Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people.
As a result they have a strangle hold on you. See how they control your
behavior by their approval and disapproval. They hold a power to ease
your loneliness with their company, to send your spirit soaring with
their praise, to bring you down to the depth with their criticism and
rejection.
Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your
day locating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead. You
live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company,
desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly
submit to the guilt they lay upon you. You are terrified to go against the
fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think. And observe
how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved
by them.
People have become so much a part of your being that you cannot even
imagine living a life that is unaffected or uncontrolled by them. As a
matter of fact, they have convinced you that if you ever broke free of
them you would become an island; solitary, bleak, unloving. But the
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exact opposite is true. How can you love someone whom you are a slave
to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? You can
only desire, need, depend and fear and be controlled. Love is to be found
only in fearlessness and freedom. How do you achieve this freedom? By
means of a two pronged attack on your dependence and slavery.
First, awareness. It is next to impossible to be dependent, to be a slave
when one constantly observes the folly of one's dependence. But
awareness may not be enough for a person whose addiction is people.
You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work
that you do, not for its utility but for itself. Think of something you love
to do for itself whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it
or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether
people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not.
How many activities can you count in your life that you engaged in
simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find out; cultivate
them for they are your passports to freedom and to love. Here too you
have probably been brainwashed into the following consumeristic way
of thinking. To enjoy a poem or a landscape or a piece of music seems a
waste of time. You must produce a poem or a composition or a work of
art. Even to produce it is of little value in itself. Your work must be
known. What good is it if no one ever knows it? And even if it is known
that means nothing if it is not applauded and praised by people. Your
work achieves maximum value if it becomes popular and sells. So you
are back again into the arms and control of people. The value of an
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action according to them is not in its being loved and done and enjoyed
for itself but in its success. The royal road to mysticism and to reality
does not pass through the world of people, it passes through the world
of actions that are engaged in for themselves without an eye to success
or to gain or profit actions.
Contrary to popular belief the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is
not company but contact with reality. The moment you touch this reality
you know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people and so the
ability to love them. You must not think for love to arise in your heart
you must first meet people. That would not be love but attraction or
compassion. Rather it is love that first springs in the heart through your
contact with the real. Not love for any particular person or thing but the
reality of love, an attitude, a disposition of love. This love then radiates
outward to the world of things and persons. If you desire this love to
exist in your life, you must break loose from the inward dependence on
people by becoming aware of it and by engaging activities that you love
to do for themselves.
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