The fourth question:

Question 4

WHAT SHOULD ONE CHOOSE, SELFISHNESS OR ALTRUISM?

One should not choose at all. Choose and you go wrong. Prefer and you have gone wrong. Non-preference, no. choice....

You ask: To be selfish or to be altruistic?

Now these things are separate only in language, and that creates great anxiety. But in life they are not separate things. To be altruistic is the only way to be selfish, to be selfish is the only way to be altruistic. It sounds paradoxical, but if you meditate over it you will be surprised. And that is so about all paradoxes of life!

If you want to be happy, really happy, can you be happy in an unhappy world? Can you be happy in an unhappy family, can you be happy with unhappy human beings? It is not possible. It is like you want to be healthy -- can you be healthy when everybody is ill and unhealthy? How long can you protect yourself? Your health depends on everybody else's health. If everybody else is healthy, the more is the possibility for you to be healthy. If everybody is ill, the sooner or later you will be ill. And if you protect yourself so much from illness, then your protection will become your illness. You will be constantly worried about protection, and that will create stress. That will make you sc tense that you will not be able to live at all.

We are not separate, we are together.We are so much together that we are members of each other. I penetrate you you penetrate me. So this division of selfishness and altruism is a false division. If a person becomes REALLY selfish and only thinks about himself and nothing else, do you think he will be able to be happy at all? He will not think about his wife. he will not think about his children, he will not think about his neighbors, he will not think about anybody else. Do you think he will be happy? He will be like a cancer cell.

That is the difference between other cells and the cancer cell -- a cancer cell is ABSOLUTELY selfish, it only thinks about itself. So when a cancer cell enters into your body and you become host to a cancer cell, it starts eating you up. And it simply goes on eating you up, and it never gives anything back. And it does not worry about any other cell in the body. Sooner or later it has eaten the host. And when the host dies, do you think the guest can live? The guest dies with the host. The cancer cell will have to die when the body dies, because it cannot exist without the body which was hosting it. So in fact by being selfish it has committed suicide. The cancer cell is a stupid cell; it has no intelligence. Other cells are far more intelligent: they eat, they give, they take, they give, and a balance is kept. The egoistic person is like a cancer cell.

And what about the other, the extreme opposite -- the public servant, one who is ready to martyr himself, one who is always searching for some opportunity to sacrifice himself? He's also not healthy because he goes on sacrificing himself, and the more he sacrifices the more unhappy and miserable he becomes deep down. And naturally when he is unhappy and miserable, he vibrates misery around him.

You have watched it: if your mother is too much of a sacrificing mother, which mothers tend to be.... In fact, all mothers are Jews. I have not come across a mother who is not a Jew. They sacrifice too much! They are great martyrs but then they take revenge, which is natural. If somebody sacrifices too much escape from that place, because sooner or later he will surround you like a prison. He will demand, "I have sacrificed so much!" He will make you feel guilty every moment of your life.

Millions of people feel guilty because of mothers, because they have been so sacrificing. And later on every person feels, "I have not done anything. I have not given anything back to my mother -- and how much she sacrificed." Because of this sacrifice, no child is ever able to forgive the mother. Forgive or forget, neither is possible. In fact, that's why you are so against the parents, you will be surprised to know. Why are you so against the parents? Why do parents create such tension in you? Why is it not a beautiful experience to be with the parents? It is here every day . Whenever a mother comes, the sannyasin becomes afraid. A father comes and the fear arises. What fear? The fear is that the father simply makes you feel guilty: "I have done so much for you. What have you done? And I am getting old, and you are doing Kundalini here? And you are enjoying? Think of me and think of your mother! And we sacrificed our lives, and we educated you. And we were poor and we did this and that and that, an you never lacked anything. Have your forgotten it all?" You become uneasy with the parents. The relationship is not healthy. Why is the relationship not healthy? -- they have been too altruistic.

Be selfish and you commit suicide. Be too altruistic and you again commit murder.

Don't choose. There is no need to choose between these two. Just be natural, spontaneous. Respond to life each moment with no prejudice, with no a priori notion. Don't try to become altruistic, and don't try to become selfish. There is no need. Remain easy, relaxed. and there are moments in life when you will need to be selfish, but then it will happen spontaneously. And there will be moments when you will have to be altruistic -- that too will happen spontaneously. Don't have a fixed gesture, remain fluid. That's my whole approach to the problem of choice: remain fluid, don't choose.

Once you have chosen you are in difficulty, because then you cannot respond to the reality. You have to go on reacting out of your chosen part. If you are selfish and you have chosen it ;as your philosophy, then there are moments when joy arises only by sharing -- and you cannot share, because to share seems to be altruistic. So you remain confined in your selfishness and you miss the joy. Now what kind of selfishness is this which goes on missing joy? This is just being unintelligent, nothing else.

Or you have chosen to be altruistic, and then you start seeing that somebody else is exploiting you, and you go on because you have to be altruistic. Somebody is destroying you and you go on being destroyed -- in fact, you start feeling that you are a great martyr. Look! -- "Sooner or later the church is going to make me a saint." But you are destroying this man because you are allowing yourself to be destroyed by him. You are making him violent, you are teaching him something ugly. he will do it to other people too.

So move in life with no notion at all. let each moment be decided on its own -- not with a discipline, not with a concept that you have carried all along. never act out of your philosophies, respond to the reality, and sometimes you will find you are selfish, and sometimes you will find you altruistic. and that is good. You are a flow.

Don't feel guilty about being selfish, because selfishness is natural -- otherwise you would not survive at all. And don't feel that you have done something great when you are altruistic, because that too is natural. Otherwise you will never be able to love, and without love there is no joy.