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he would! What happened? Psychologists say that if a person becomes fully conscious of a thing, that thing is lost.
I was in a town where a youth was brought to me. He was a teacher in the university. His trouble was that while walking he would suddenly begin to walk like a woman. He had gone through all kinds of treatment but the malady prevailed. It was very embarrassing for him, more so since he was a teacher. I could think of only one cure for him. I told him that whenever he found himself walking like a woman, he should consciously and knowingly walk like a woman and not restrain himself. Up 'til now he had consciously forced himself to walk like a man, but unconsciously he walked like a woman. Now he should do the opposite: whenever the feeling came, he was to give it full expression.
He broke out in loud protests: 'As it is, I am in trouble. And this is what you suggest? I shall be walking like a woman all the time!" I tried to console him and by way of encouragement asked him to try and walk like a woman right before my eyes. But try as he would he could not.
One rule of the mind is, when you try very hard to do something, that something loses its edge. This is how we lose the edge of our happiness. What happens is instead that the edge of our unhappiness remains razor-sharp. We suffer so much misery in the world not because there is so much misery but because there is a fundamental error in our way of life. We do not want to touch unhappiness so its edge remains razor-sharp; and we are so eager to touch happiness that we blunt its edge in the process. In the final analysis we find nothing but misery all around and no sign of happiness anywhere. Then we say, "Happiness is difficult to come by. It is only a dream. Life is a long stream of misery."
This flow of misery and pain is entirely of our own making. One who keeps feeling the edge of misery and does not worry about happiness at all gradually finds that the edge of misery becomes dull and all of life becomes a fountain of joy. Whatever you touch is destroyed; whatever you desire is lost. You never attain what you run after. Life is not a mathematical equation but a riddle
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