It is very difficult for a child to be genuine and happy without the mother. If the mother is lost in the early childhood, it is almost as if the juice disappears from the child. He becomes dry. That’s why you feel like a monk.
The mother is not just a caretaker. She is not only giving you food, she is giving you a life energy. She is continuously pouring her love into you. Her affection makes you feel that you are loved, needed, appreciated, that you are valuable, that without you somebody is going to be very very unhappy. Your smile is significant. It makes others smile.
Once the mother is not there, the child is cut off from existence. Others will take care, food will be taken care of, everything will be okay, but there will be no one who feels tremendously happy just because you are there. Just your being makes somebody tremendously happy. The child starts feeling as if he is a sort of a burden. People are taking care of him, but he feels not needed. It would have been better if he were not.
Those very indirect, subtle feelings, enter into the heart and they make one dry. That’s what has happened. But in a way it is simpler to solve than if it were a karmic chain, because just reliving it you will become alive again. Just recognising the fact that this is what has happened, the whole load will disappear.
You need some meaning in your life. If the mother is missing, the meaning is missing. If meaning can be caught hold of again, you will find that the existence has become your mother. Just the other day I was reading a sentence of Jean-Paul Sartre. He thinks that man is an impotent passion, a futile passion. Failure is certain. There is no meaning. Life is just accidental, not going anywhere. He says that life is like a child who is asleep in a train and is awakened by an inspector who wants to check the ticket, but the child has no ticket and no money either to pay for it. Not only that, the child is not at all aware of where he is going, what his destination is and why he is in the train. And the last but not the least, the child cannot figure it out because he has never decided to be on the train in the first place. Why is he there?
This situation is becoming more and more common to the modern mind because man is somehow uprooted, meaning is missing. One simply feels, ’Why? Where am I going?’ You don’t know where you are going and you don’t know why you are in the train. You don’t have a ticket and you don’t have the money to pay for it, and still you cannot get out of the train. There are guards who won’t allow you to jump out of it, because to commit suicide is a great crime. You are neither allowed to go out of the train nor do you see any point in being in the train because you don’t know where you are going and you never decided to be there in the first place. Everything seems to be chaos, maddening.
This has happened because roots in love have been lost. It is not only your case. It is obvious that your mother died, but don’t feel sorry for yourself because of it, because people whose mothers are alive are in the same boat; sometimes even in a worse state. Motherhood has somehow died. It is not a question of a mother dying. Motherhood has disappeared. Love has disappeared. People are just living loveless lives... somehow pulling themselves. So what to do?
I know that everybody one day feels like a child in a train. Still I don’t say that life is going to be a failure, because in this big train there are millions of people fast asleep, but there is always somebody who is awake. The child can search and find somebody who is not asleep and snoring, someone who has consciously entered the train, someone who knows where the train is going, or at least knows where he is going. Being in the vicinity of that person, the child also learns the ways of becoming more conscious. That’s what is needed for you.
Become more conscious, because whatsoever happened, happened, and whatsoever has not happened, has not happened. There is no point in being too puzzled about it. Just become more conscious and have a look at your past life very deliberately, without any justification, rationalization – just naked facts. Allow that movie of your past life to come across your eyes again and again. Make it a point every night before you go to sleep, for half an hour start again from the very beginning.
Don’t go backwards; start from the very beginning. Start from the first thing in your life and then move towards the point where you are. You will be surprised – many many more new points will be bubbling up. By and by you will be able to remember further back, further back. One day you will remember the day that you were born out of the womb. The day you remember that and you pass through that agony and pain, there will be the primal scream. The goal is to come to the primal scream, because it is such an agony that it became the first repression by the mind.
That is at the very base of the mind. Once that repression is dissolved, you have a totally new mind, a new orientation, fresh.
Once you are free of the past and the dryness of the past, you will again feel flowing, alive, again a child full of wonder, surprise, meaning, poetry, mm? It will happen.
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose
Osho
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