Every time I am on my own, I feel separate, lonely and miserable. I love myself only when I am with others. If I am alone I feel ashamed and dislike myself. It seems as if I judge myself through the eyes of others.
It is one of the basic problems. Every human being has to face it. It is not only you. The way children are brought up is the cause of this whole misery. No child is accepted as he is. He is rewarded if he follows the directions of the parents, the teachers, the elders. Those directions may go against his nature, because those directives were not made by him or for him. Somebody five thousand years before made those principles, and they are still being used in raising the children.
Naturally, every child is displaced. He is not in his own self. He is not himself; he is somebody else. That somebody else is given to you by the society, by others.
So when you are lonely, and there is nobody to dictate to you, you simply relax in your nature. There is no need to perform anything, because there is nobody who is seeing. That relaxing into your own nature makes you feel guilty. You are going against your parents, against the priest, against the society; and they have told you that you, in yourself, are not right. You have accepted it. It has become a conditioned thing in you.
Whatever you do on your own is always condemned, and whatever you do following others is always praised.
In your aloneness there is nobody else there. Naturally, you need not act; you need not be a hypocrite. You simply relax into what you are; but your mind is full of the garbage given by others.
So when you are with others, the others are dictating to you; and when you are alone, the mind that has been created by the others is making you feel ugly, guilty, unworthy.
That’s why people don’t want to be alone. They want always to be with someone else, because with someone else they cannot relax into their nature. The presence of the other keeps them tense. The other is there, judging every moment, every action and gesture that you are going to make.
So you simply perform a certain act that you have been told is right. Then your mind feels good: it is according to the conditioning. Your mind feels happy that you did well; you are great.
People need crowds. This is the psychological reason why they always want to belong to Hinduism, to Christianity, to Mohammedanism, to this country, to that country, to this race, to that race. Even if that does not suffice, they create rotary clubs, lion clubs.
They cannot be alone. They have to be surrounded by people continuously. Only then, they can keep the tension alive, the act alive. In the crowd, they cannot be themselves.
Alone, why do you feel afraid? To be alone is one of the most beautiful experiences. You are no longer bothered by others; you are no more forcing yourself to do something which is expected. Alone, you can do what you want to do. You can feel what you want to feel. All that you need is to become detached from your mind.
Your mind is not your mind. Your mind is only an agent of the crowd you belong to. It is not in your service; it is in the service of the crowd. The crowd has put a detective in your mind who goes on forcing you, even if you are alone, to perform according to the rules.
The whole secret is to witness the mind; allow your nature and say clearly to the mind, “You are not mine. I came into the world without you. You have been given to me later on by education, by example. You are something alien; you are not part of my nature. So at least when I am alone, leave me alone.”
You have to learn to say, “Shut up!” to the mind, and allow your nature full freedom.
You will be immensely surprised what beauties you have, what innocence, what perceptiveness. Once you have learnt that the mind can be put aside, and you can be really alone — because with the mind you are not really alone; all those voices of your parents and teachers and priests and the politicians are recorded in the mind; the mind simply goes on repeating them.
It is a very great strategy played by society against the individual.
One psychologist, Delgado, has been working his whole life on a project — and he has succeeded in the project — which will give you some insight into yourself.
In your brain there are seven hundred centers. All that you do is done through one of the seven hundred centers He has figured out — working for his whole life — which center controls what kind of activity in you; with anger, hate, murder for example — which center is active when somebody gets angry. He has made very small electrodes. Of course, he is not allowed yet to experiment on human beings, but he has a great gift. The whole humanity can be changed by it, and he has worked on animals.
For example, in Spain he showed this. He put the electrode in the brain of a bull, and was standing his ground as the bull was rushing towards him to kill him. Just one foot away from him, the bull suddenly stopped, frozen. What has happened? The people could not believe it. They have never seen such a scene.
They were not aware that it was an experiment. He had a remote controller. He could stop any activity of the bull just by pressing a button in his hand. He allowed the bull to run so close; up to one foot; it could have killed him. But as the button was pressed, the activity completely stopped.
Delgado’s experiment is of immense importance. If it gets into the hands of the politicians, it is going to be very dangerous to humanity, because as the child is born....
For example, in Russia, no child can be born in your own house; every child has to be born in the hospital. Now that is the right moment to put any kind of electrode into the child’s brain — for example, any electrode that stops him from revolutionary activity against the government, any electrode that prevents him feeling miserable, full of suffering, tortured. The central board of the communist party would have all the remote controls.
They can have a system that if somebody is thinking in terms of anti-communism, on a board a light will show suddenly. And then they just have to push a button, and all his revolution, anti-communism will disappear.
What Delgado has done and proved, has been done to you by society in a more primitive way. But it has been successful up to now. They don’t put an electrode in your mind — they had no idea of it — but what they do functions in the same way.
