Question 4

WHAT IS REPRESSION?

Repression is to live a life that you were not meant to live.

Repression is to do things which you never wanted to do.

Repression is to be the fellow that you are not:

Repression is a way to destroy yourself.

Repression is suicide -- very slow of course, but a very certain, slow poisoning.

Expression is life; repression is suicide.

This is the Tantra message: Don't live a repressed life, otherwise you live not at all. Live a life of expression, creativity, joy. Live the way God wanted you to live; live the natural way. And don't be afraid of the priests. Listen to your instincts, listen to your body, listen to your heart, listen to your intelligence. Depend on yourself, go wherever your spontaneity takes you, and you will never be at a loss. And going spontaneously with your natural life, one day you are bound to arrive at the doors of the divine.

Your nature is God within you. The pull of that nature is God's pull within you. Don't listen to the poisoners, listen to the pull of nature. Yes, nature is not enough -- there is a higher nature too -- but the higher comes through the lower. The lotus grows out of the mud. Through the body grows the soul. Through sex grows SAMADHI.

Remember, through food grows consciousness. In the East we have said: ANNAM BRAHM: food is God. What type of assertion is this that food is God? God grows out of food: the lowest is linked with the highest, the shallowest is linked with the deepest.

Now the priests have been teaching you to repress the lower. And they are very logical. Only they have forgotten one thing -- that God is illogical. They are very logical and it appeals to you. That's why you have listened down the ages and followed them. It appeals to reason that if you want to attain to the higher, don't listen to the lower -- it looks logical. If you want to go high, then you cannot go low; then don't go low, go high -- it is very rational. The only trouble is that God is not rational.

Just the other day Dhruva was talking to me. In his Sahaj group sometimes he comes to some moments when the whole group falls silent -- out of nowhere, out of the blue. And those few moments of silence are of tremendous beauty. And he was saying 'They are so mysterious, those moments. We are not managing them, we don't think about them, they simply come sometimes. But when they come, the whole group immediately feels the presence of something divine, of something higher, something greater than everybody else. And everybody IMMEDIATELY becomes aware that something IS present, something mysterious. And everybody falls silent in those moments.'

Now his logical mind thought 'It will be good if I can do the whole group in silence.' He must have started thinking 'If those few moments -- far and few between -- are so beautiful, then why not do the whole group in silence?' I said 'There you go -- logical, and God is not logical. If you remain silent, those moments will never come again.'

There is a polarity in life. The whole day you work hard, you chop wood, then in the night you go into your deepest sleep. Now the logical thing is -- you can think logically, it is mathematical -- next morning you can think 'The whole day I worked so much and was tired, still I could come to such a deep sleep. If I practise rest the whole day, I will go into an even deeper sleep.' So the next day you simply lie down in your rest-chair: you practise rest. Do you think you are going to have a good sleep? You will lose even ordinary sleep. That's how rich people suffer from insomnia.

God is not logical. God gives sleep to the beggars who have been working the whole day, moving from one place to another in the hot summer, begging. God gives good sleep to labourers, to stonecutters, to woodcutters. The whole day they have been tired. Out of that tiredness, they fall into deep sleep.

This is the polarity. The more you are exhausted energy-wise, the more is your need for sleep because you can only get more energy from deep sleep. If you exhaust your energy, you create a situation in which you will fall into deep sleep. God has to give you deep sleep. If you don't work at all, then there is no need. You have not-used even the energy that was given you, so what is the point of giving you any more? Energy is given to those who use it.

Now Dhruva is logical. He thinks 'If we do the whole group in silence...' But, even those few moments will be missed. and the whole group will become very, very chattering inside. Of course, from the outside they will remain silent, but their minds will go crazy inside. Right now they are working hard, they are expressing their emotions, catharting, bringing everything up, throwing everything out; they become exhausted. There come a few moments when they are so exhausted that there is nothing else to throw out. In that moment, suddenly, there is a contact; silence descends.

Out of work is rest. Out of expression is silence. This is how God works. His ways are very irrational.

Now, if you really want to be secure, you will have to live a life of insecurity. If you really want to be alive, you will have to be ready to die at any moment. This is God's illogic! If you really want to be authentically true, then you will have to risk. Repression is a way to avoid the risk. For example, you have been taught never to be angry, and you think that a person who is never angry is bound to be very loving. You are wrong. A person who is never angry will not be able to love either. They go together, they come in the same package.

A man who really loves will sometimes be really angry. But his anger is beautiful -- it is out of love. His energy is hot, and you will not feel hurt by his anger. In fact, you will feel grateful that he was angry. Have you watched it? If you love somebody and you do something, and the person is REALLY angry, frankly angry, you feel grateful because he loved you so much that he can afford anger. Otherwise why? When you don't want to afford anger, you remain polite. When you don't want to afford anything -- you don't want to take any risks -- you go on smiling. It doesn't matter.

If your child is going to jump into the abyss, will you remain unangry'? Will you not shout? Will you not be a boiling energy? Will you go on smiling? It is not possible.

There is a story:

Once it happened in Solomon's court that two women came fighting for one child. Both were claiming that the child belonged to them. It was very difficult. How to decide? The child was so small that he could not say anything.

Solomon looked, and he said 'One thing I will do -- I will cut the child in two and divide the child. That is the only way possible. I have to be just and fair. There is no proof either way that the child belongs to A or to B. So I, as the king, have decided: cut the child in two and give half and half.

