20. *hat is attention-need?*

Before we move into subject of love, let us see what is meant by the word attention-need.

Whatever we do, whatever we think, we are subconsciously seeking concurrence and approval from the people around us in some subtle way. We are very keen that we should earn a good name from everyone. We may not do this in a very obvious fashion, but if you analyse deeply, you will not be at ease without the appreciation and endorsement of the people around you. This endorsement, this approval, is what we call 'attention-need'.

80% of our problems is due to this asking for attention or approval. If you just sit and write down, in a day, how many things you do to get a good name, to maintain your reputation in family and society, you will see.

You will find that all the 24 hours, all your lifetime, you are involved in getting approval from others. All your life, you are on a signature campaign, getting approval signature from family and society.

In a big register you make a column: Good Father, and for everything that you do for your children, you expect their signature of approval under that column! Then you go to your wife, to your boss, to your friends. You prepare columns with suitable headings like Good Husband, Good Employee, Good Friend etc. and wait for them to sign under it*.*

Of course, all these people also come to you for your signature! You too need to sign on their registers under the columns applicable to you!

Why do we bother so much about others' opinions about us? Why can't we judge ourselves by our own strength and continue to do our work? Why are we deriving strength from others? All this is because of two things: one, we don't know anything about ourselves. We know ourselves only through others' opinions of us, only through others' certificates. Second: when others give us their approval and attention, they are actually giving us energy to move on. Attention IS energy! That is why we feel so boosted when they give us attention.

Attention in any form is alright for us. In most of the houses, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law will be constantly fighting with each other. They will be constantly complaining about each other to the poor man in the house. But for a few days, if one of them goes out of town, what happens? The other starts missing them! Although they are fighting all the time, they miss each other when they are not together! Why does this happen? When they fight with each other all the time, they are actually getting that much of attention upon themselves from the other person!

Don't think that only positive attention is energizing! Any form of attention is energizing. Both the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law subconsciously enjoy the attention that they get from the other when they fight. That is why they miss each other; they actually miss the attention! But when they start missing each other, they term it love! They say that they miss each other because of love.

Of course, it may be true; but I want you to understand that attention is nothing but energy, which keeps us in good spirits. It is a subtle form of energizing ourselves, and we are not even aware of this. When we need something, that something is not love; it is attention. You don't need love; you are love yourself. So when you say that you need love, when you say that you need to be loved, you are really in need of attention, not love.

People come and tell me that their sons and daughters don't love them enough in their old age. What they really mean is, their sons and daughters are not giving them the attention, the energy that they need in their old age.

Actually if you see, as we grow older, we should become more and more centered within ourselves, sensitive to the existential energy inside us. But what happens is, because we have been dependent on others for attention and energy all our lives, because the love that we know exists only in relationships, because we have lived with no awareness and sensitivity to what is inside us, when we get older, we start missing the love that came from outside or the attention that came from outside. The family becomes busy with other things and they don't interact with us as they used to. So we start complaining with age.

If you see, only because we don't understand that our energy source lies within us, instead of living life with more joy and energy, we live life with reduced joy and energy.

Certificates of energy?

When you are dependent on external sources for energy, you become psychologically handicapped*.* When you need physical support, you are physically handicapped. When you need psychological support, you are psychologically handicapped.

With a physical handicap, you know that you are handicapped because you can see it clearly, but with psychological handicap, you don't even know that you are handicapped. When you are not aware of it, you will not know the consequences that it can give rise to. When the real consequences or dis-ease happens, you will wonder what the reasons are.

If you have seen children play, you might have seen them building castles with cards. They will place the cards at a certain angle to each other and build several layers of such patterns in a pyramid shape. It will be beautiful to look at. But if you remove even one card from the castle, from anywhere, the whole castle will collapse! The higher the castle, the more the chances of collapsing.

Just like this, we build our own self-image like a castle, out of people's opinions of us. We collect certificates or signatures from our father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend, teacher, friends and what not, and arrange all these certificates and build a castle to form our self-image. The image will look beautiful and we will feel happy.

But if even one person withdraws their certificate, what happens? The castle collapses! You start feeling miserable about yourself. You feel depressed. You feel that the whole world has come to an end.

At least in the case of the children, they build their castles with their own cards. But we build our castles with others' cards, with others' certificates! We don't have control over the castle because it is built with other people's certificates.

So what do we do? We start working hard in maintaining the castle; in guarding it well. We start behaving in such a way that people don't remove their certificates. We start doing things to get their continuous approval, because their approval has become our very survival.

A small story:

A lady once went shopping with her husband because she wanted to buy a coat for herself.

They visited many shops but she could not find what she wanted.

The husband became tired.

He asked, 'Dear, do you know the exact kind of coat you want to buy?'

The wife replied, 'Of course! I am looking for a drop-dead coat.'

The husband could not understand what she meant.

He asked, 'What is a drop-dead coat, dear?'

She replied, 'When people see it, they will drop dead!'

All the time we are looking to see how we can collect certificates from people! Every action of ours is unconsciously related to what people will say to it and how people will react to it.

For example, a bag may come reasonably within your budget and it may have a good utility value also. But unconsciously, your mind will say that people may not appreciate the look of the bag very much. You start choosing again! But you will not agree that you are searching for certificates, because it is an unconscious process in you!

We become almost like a centipede. A centipede needs 100 legs to walk. Like that, we need the synchronous approval of everyone for us to walk in life. What happens if even one leg of the centipede is not alright? It will be stranded. What happens to us when even one approval fails to be got? We fall into depression.

