Love and Lust

 

Photo Credit: Minimalist Quotes

Love and Lust

The whole world is going through a unique kind of neurosis, which was not there in the past. This is simply because modern man has stopped using his body to a large extent. In the past, when we intensely involved ourselves in physical activity, a lot of our neurosis was worked out. Our nervous energy got spent. There are several people, especially young people, who have psychological problems, simply because they cannot expend their nervous energy due to lack of physical activity. In the past such people would just start swimming or playing some sport daily and then everything became okay. Because of enough activity, the energy was expended.

Today, people have become physically inactive like never before. They could not afford to be so physically inactive earlier, as they had to do so many things physically, just to survive. They have become more neurotic than in the past. As a general phenomenon, there were neurotic people then also but not in these numbers. Today, it has become a common phenomenon in society that everybody is in some level of neurosis. This is simply because our energy is not worked out. It is trapped. We have not transcended our madness and at the same time, we are not working it out. The therapy also is not there. If we went out and chopped wood for the whole day – if we chopped a hundred logs a day – a lot of our energy would be spent, and life would be peaceful. But today it is not like that. We are not using our body the way it used to be utilised, so we go on generating all kinds of diseases, like never before.

This builds up into our system over a period of time. Then our physical and emotional energy needs some outlet. That is how bars, clubs and discotheques have come into place. People have to work out their neurosis somewhere, somehow. These discos look like madness, we cannot even breathe inside. They are full of smoke and sweat, but people just go wild in there. We cannot even dance, everybody is bumping into everybody else, but it does not matter, we have to work it out. Otherwise, we will go crazy. So, on Saturday, we go to work out our neurosis for the week. Then the piling up starts once more and once again the Saturday night fever comes.

There is another way to drop this madness and go ahead – completely leaving it behind and going ahead where we are no more a part of it. This is what meditation is all about. Now, if we dance, we simply dance for the joy of it, and not because there is something to work out. If we are dancing to work out something, maybe it is therapeutic. It is good therapy alright, but there is a certain ugliness about it. It is filled with lust. We cannot dance out of love. We can only dance out of lust.

Lust is a strong need. Love is not a need. When we love, we settle down, nothing more is needed. We can just sit here for a lifetime. With lust we cannot sit anywhere. We either get into some mad action, or we are bound to go crazy. When there is a certain neurosis, a certain madness within ourselves, we can only be in lust. Our lust can be for sex, for food or for some particular activity or some hobby; it does not matter what it is, but we develop lust for something. Without that lust we cannot live. Even our work is an effective way of throwing out our lust. It is just that it is the most popular and accepted way in the world. Today people just go on working, working and working. Not because they are creating something fantastic, but simply because they have to work. Otherwise, they don’t know what to do with themselves.

We have to guard that madness cautiously. Nobody ever knows that we have this within ourselves and we ourselves would like to forget it. We do everything possible to forget it. All the entertainment in the world has come just to hide our madness. If we were perfectly sane, we would not need entertainment. We need entertainment just to cover our madness. If we take away our entertainment, we will go crazy. 

We need entertainment simply to hide our madness. If we were perfectly sane, we would not need entertainment. We could just sit and watch the bamboo grow. We would not really need entertainment.