The woman who was holding the child continued to smile, she was happy. But the other woman became simply mad, as if she would kill the king! She said 'What are you saying? Have you gone mad?' She was in a rage. She was no longer an ordinary woman: she was anger incarnate, she was fire! And the woman. said 'If this is justice, then I leave aside my claim. Let the child remain with the other woman. The child belongs to her, he is not my child!' Angry, yet tears flowing down her face.

And the king said 'The child belongs to you. You take it. The other woman is just bogus, false.'

She could not afford anything -- and the child was being killed! In fact, she continued to smile. It did not matter to her.

When you love, you can be angry. When you love you can afford it. If you love yourself -- and that is a must in life, otherwise you will miss your life -- you will never be repressive, you will be expressive of whatsoever life gives. You will be expressing it -- its joys, its sadness, its peaks, its lows, its days, its nights.

But you have been brought up to become bogus, you have been brought up in such a way as to become hypocrites. When you feel angry, you go on smiling a painted smile. When you are in a rage, you repress the rage. When you feel sexuality, you repress that, and you go on chanting your mantra. You are never true to what is within you.

It happened...

Joe and his little daughter, Midge, took a trip to an amusement park. En route they stopped for a huge meal. At the park they came to a hotdog stand, and Midge explained 'Daddy, I want...' Joe cut her short and stuffed her with popcorn.

When they came to the ice-cream vendor, little Midge once more shouted 'Daddy, I want...' Joe stopped her again, but this time said 'You want, you want! I know what you want -- icecream?'

'No, Daddy' she pleaded 'I want to vomit.'

That's what she was wanting from the very beginning. But who listens?

Repression is not listening to your nature. Repression is a trick to destroy you.

Twelve skin-heads, bubbleboys, walk into a pub with their Levi jackets on and all their equipment. And they walk up to the landlord and say 'Thirteen pints of bitter, please.'

'But there are only twelve of you.'

'Look, we want thirteen pints of bitter.'

So he gives them the beer and they all sit down. And there's a little old fellow sitting in a corner and the skin-head leader walks over to him and says 'Here you are, dad, here's a pint of beer for you.'

The little fellow says 'Thank you, thank you, you are generous, son.'

'It's all right, we don't mind helping cripples.'

'But I'm not a cripple.'

'You will be if you don't buy the next round.'

That's what repression is: it is a trick to cripple you. It is a trick to destroy you, it is a trick to weaken you. It is a trick to put you against yourself. It is a way of creating conflict within you, and whenever a man is in conflict with himself, of course he is very weak.

The society has played a great game -- it has put everybody against himself. So you are continuously fighting within yourself. You don't have any energy to do anything else. Can't you observe it happening in you? Continuously fighting. The society has divided you into a split person: it has made you schizophrenic and it has confused you. You have become driftwood. You don't know who you are, you don't know where you are going, you don't know what you are doing here. You don't know why you are here in the first place. It has really confused you.

And out of this confusion are born great leaders: Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Josef Stalin. And out of this confusion arises the Vatican Pope, and out of this confusion a thousand and one things arise. But YOU are destroyed.

Tantra says: Be expressive. But remember, expression does not mean irresponsibility. Tantra says: Be expressive intelligently, and no harm will happen to anybody from you. A man who cannot harm himself will never harm anybody. And a man who harms himself is a dangerous man in a way. If he is not even in love with himself, he is dangerous; he can harm anybody. In fact, he WILL harm.

When you are sad, when you are depressed, you will create other people around you who are sad and depressed. When you are happy, you would like to create a happy society, because happiness can exist only in a happy world. If you are living joyfully, you would like everybody to be joyful -- that is true religion. Out of your own joy, you bless the whole existence.

But repression makes you false. It is not by repression that anger, sex, greed are destroyed, no. They are there -- just the labels are changed. They go into the unconscious, they start working from there: they go underground. And, of course, when they are underground, they are more powerful. The whole psychoanalytic movement tries to bring what is underground to the surface. Once is becomes conscious, you can be freed of it.

A Frenchman was staying in England, and a friend asked him how he was getting on. He said he was doing very well, except for one thing. 'When I go to a party, the hostess, she does not tell me where is the 'pissoir"...'

'Ah, Georges, you mean she does not tell you where the toilet is? That's just our English prudery. Actually, she will say "Do you want to wash your hands?" and that means the same thing.'

The Frenchman made a mental note of this, and the next time he went to a party, with the hostess waiting for him, the guests standing around heard 'Good evening, Mr. Du Pont, do you want to wash your hands?'

'No, thank you, Madame, I have just washed them up against the tree in the front garden.'

That's what happens; just the names change. You become confused, you don't know what is what. Everything is there -- just the labels change, and that creates a sort of insane humanity.

Your parents, your society have destroyed you, you are destroying your children. Now, this is a vicious circle. Somebody has to come out of the vicious circle.

If you understand me rightly, then my sannyas is an effort to bring you out of the vicious circle. Don't be angry at your parents -- they could not do better than they have done. But now become more conscious, and don't do the same thing to your children. Make them more expressive, teach them more expression. Help them, so that they become more authentic, so that they can bring out whatsoever is inside them. And they will be tremendously grateful forever, because there will be no conflict within them. They will be in one piece; they will not be in fragments. And they will never be confused, they will always know what they want.

And when you know exactly what you want, you can work for it. When you don't know what you really want, how can you work for it? Then anybody who takes hold of you, anybody who gives you any ideas... and you start following him. Any leader comes  -- anybody can convince you argumentatively, and you start following him. You have followed many people, and they have all destroyed.

Follow your nature.