All your promises are untrue — how can you promise ?

All your promises are untrue -- how can you promise ?

 

All your promises are untrue -- how can you promise ?

Just first watch in how many ways you lie. You smile and you don’t feel like smiling within. It is a lie.

Don’t smile, because you are being violent to the lips, to the face. And if you go on doing it for long you will completely forget the feeling of a smile, what a true smile is. Only small children know; you have completely forgotten what a true smile is. You simply smile; it is a gesture, false. You smile as a polite mannerism. You smile because people expect you to smile. You smile not knowing what you are doing.

Why are you forcing your lips? And if your smile has become false, what else can be true in you? Your tears, they also have become false. You weep when it is required to weep; otherwise you suppress.

Watch in how many millions of ways you have become untrue. You say things you don’t mean. You use words completely unconsciously — and then you are trapped through them. You say to someone, “You are beautiful.” It may have been just a mannerism with you, but you have touched the other person, you have stirred something in the other person. The other person may start feeling that you feel that way. Now expectations arise, and soon frustrations will follow — because you had said it just by the way, you never meant it. Now you are in a trap: you have to fulfill the expectation. Now you feel burdened.

Be true and you will be less burdened. Be true; don’t create false expectations around you, otherwise you will be in a prison, trapped! Say exactly what you mean and always say, “This I mean in this moment. For the next moment I cannot say anything — because who knows what will happen in the next moment? I love you this moment but how can I speak for the next moment?”

Only an enlightened person can say something about the next moment because he has come to a point where everything is eternal. But how can you speak about the next moment? Your moods change. This moment you feel, “I love,” and this moment you can say, “I will love you for ever and ever.” This is true only in this moment; for the next moment, how can you say anything? Then be alert and make the statement conditional: “This is only for this moment — this is how I feel. Nobody knows about the next moment. I cannot promise.”

All your promises are untrue — how can you promise? — because a promise means you have attained to a crystallized center. How can you keep a promise? You say to a woman, “I will love you for ever and ever.” How can you keep this promise? And after just a few days you feel the excitement has disappeared, now there is no love — what to do?

Now you have to smile falsely. You have to kiss this woman, you have to make love to this woman — because of the promise. Now everything goes false. You become untrue. Now you feel guilty if you don’t fulfill it. If you fulfill it, it is untrue, you are acting. It cannot make you ecstatic — it will create more anxiety and burdens. It cannot be a fulfillment, it will be a frustration.

And the more you force yourself to love that woman the more you will take revenge, because this woman has become a rock around your neck. Now you feel: “If she dies it will be good.”

Now you feel: “Somehow, if she goes away it will be good.” Now you will find a way to escape — just because of a promise! A promise that is given in a moment and given for one life is not possible for you. You live in moments. You don’t have an eternal center in you yet, you have just a wheel-like periphery that moves. And this is how you are trapped.

You cannot love, you cannot laugh, you cannot weep — everything is untrue, and you are in search of truth. No, it is not possible. You have to be true to meet truth, because only the same can meet the same. An untrue person cannot reach the truth; only a true person can reach the truth.

Be alert, don’t promise! Just say that this moment it appears so. It will give you a feeling of helplessness, of course; the ego cannot stand. The ego can say, “I will, for ever and ever.” You will feel helpless that even this promise you cannot give; but it is being true.

And I know that if even for a single moment you can love another person totally, that will change you, that will give you a taste of truth. But be true. Say what you mean. If you don’t know, if in a situation you are confused, don’t speak — or simply put your confusion out, express it. Before you act, act with full awareness that this is going to give you a truer being. Be authentic!

Millions of things you go on doing that you don’t want to do. Who is forcing you? You simply drift — nobody is forcing you to do those things. Why do you do them? You are not aware. It is just a chain: you do one thing, then another arises. One thing leads to another and you go on and on. Then when will you stop? Every moment is the right moment to stop. Just watch and start falling out of the chain of lies that you have created.

Of course, you will feel very, very humiliated, humble, helpless. But that’s true — feel it. Weep when you want to weep, when it comes from your heart. Don’t stop; don’t say, “I am a man, I cannot be a sissy, I cannot behave like a woman.” Don’t say that. Nobody is so totally a man and nobody can be.

Man is woman also, woman is man also; both meet and mingle inside. Weep, because if you cannot weep authentically you cannot smile. Then you will be afraid. When you would like to laugh you will be afraid because tears may come; they are suppressed there so you cannot laugh. When you cannot laugh, you cannot weep — it becomes a vicious circle. When you are angry, be angry and take the consequences — be truly angry.

And this has been my observation: if you are truly angry, nobody is offended by true anger — nobody! But your anger is impotent, dead. If you are a father and you feel angry with your child, be angry and the child will never feel anything antagonistic towards you. But you are angry and you smile, and the child simply detects it because a child is innocent, he has clear eyes, more clarity than you have. He simply detects the falsity — that you are angry and you are smiling. He will never be able to forgive you because you are untrue. A child never feels so bad about anything as he feels about untruth. Be authentic! If you feel like hitting the child, hit him, but don’t be untrue. And when you feel repentance, ask forgiveness also, and be true in that.

A husband who has never said anything in anger to his wife will not be able to love, because everything remains false, on the surface. If you cannot bring deep anger, how can you bring deep love? And if you are so much afraid of being angry, that shows that you are not confident of love. You are afraid that things may fall apart, the relationship may break; that’s why you are afraid. But then this relationship is not worth much. If it cannot pass through anger and mature, it is not worth much. Drop it before it becomes a commitment — but be true.

You will have to suffer through truth, but that suffering is needed. And through suffering you will mature, your inner being will become seasoned. You will attain to a sharpness and clarity that only comes through encounter, that only comes through facing facts. When you are angry, be truly angry so that you can be truly forgiving also. When you don’t want to give a thing, simply say, “I don’t want to give it,” but don’t find excuses. Don’t find excuses, because you are creating a pattern every moment, and that pattern can become so ingrained that you will have to follow it. Come out of it — and every moment is a right moment.

OSHO