Intimacy Trusting Oneself and the Other

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....



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