Your Disgust

Being Seeker

It is jealousy, possessiveness, hatred, anger, violence; it is a thousand and one things except love. It masquerades as love – because all these things are so ugly they cannot exist without a mask.

Everybody is living in such contradictions. People are using friendliness as a shield, love as a shield, prayer as a shield. When they want to cry they cannot cry, they smile, because a smile functions as a shield. When they don’t feel like crying they cry, because tears can function in certain situations as a shield.

I have heard about a very rich man who had a very big office. He used to come in for only one hour every day just to see that things are going well. And this was the routine he had followed all his life. He would come, go into his office, call everybody in, offer tea to everybody. He knew only three jokes, and he would tell one of the three jokes every day. And everybody had to laugh as if they were hearing it for the first time.

But one day it happened, a girl typist did not laugh. Everybody was shocked. This was insulting to the boss. What has happened to this girl?… and the boss was furious. He said, “What is the matter with you? Can’t you understand the joke?”

Now, they had heard that joke thousands of times, there was no question of understanding it. The girl said, “I understood it even before you had started telling it – so that is not the question. The reason why I am not laughing is that today I am leaving the job. Now I don’t have to laugh. These poor fellows have to laugh, it is their shield. I don’t have to.

“For the first time I don’t have to pretend that you are telling a great joke. You have told it thousands of times. But you can continue and these people will laugh every day. As far as I am concerned, I will laugh at somebody else’s jokes. I am going to join another office whose boss knows a few more jokes than you know.”

Our laughters are just exercises of the lips, and behind it we are hiding the truth – our tears.

Being seeker simply means the beginning of dropping all your masks. Out of this space a more open and less fearful connection happens. And yet, you often watch yourself not being totally authentic and real.

Don’t be impatient. You have been conditioned for so long, for so many years – your whole life – now unconditioning will also take a little time. You have been burdened with all kinds of false, pseudo ideas. It will take a little time to drop them, to recognize that they are false and they are pseudo. In fact, once you recognize something as false, it is not difficult to drop it. The moment you recognize the false as false, it falls by itself.

The very recognition is enough. Your connection is broken, your identity is lost. And once the false disappears, the real is there in all its newness, in all its beauty. Because sincerity is beauty, honesty is beauty, truthfulness is beauty.

Just being yourself is being beautiful.