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Book Name: Hsin Hsin Ming - The Book of NothingPrevious     Next
 

there will be struggle. The struggle is not because others are trying to dominate; the struggle is because you are not trying to understand how the ego functions.

You drop out of it! The others cannot be changed, and you will be unnecessarily wasting your life if you try to change the others. That is THEIR problem. They will suffer if they are not understanding, why should you suffer? You simply understand that everybody is trying to dominate, "I drop out of it, I will not try to dominate"... your struggle disappears. And a very beautiful thing happens.

If you don't try to dominate, the wife starts feeling foolish, and by and by she starts looking silly to herself -- because the other is no more there to fight. When you fight you strengthen the other's ego, and this is a vicious circle.

When you don't fight then the other feels he is fighting alone, in a vacuum: fighting with the wind or fighting with a ghost, but not fighting with anybody. And then you give an opportunity for the other also to see, to understand. Then the wife cannot throw the responsibility on you, she has to carry her own responsibility.

The same is the problem with everybody because human nature functions similarly, more or less; the differences are only of degrees. If you try to understand, you become a dropout. Not that you drop out of the society, not that you become a hippie and go and make a commune -- that is not the point. Psychologically you are no more in these trips of egos, domination, aggression, violence, anger. You are no more part of it. Then a distance is created, a detachedness. Now you can look at things and you can laugh... how foolish man is! And you can laugh... how ridiculous you have always been!

It is said about Rinzai that in the morning when he got up he would laugh a belly laugh, so loud that the whole monastery -- five hundred sannyasins were there -- they would hear it. In the evening when he went to sleep, he would have again a belly laugh.

Many people asked why, but he would simply laugh and he would not answer. When he was dying somebody asked, "One thing: tell us why you were laughing every day, morning and evening, the

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