Problems & Happiness

What will meditation do to solve my problems?


If you are clear, if you can see, your life-problems dissolve. Let me remind you about using the word 'dissolve'. I am not saying you find the answers, solutions to your problems, no. And I am only talking about life-problems.

This is the most important thing about life-problems to understand: they are created by your unclarity of vision. So it is not that first you see them clearly, then you find the solution, and then you try to apply the solution. No, the process is not that long; the process is very simple and short.

The moment you can see your life-problem clearly, it dissolves. It is not that you have now found an answer that you will apply, and someday you will succeed in destroying the problem. The problem existed in your unclarity of vision. You were its creator.

Remember again, I am talking about life-problems. I am not saying that if your car is broken down you just sit silently and see clearly what the problem is: the problem is clear, now do something. It is not a question that you simply sit under a tree and meditate and just once in a while open your eyes and see whether the problem is solved or not.

This is not a life-problem, it is a mechanical problem. If your tire is punctured you will have to change the wheel. Sitting won't do; you just get up and change the wheel. It has nothing to do with your mind and your clarity, it has something to do with the county road.

What can your clarity do with the county road? Otherwise, three thousand meditators here cannot mend one county road? Just meditation would have been enough -- and in the morning you would find an asphalt road.

But the question is only about life-problems. For example, you are feeling jealous, angry, you are feeling a kind of meaninglessness. You are dragging yourself somehow. You don't feel that life is juicy anymore. These are life-problems and they arise out of your unclarity of mind.

Because unclarity is the source of their arising, clarity becomes their dissolution. If you are clear, if you can see clearly, the problem will disappear.

You have not to do anything other than that. Just seeing, just watching its whole process: how the problem arises, how it takes possession of you, how you become completely clouded by it, blinded by it; and how you start acting madly, for which you repent later on, about which you realize later on that it was sheer insanity, that "I did it in spite of myself. I never wanted to do it, still I did it. And even when I was doing it I knew that I didn't want to do it." But it was as if you were possessed...


Will meditation help me to be happy?


Many people come to me and they say they are unhappy, and they want me to give them some meditation. I say: First, the basic thing is to understand why you are unhappy. And if you don't remove those basic causes of your unhappiness, I can give you a meditation, but that is not going to help very much -- because the basic causes remain there.

The man may have been a good model, beautiful dancer, and he is sitting in an office, piling up files. There is no possibility for dance. The man may have enjoyed dancing under the stars, but he is simply going on accumulating a DataBase. And he says he is unhappy: "Give me some meditation." I can give him! -- but what is that meditation going to do? what is it supposed to do? He will remain the same man: accumulating money, competitive in the market. The meditation may help in this way: it may make him a little more relaxed to do this nonsense even better.

That's what Transcendental Meditation is doing to many people in the West -- and that is the appeal of transcendental meditation, because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on saying, "It will make you more efficient in your work, it will make you more successful. If you are a salesman, you will become a more successful salesman. It will give you efficiency. And American people are almost crazy about efficiency. You can lose everything just for being efficient. Hence, the appeal.

Yes, it can help you. It can relax you a little -- it is a tranquillizer. By constantly repeating a mantra, by continuously repeating a certain word, it changes your brain chemistry. It is a tranquillizer! a sound-tranquillizer. It helps you to lessen your stress so tomorrow in the market place you can be more efficient, more capable to compete -- but it doesn't change you. It is not a transformation.

You can repeat a mantra, you can do a certain meditation; it can help you a little bit here and there -- but it can only help you to remain whatsoever you are.

Hence, my appeal is only for those who are really daring, dare-devils who are ready to change their very pattern of life, who are ready to stake everything -- because in fact you don't have anything to put at the stake: only your unhappiness, your misery. But people cling even to that.

I have heard: In a remote training camp, a squad of rookies had just returned to their billet after a day's route-march under the boiling sun. "What a life!" said one new soldier. "Miles from anywhere, a sergeant who thinks he's Attila the Hun, no women, no booze, no leave -- and on top of all that. my boots are two sizes too small. "You don't want to put up with that, chum," said his neighbor. "Why don't you put in for another pair?" "Not likely." came the reply. "Taking 'em off is the only pleasure I've got!"

What else do you have to put at stake? Just the misery. The only pleasure that you have is talking about it. Look at people talking about their misery: how happy they become! They pay for it: they go to psychoanalysts to talk about their misery -- they pay for it! Somebody listens attentively, they are very happy. People go on talking about their misery again and again and again. They even exaggerate, they decorate, they make it look bigger. They make it look bigger than life-size. Why? Nothing do you have to put at the stake. But people cling to the known, to the familiar. The misery is all that they have known -- that is their life. Nothing to lose, but so afraid to lose. With me, happiness comes first, joy comes first. A celebrating attitude comes first. A life-affirming philosophy comes first. Enjoy! If you cannot enjoy your work, change. Don't wait! because all the time that you are waiting you are waiting for Godot. Godot is never to come. One simply waits -- and wastes one's life. For whom, for what are you waiting? If you see the point, that you are miserable in a certain pattern of life, then all the old traditions say: you are wrong. I would like to say: The pattern is wrong. Try to understand the difference of emphasis.

You are not wrong! Just your pattern, the way you have learned to live is wrong. The motivations that you have learned and accepted as yours are not yours -- they don't fulfill your destiny. They go against your grain, they go against your element.... Remember it: nobody else can decide for you. All their commandments, all their orders, all their moralities, are just to kill you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to take your life in your own hands. Otherwise, life goes on knocking at your door and you are never there -- you are always somewhere else. If you were going to be a dancer, life comes from that door because life thinks you must be a dancer by now. It knocks there but you are not there -- you are a banker. And how is life expected to know that you would become a banker? God comes to you the way he wanted you to be; he knows only that address -- but you are never found there, you are somewhere else, hiding behind somebody else's mask, in somebody else's garb, under somebody else's name. How do you expect God to find you? He goes on searching for you. He knows your name, but you have forgotten that name. He knows your address, but you never lived at that address. You allowed the world to distract you. God can find you only in one way, only in one way can he find you, and that is your inner flowering: as he wanted you to be. Unless you find your spontaneity, unless you find your element, you cannot be happy. And if you cannot be happy, you cannot be meditative.

Why did this idea arise in people's minds? that meditation brings happiness. In fact, wherever they found a happy person they always found a meditative mind -- both things got associated. Whenever they found the beautiful, meditative milieu surrounding a man, they always found he was tremendously happy -- vibrant with bliss, radiant. They became associated. They thought: Happiness comes when you are meditative. It was just the other way round: meditation comes when you are happy. But to be happy is difficult and to learn meditation is easy. To be happy means a drastic change in your way of life, an abrupt change -- because there is no time to lose. A sudden change -- a sudden clash of thunder -- a discontinuity.

That's what I mean by sannyas: a discontinuity with the past. A sudden clash of thunder, and you die to the old and you start afresh, from ABC. You are born again. You again start your life as you would have done if there had been no enforced pattern by your parents, by your society, by the state; as you would have done, must have done, if there had been nobody to distract you. But you were distracted. You have to drop all those patterns that have been forced on you, and you have to find your own inner flame.