pick up a glass of water. Somebody put the water in the glass, somebody brought the water here, somebody produced the bottle that the water was in, some people got the water from underground, maybe, pumped it up; somebody put the two together, the bottle and the water. Let’s say it’s San Pellegrino - somebody brought it from Italy into Germany, somebody delivered it from the central depot to Hofheim, somebody in a shop put it on a shelf. So many people are involved. And I haven’t even begun to speak about the glass and the design on it, just the water. So many people have been involved in me taking a sip of water. So to say, “I am drinking this water; it is a perfectly separate, individual, selfish act. No-one else is involved. I’m not asking anybody to hold the glass for me, I’m managing with my very own left hand to bring the glass to my lips; with my own lips I sip it; I taste it with my own throat, it goes into my own space. No-one else is involved…” this is ridiculous. Thousands of people are involved! And that is true for everything.

So the moment you say, “I am going to be open to what comes,” then you’re saying, “I accept that I am part of All.” And as soon as you break down your barriers and your controls, and your resistance and your fears, and open, then you are entering into life itself. And all this is quite apart from my view as a spiritual teacher that what comes to you is as much you as the you to whom it comes. As my regular students who are here will know, I’ve said many, many times that you are half of your reality, and the other half of your reality is what is coming to you each moment. Because only you are having this experience right now. You have attracted it, or at least some greater wisdom has provided it for you to deal with, so to say no to it is to deny yourself as a dynamic process from birth to death in your life. So no is a ridiculous thing to say to what comes to you.

That doesn’t mean to say you have to agree, or you have to go positively with it, it just means that you have to accept that this is something you have to come to terms with, you have to grapple with, you have to meet in some way - whether it is in a positive or a struggling way. You cannot deny, or you should never deny, the reality of that which is there each moment before you.

So what happens when you open and open and open is that you make contact - as my students know - certainly on an energy level, with every single living being. And if you make contact with all living beings, where is the enemy? If on that level you can feel oneness with everything, how can there be an enemy?

And then the relationship of any part of the One with any other part of the One can only be one thing, and that is love. It has to be. Then how can you destroy, how can you bomb, how can you attack, how can you murder? You can’t do it. And then, when you do that, when you open and you make contact, in a way it comes back, and you see that you are just an expression of this one life.

In some way you disappear into the One when you do that, but in another way you don’t disappear, because still there’s a unique expression of that One through this particular form of life that you are. And that’s a wonderful feeling when that happens, even if it happens for a moment - as I’m sure it has happened to most of you, if not all of you, for a moment, and some of you for much longer. Just a feeling that, “I am happening out of the One and yet I feel that this is very much my experience and my reality, and yet I’m not cut off at all, I’m not separated from the one reality.”

So that is the alternative choice to the first choice I talked about, where you are separated and trying to control what happens in your life. You have to see that there is an alternative. And of course you have to be willing to let go the choice that you have made up until now.

You see, on the level of control there is no way out. It requires a shift, a jump, a movement, a search for some other possibility, and to make that search you have to be already sceptical, doubtful about the richness that you can find in life through the first pole of control.

So you could say that this polarity that I’ve drawn this morning is between two responses. The second, as I’ve said, is love, and the first is another four letter word. What is that word? What is that first choice, that first pole choice that I talked about?

(participant) Hate.

No, it’s not. Hate is the same energy as love, just misdirected.

(another participant) Fear.

Fear. Exactly. Fear. This person who is in control is in fear: “What will happen to me if I lose control? Where will I go? Who will I be? Will I be anybody? Will I have an existence? Will I have a reality? Will I be noticed? Will I have a life if I let go my sense of self?” It says in the Upanishads, the holy books of India: ‘Where there is the other, there is fear’ - because the other can always show you that you are in fact a phoney, so we have to be careful who we make contact with. But I say, not just where the other is there is fear, but where there is an identity, an ego, a self, there is fear.

You identify with an ego, and you will live in fear. You may not know why you feel fear, you may not be able to think of anything that you are especially afraid of, and yet you feel underneath, deep in your belly, a tremendous fear. And that fear is that you will be shown to be not what you are pretending to be. And if somebody discovers that and calls you on it, or shows you up, knocks you down, or punctures your balloon, then not only is that terrifying, but what’s especially terrifying is what comes after that.

But the moment you start to open and accept that you’re not separated, that you belong and connect with everything, and you have that wideness to spread yourself out, receiving what comes from any direction, then the fear begins to dissolve, because you feel that you are standing on the same place as life itself is standing.

If you really find that deeply and strongly, you will lose all fear. You will even lose the fear of death, because what you contact gives you a conviction that is deeper than this duality between life and death, living and not living.

Talk given during a seminar in Frankfurt, Germany, 06.06 2004