They go on telling you what is right. And continuous repetition of what is right and what is wrong goes on making a spot in your mind without putting in an electrode. By and by, you start thinking that it is your mind which is deciding what is right and what is wrong. It is not so. The society has conditioned you.
That you can see in different societies, because different societies have different conditionings. For example, the American flag has meaning for the American, because from his very childhood he has been told, “Even to sacrifice your life for the flag is something great.”
And what is the flag? Just a piece of cloth. It has no intrinsic value. For an Indian, it means nothing; for an American, it means everything. The Indian flag means everything to the Indian; to the American it means nothing.
So it is not your mind that is deciding. It is the mind of the society that has imposed upon you certain ideas. In whatever crowd you happen to be, the crowd gives its mind to you. Slowly slowly, you completely forget that this is not your real self.
My sannyasins have to make a clear-cut distinction. The mind is part of society, not part of you. What is part of you is your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing. Then you can be alone and immensely happy. In fact, you can be happy only when you are alone.
One who knows how to be ecstatic being alone can be alone in the crowd. Who is going to find out that inside you are completely centered in your witnessing, and you are not at all bothered by the mind?
It takes just a little time but as you go on disidentifying with the mind, the mind loses control over you, and finally it starts disappearing.
That is the beginning of freedom, the birth of a new man, the birth of an authentic man. Now you will act out of your awareness not out of your mind. You will act moment-to-moment, seeing the situation clearly. There is no problem to worry about what is wrong and what is right.
Your clarity will decide what is right, your clarity will take you towards the right. It may not coincide with the right of your society. That’s why society is afraid and wants to put a mind in you.
The old method is a long process. Delgado’s method is simple, can be done within seconds, but it is more dangerous too. You can disidentify yourself with the mind that the society has given, but the electrode is a different matter.
Even if you disidentify, the electrode will control your body. You may not like to do something, but the electrode will force you to do it. You are absolutely incapable.
In a way, the discovery can be a blessing, because we can stop all that is ugly in man, all that is inhuman in man with such a simple methodology — just a small operation in your skull, and placing a small electrode.
If you are too much of a man of anger, you can just go to the scientist and tell him that this is your basic trouble: small things make you angry. He can put an electrode at the exact point from where anger arises. He can give you a remote controller to keep in your pocket. Whenever you don’t want to be angry, just push the button and anger will simply disappear.
It is good in a way, but spiritually it is not something that I will support. For society it is good, but if you can manage just by a remote control all your emotions, feelings, actions, you will never think of being aware. You will never think of becoming meditative.
Strangely enough, in those seven hundred points in your mind, there is not a single point which can create meditation in you. So it is something beyond the mind, above the mind.
If a man is clear about the whole situation, he can use electrodes, but he should not forget meditation, because he is not only the body and the brain; he is also a luminous being. That experience is possible only through meditation.
So my suggestion to the questioner is: when you are alone, tell the mind, “Shut up! You are not part of me. Leave me alone!”
There is a Sufi story.... A young seeker came to a great Sufi master. As he entered his room and saluted the master with great respect, the master said, “Good. That’s perfectly good. What do you want?”
He said, “I want to be initiated.”
The master said, “I can initiate you, but what about the crowd that is following you?”
He looked back; there was nobody. He said, “What crowd? I am alone.”
The master said, “You are not. Just close your eyes and see the crowd.”
The young man closed his eyes and he was surprised. There was the whole crowd that he had left behind: his mother weeping, his father telling him not to go, his wife in tears, his friends preventing him — every face, the whole crowd. The master said, “Now open your eyes. Can you say that people are not following you?”
He said, “I am sorry. You are right. The whole crowd I am carrying within myself.”
So the master said, “Your first work is to get rid of the crowd. This is your problem. And once you are finished with the crowd, things are very simple. The day you are finished with the crowd I will initiate you, because I can only initiate you; I cannot initiate this crowd.”
The story is meaningful. Even when you are alone you are not alone. And a man of meditation, even though in the crowd of thousands of people, is alone.
When you are alone, nobody can see the crowd, because it is within you. And when a meditative man is in the crowd and yet alone, nobody can see his aloneness, because that too is within him. To know your aloneness is to be acquainted with existence, nature, your reality. And it gives such blissfulness that there is no comparison with any joy that you have felt in the past.
You are saying that, when you are with people you are perfectly happy. It is not happiness, it is an hallucination of happiness, because your mind is in tune with the people. Alone they are also in the same trouble as you are. So together there is a certain harmony in the mind, and that harmony gives you the sense of happiness. But the sense is very superficial; it has no roots.
Unless you can be blissful in your total aloneness, remember, anything that you think is happiness is only a deception.
Once the thing is clear, it is not difficult to do it. Find time — even for a few minutes, once in a while — just to be alone.
In the beginning you will be miserable, because nobody is there to say how beautiful you are. Nobody is there to say, “What a great artist you are!” There is nobody, just silence around you. But a little patience, and a little alertness not to get identified with the mind, will bring the great revolution which will make you really a sannyasin.
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