281

If I don’t tell you to be happy, you will never reach the peak of pain and anguish. I go on telling you to be happy and the more I say, “Be happy,” the more you become aware of your unhappiness.

The more you listen to me, the more you will find anguish arising. The only way to make you unhappy is to go on constantly forcing on you: be happy! You cannot be, so you feel the unhappiness all around you. Even what you used to think was happiness, even those points disappear and you feel absolutely hopeless. Even momentary happinesses disappear and the desert becomes complete. All hopes and all oases disappear.

That’s where the jump happens. When you are really unhappy, totally unhappy – not even a ray of hope – suddenly you drop all unhappiness. Why? Why does it happen? It happens because unhappiness is not clinging to you; you are clinging to unhappiness. Once you feel the total anguish of it, you drop it. There is nobody to carry it for you.

But you have never felt it so intensely; you have always been lukewarm. You feel a little unhappiness, but always there is a hope for the future. Tomorrow there is going to be happiness – a little desert, but the oasis is coming closer. Through the hope, you go on. Through the hope, the unhappiness remains.

My whole effort is to kill the hope, to leave you in such total darkness that you cannot allow any dream any longer. Once this intensity reaches to the hundredth degree, you evaporate. Then you cannot carry it anymore. Suddenly whatever you call it – unhappiness, the ego, ignorance, unawareness, or what have you, anything that you want to call it – it drops.

I will tell you a story. It happened…

A farmer had a pedigree ram. It was a beautiful animal, but sometimes it got mad and the shepherd who looked after the ram was very worried. He always wanted to get rid of it, but the farmer loved it.

One day it became too much, so the shepherd came and said, “Now you choose: either me or the ram. I resign; take my notice or this ram goes. This is a mad animal and continuously creating trouble. He gets so angry and so dangerous that sometimes one feels that he will kill.”

The farmer now had to decide, so he asked his friends what to do. He never wanted the ram to be sold. They suggested an animal psychologist. The psychologist was called. The farmer was skeptical, but he wanted to do anything so that the ram could be saved. The psychologist remained for four days: watched, observed, took notes, analyzed. Then he said, “There will be no trouble. Just go to the market, purchase a gramophone and bring Beethoven records, Mozart, Wagner – classical music. Whenever the ram gets mad, in a rage, just put on a classical record. Play it and it will soothe him, and he will be perfectly calmed down.”

The farmer couldn’t believe it, that this was going to be so. But it had to be tried, so he tried it. It worked! Immediately the ram would become silent and cool down. For one year there was no trouble. Then one day the shepherd came running and said, “Something has gone wrong, I don’t know what. The ram has killed himself! As usual, seeing that he was getting in a rage again, I put a record on. But he worsened. Then he became more and more mad and he simply charged into the wall. His neck is broken. He is dead.”

The farmer went there. The ram was lying dead near the wall. Then he looked at the gramophone to see what record was there. There had been a terrible mistake: it was not classical music, but Frank Sinatra’s record singing: “There Shall Never Be Another Like You.”

That created the trouble. “There Shall Never Be Another Like You.” The ego is the cause of all madness, unhappiness, misery. That is going to be the cause of your death, that is going to break your neck.

But you can cope with it, if it is lukewarm. My whole effort is to bring it to a peak where you cannot cope with it. Either you have to drop it, or you will drop. And whenever such a choice arises – that you have to drop the misery or you have to drop yourself – you will drop the misery. With the misery, the ego, the ignorance, the unawareness – they all disappear. They are names of the same phenomenon.

Enough for today.