Buddha Block

Love And Respect

From the very childhood, you have not been accepted as you are. You have been told, “Be like this, only then are you acceptable.” If you want to live a life of your own you will be condemned by everybody, everybody will be against you. Your parents will not be able to tolerate you. They have to mold you, form you, change you, manipulate you; they have to manufacture you according to their hearts’ desire.

Parents are living their own traumas; they have tried their whole life and they have failed. Now they want to live through the child; hence they start turning the child into a neurotic being, they start teaching the child. This is a vicarious way of living. They have failed; now they know that death is coming and their days are finished, they are losing hope. A new hope arises: they can live through the child. If they were not perfect, at least their children can be perfect. They say a tree is known by the fruit: if the children are perfect then the parents must have been perfect.

This is how the whole neurosis continues from one generation to another generation. The parents are continuously trying to improve upon the child in every way, and all that they succeed in doing is to make the child feel condemned as he is. They make it impossible for the child to love himself, to respect himself. And once that love and respect for oneself is lost, one is lost.

The world suffers so much from madness, all kinds of mental illnesses, physical diseases, and ninety-nine percent of the causes of all these mind-body problems come from this idea that the child has to be perfect.

That is from where the problem is arising, you don’t allow your children to be real, you want them to be perfect. You make them feel unreal; you force them to feel phony, rejected, worthless. Once this idea is created in their minds, that they are worthless as they are, naturally a great desire to become perfect arises, and with that all sorts of neuroses arise.

My effort here is to help you not to be perfect, but to drop the whole nonsense. In dropping that, you will become for the first time real. Reality is never perfect, remember. Reality is always growing, how can it be perfect? Once something is perfect, growth is not possible. Only imperfection can have the joy of growing.

Do you want to remain a flower, growing, opening? Or do you want to become just a dead stone – perfect, no opening, no growing, no change? Remain imperfect and respect your imperfections, and you will be able to enjoy; celebrate, and you will be able to be healthy and whole. You will not need to go to a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst and lie down stupidly on the couch for five years talking nonsense, neither will there be any need for shock treatments. In fact, if your mental stress disappears, your body will feel immediately relieved.

Many diseases will automatically disappear from the earth if this foolish idea to become perfect disappears. Perfection is simply death and nothing else. Life is imperfect, and life enjoys imperfection.

Live life in totality, not to be perfect, and these are two different goals. Perfection is a neurotic goal, totality is a sane goal. Perfection is in the future, totality is herenow. You can be total this moment. You can be total in your anger, you can be total in your sex, you can be total in whatsoever you are doing – cleaning the floor or cooking food or writing poetry. You can be total this moment. It needs no preparation, it needs no cultivation.

By being total you will enter into existence, into nirvana. When you are total, the self disappears, that is the beauty of totality. Just try to understand – this is subtle, and of immense significance: when you are total, the self disappears.