If you are happy at the expense another happiness you - You are forever bound
If you are happy at the expense of another man’s happiness, you are forever bound.
From the very beginning we start poisoning every human with the poison of competitiveness. By the time one comes out of the school one will be completely poisoned. We have hypnotized everyone with the idea that one has to fight with others, that life is a survival of the fittest. Then life can never be a celebration then life can never have any kind of religiousness in it. Then it cannot have any quality of sacredness. Then it is all mean, ugly.
Buddha has his way of saying things and I have mine - here is how I say it: If you are happy at the expense of another person happiness, you are forever bound
Naturally. If you are happy at the expense of another human's happiness—and that is how you can be happy, there is no other way. If you find a beautiful partner and somehow manage to possess them, you have snatched them away from others’ hands. We make things look as beautiful as possible, but that is only the appearance. Now the others who have lost in the game, they are angry, they are in a rage. They will wait for their opportunity to take revenge, and sooner or later the opportunity will be there.
Whatsoever you possess in this world you possess at somebody else’s expense, at the cost of somebody else’s pleasure. There is no other way. If you really want not to be inimical to anybody in the world, you have to drop the whole idea of possessiveness. Use whatsoever happens to be with you in the moment, but don’t be possessive. Don’t try to claim that it is yours. Nothing is yours, all belongs to existence.
We come with empty hands and we will go with empty hands, so what is the point of claiming so much in the meantime?
But this is what we know, what the world teaches us: possess, dominate, have more than the others have. And it may be money or it may be virtue; it does not matter in what kind of coins you deal—they may be worldly, they may be otherworldly, but be very clever, otherwise you will be exploited. Exploit and don’t be exploited—that is the subtle messages given to you with your mother’s milk. And every school, college, university, is rooted in the idea of competition.
A real education will not teach you to compete, it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can’t be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time you become the first.
A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for the act itself. Only then can existence flow through you. Only then can it use your hands and your fingers and your brush. Only then something of superb beauty can be born.
It is never by you but only through you. Existence flows; you become only a passage. You allow it to happen, that’ s all; you don’t hinder, that’s all.
Don’t think of the result at all. Just do what you are doing with your totality. Get lost into it. Lose the doer in the doing. Don’t “be”—let your creative energies flow unhindered.