On Saturday Night Fever

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 you intensely involved yourself in physical activity, a lot of your neurosis was worked out. Your nervous energy got spent. 

If you went out and chopped wood for the whole day, a lot of your energy would be spent, and life would be peaceful. But today it is not like that. You are not using your body the way it used to be used, so you go on generating all kinds of diseases, like never before. This builds up into your system over a period of time. 

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, you cannot even breathe inside. 

You cannot even dance, everybody is bumping into everybody else, but it does not matter, you have to work it out. Otherwise you will go crazy. So on Saturday, you go work out your 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. Completely leaving it behind and going ahead where you are no more a part of it. This is what meditation is all about. Now, if you dance, you simply dance for the joy of it, and not because there is something to work out. If you are dancing to work out something, maybe it is therapeutic, but there is a certain ugliness about it. It is lusty. You cannot dance out of love. You can only dance out of lust.  

Do you know the difference between love and lust? Lust is a strong need. Love is not a need. When you love, you settle down, nothing more is needed. You can just sit here for a lifetime. With lust you cannot sit anywhere. You either get into some mad action, or you are bound to go crazy. 

When there is a certain neurosis, a certain madness within yourself, you can only be in lust. Your lust can be for sex, for food or for some particular activity or some hobby, it does not matter what it is. Without that lust you cannot live. Even your work is an effective way of throwing out your lust. 

It is just that it is the most popular and accepted way in the world. Today people just go on 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. 

Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch the bamboo grow.