The Causes of Stress In the Workplace

Possessiveness

Modern man, the modern mind, wants to possess everything and not be possessed by anything. Modern man wants to be the master of everything, and you can only be the master of things – not of happenings. You can be the master of a house, you can be the master of a mechanical device; you cannot be the master of anything which is alive. Life cannot be mastered; you cannot possess it. On the contrary, you have to be possessed by it. Only then is there contact with it.

Love is life, and it is greater than you. You cannot possess it. I would like to repeat it: love is greater than you; you cannot possess it. You can only allow yourself to be possessed by it; it cannot be controlled. The modern ego wants to control everything, and you become scared of whatsoever you cannot control. You become afraid; you close the door. You close that dimension completely because fear enters. You will not be in control. With love you cannot be in control, and the whole trend which has led to this century was one of how to control. All over the world, and particularly in the West, the trend is for how to control nature, how to control everything, how to control energies.

Man must become the master, and you have become the master – of course, only of those things which are possible to possess, and side by side you have been developing an incapacity for those things which cannot be possessed. You can possess money; you cannot possess love. And because of this we have been turning everything into a thing. You even go on turning people into things because then you can possess them. If you love a person, you are not the master; no one is the master. Two persons love each other, and no one is the master – neither the lover nor the beloved. Rather, love is the master and both are possessed by a greater force than themselves, encircled by a greater force – a whirlwind. If they try to possess each other, they will miss each other. Then they can possess each other. Then the lover will become the husband and the beloved will become the wife. Then they can possess, but a husband is a thing and a wife is a thing. They are not people. You can possess them. They are dead entities, legal labels – not alive.

Face The Real

Yoga means: “Now no hope, now no – future, now no desires. But I am ready to know; what is? I am not interested in what can be, what should be, what ought to be. I am not interested! I am interested only in that which is.” Because only the real can free you, only the reality can become liberation.

Total despair is needed. That despair Buddha called dukkha. If you are really in misery don’t hope, because your hope will only prolong the misery. Your hope is a drug. It can help you to continue, but where are you moving? It will help you to reach only death and nowhere else. All your hopes can lead you only to death; they are leading.

Become totally hopeless – no future, no hope. It is difficult; it requires courage to face the real. But such a moment comes to everyone, sometime or other. A moment comes to every human being when he feels total hopelessness. Absolute meaninglessness happens to him. When he becomes aware that whatsoever he is doing is useless, wheresoever he is going is going to nowhere, and all life is meaningless, then hopes drop. Future drops, and for the first time he is in tune with the present, for the first time he is face to face with reality.