Truthfulness means authenticity-to
be true, not to be false, not to use
masks. Whatsoever is your real face, show it at whatever the cost.
Remember, that doesn’t mean that you have
to unmask others; if they
are happy with their lies it is for them to decide. Don’t go and unmask
anybody, because
this is how people think-they say they have to be
truthful, authentic; they mean they have to go and make everybody
nude,
because "why are you hiding your body? These clothes are not
needed." No. Please remember: be truthful to yourself. You
are not
needed to reform anybody else in the world. If you can grow yourself,
that’s enough. Don’t be
a reformer and don’t try to teach others, and
don’t try to change others. If you change, that’s enough
of a message.
To be authentic means to remain true to your
own being. How to remain
true? Three things have to be remembered. One, never listen to
anybody, what they tell you
to be. Always listen to your inner voice,
what you would like to be; otherwise your whole life will be wasted. Your
mother
wants you to be an engineer, your father wants you to be a
doctor, and you want to be a poet. What to do? Of course the
mother is
right because it is more economical, more financially helpful, to be an
engineer. The father is also right;
to be a doctor is a good commodity in
the market, it has a market value. A poet? Have you gone mad? Are you
crazy?
Poets are people who are cursed. Nobody wants them. There is
no need for them; the world can exist without poetry-there
will be no
trouble just because there is no poetry. The world cannot exist without
engineers; the world needs engineers.
If you are needed, you are
valuable. If you are not needed you don’t carry any value.
But if you want to be a poet, be a poet. You
may be a beggar-good.
You may not become very rich out of it, but don’t worry about
it—because otherwise
you may become a great engineer, and you may
earn much money but you will never have any fulfillment. You will always
hanker; your inner being will hanker to be a poet.
I have heard that one great scientist, a surgeon
who was awarded a
Nobel Prize, was asked, "When the Nobel Prize was awarded to you, you
didn’t look very happy.
What is the matter?" He said, "I always wanted
to be a dancer. I never wanted to be a surgeon in the first place, and
now not only have I become a surgeon, I have become a very successful
surgeon and this is a burden. I wanted to be
just a dancer, and I remain
a lousy dancer-that is my pain, anguish. Whenever I see somebody
dancing, I feel so miserable,
in such hell. What will I do with this Nobel
Prize? It can’t become a dance to me, it can’t give me a dance."
Remember, be true to your inner voice. It may
lead you into danger, then
go in danger, but remain true to the inner voice. Then there is a
possibility that one
day you will come to a state where you can dance
with inner fulfillment. Always look: the first thing is your being. Don’t
allow others to manipulate and control you-and they are many;
everybody is ready to control you, everybody is ready
to change you,
everybody is ready to give you a direction you have not asked for.
Everybody is giving you a guide
for your life. The guide exists within you,
you carry the blueprint.
To be authentic means to be true to oneself.
It is a very, very
dangerous phenomenon; rare people can do that. But whenever people
do it, they achieve. They achieve
such beauty, such grace, such
contentment that you cannot imagine. The reason everybody looks so
frustrated is that
nobody has listened to his own voice. You wanted to
marry a girl, but the girl was a Mohammedan and you are a Hindu
brahmin,
your parents wouldn’t allow it. The society wouldn’t accept it, it
was dangerous. The girl was poor and you
are rich. So you married a rich
woman, Hindu, brahmin by caste, accepted by everybody but not by
your heart. So now
you live an ugly life. Now you go to the
prostitute-but even prostitutes won’t help you; you have prostituted
your
whole life. You wasted your whole life.
Always listen to the inner voice, and don’t
listen to anything else. There
are a thousand and one are temptations around you, because many
people are peddling
their things. It is a supermarket, the world, and
everybody in it is interested in selling his thing to you. Everybody
is a
salesman. If you listen to too many salesmen you will become mad. Don’t
listen to anybody, just close your
eyes and listen to the inner voice.
That is what meditation is all about, to listen to the inner voice. This is
the
first thing.
Then the second thing-if you have done the first
thing only then the
second becomes possible-never wear a mask. If you are angry, be
angry. It is risky, but don’t
smile, because that is being untrue. But you
have been taught that when you are angry, smile. Then your smile
becomes
false, a mask-just an exercise of the lips and nothing else. The
heart full of anger, poison, and the lips smiling; you
become a false
phenomenon.
Then the other thing also happens: when you want
to smile, you cannot
smile. Your whole mechanism is topsy-turvy because when you wanted
to be angry you weren’t,
when you wanted to hate you didn’t. Now you
want to love; suddenly you find that the mechanism doesn’t function.
Now you want to smile; you have to force it. Really your heart is full of
smile and you want to laugh out loud, but
you cannot laugh. Something
chokes in the heart, something chokes in the throat. The smile doesn’t
come, or
even if it comes it is a very pale and dead smile. It doesn’t
make you happy, you don’t bubble up with it.
It is not a radiance around
you.
When you want to be angry, be angry. Nothing
is wrong in being angry.
If you want to laugh, laugh. Nothing is wrong in laughing loudly. By and
by you will see
that your whole system is functioning. When it functions,
really, it has a hum around it. Just like a car, when everything
is going
well, hums-the driver who loves the car knows that now everything is
functioning well, there is an organic
unity; the mechanism is functioning
well.
You can see it-whenever a person’s mechanism
is functioning well you
can hear the hum around him. He walks but his step has a dance in it. He
talks but his words
carry a subtle poetry in them. He looks at you and he
really looks; it is not just lukewarm, it is really warm. When he
touches
you he really touches you; you can feel his energy moving into your
body, a current of life being transferred,
because his mechanism is
functioning well....