If we are so dependent on others, there is every possibility that we will fall into depression. People who suffer from depression are actually suffering from attention-need. Over time something happens; we don't get enough attention and we find it difficult to handle it. Just one word is enough to put us into depression. But we don't know the real reason for our depression. So what do we do? We start taking medicine to cure it.

How will it heal? The cause for the depression is inside you and you look at medicines for help. When people come to me with depression, I tell them to do the simple Mahamantra meditation to start with and tell them that slowly, we will stop the medicines.

You see, these people need to be shown that their energy source lies within them. Meditation can show them that.

Depending on the sincerity with which they do the meditation, they can simply harness the energy within them and come out of depression. Medicines will dull them even more. This needs to be understood.

I tell you: when you derive your energy from outside, it can simply play havoc on you. You just become a puppet.

Let me tell you a story. It is actually an experiment that was conducted in the University of Chicago in USA:

A young, healthy and intelligent man wakes up and gets ready to go to work. His wife looks at him and tells him, 'You are looking tired; are you alright?'

He feels irritated by her comment and tells her to stop imagining things and leaves.

As he takes his car out of the garage, his neighbor is watching him and shouts out, 'Are you feeling well? You look out of sorts!' The man is surprised this time but tells him that he is alright and drives out.

He reaches his office and as he walks in, the receptionist looks at him with concern and says, 'Sir, you look ill! Why did you come to work?'

The man replies, 'Well, I think I am fine. Let's see….' And he goes to his office.'

He starts to work and a colleague enters and says, 'Hey! You look awful. What's the matter? You have fever or something?'

Now, this is too much for the man. He begins to feel uneasy and sick. Just then his boss calls him and he goes in. The boss takes one look at him and says, 'You look really unwell. Are you sure you can carry on today? Why

don't you go and see the doctor?'

The young man has had enough. He feels positively ill now; he says he would like to go home, and leaves.

As he drives home in his car, he feels his temperature rising. When he reaches home, his wife is surprised to see him back. She reaches out and touches his forehead and finds that he has high temperature!

A man who was healthy and happy in the morning became actually sick by afternoon! And how did he become sick? Just by people telling him that he was sick. The people were set up to tell him the same thing again and again. This experiment was conducted on several people and all the people fell sick at the end of it.

This is what happens when you are not centered in your own energy that is inside you. You will simply move from a high to a low just because of the influences from outside. When you become centered in yourself, nothing outside can shake you.

People tell me, 'Swamiji, we don't do things for praise or approval; we do them because it is our duty.'

Be very clear: the moment you claim that you are doing your duty, you are doing it because if you don't do it, your people will stop approving of you. Your people will approve of you as long as you fulfill every small thing that is expected of you. Even if there is a small slip in what you are doing, you will be able to see the change in their relationship with you. You know this and so you do your duty.

Guaranteed Solutions

You will say, 'Swamiji, I am their father. If I don't provide for them, who will?' I am not saying that you should not provide for them. You have given birth to them; you have to provide for them until such time that they become independent and do things for themselves. But what you are doing, do out of no expectation whatsoever. Let it be an act which is an expression of the loving energy inside you, without any sort of expectation.

Right now, you might claim that you are not doing it out of any expectation, but when reciprocity from the other side dips a little, you will know; you will be able to observe the tension in you, the disappointment in you. This tension, this disappointment is the result of the expectation that was inside you when you did your duty. The degree of these may vary with each person, but it will be there at some level.

And when it is there, you are not doing it out of just an expression of the loving energy in you; you are doing it out of a lesser, limited quality called duty or so-called love.

The Bhagavad Gita beautifully says:

Karmanyevaadhikaaraste maa phaleshu kadaachanah

It means, Your job is only to do the work, not to be concerned about the result.

Whatever you do should be an overflowing of the loving energy inside you. Then, you are not bothered about the results.

When I say you are not bothered about the results, I don't mean that out of a frustrated or cynical conclusion, you are not bothered. What I mean is, you don't even know to expect results because you are continuously moving and expressing your blissful inner energy. So we can't even say that you don't expect results. You are just flowing joyfully, that's all! This flowing energy is real love.

When you start expecting from other people, there will be no end to it. And let me tell you: the most difficult thing is to satisfy all the people around you. Do you think you can satisfy all the people all the time? Never. It is the most impossible thing to do on planet earth.

A small story:

A husband and wife were celebrating their fifty years of marriage.

The wife presented the husband with two shirts.

He was very touched and declared that they would go out for dinner instead of cooking at home.

It was a very tender moment for them.

He freshened up and to make his wife happy, wore one of the gift shirts and appeared from his room.

As he came down, she looked up and smiled, but soon her expression changed and she asked, 'So the other shirt is no good?'

It is never possible to make another totally happy!

First of all, try to satisfy yourself; find fulfillment in yourself. That is enough. And let this fulfillment have nothing to do with the people around you. Let it be just a bubbling energy inside you, irrespective of the conditions and people outside. That is enough.

It is good to do something for others; it is good to give attention, give respect – but out of a deep energizing love, not out of fear; not because we are afraid that they will take away their certificates. It is not worth investing so much in others' opinions that they become the center of your life. Don't make others the source of your energy.

As I told you earlier: because you don't know anything about yourself, you turn to society for an answer. And society happily puts its labels on you: You are a good father. You are goodlooking. You are a failure and what not.

In the same way as a parcel without a proper address is pushed from place to place, we move around collecting all these labels. But we don't know that we are not the labels, but the stuff inside the parcel.

When you are dependent on others for your happiness, you are giving them control of your life. Be your own source of energy and inspiration! Come to a clear understanding that real joy is not possible when you place your center on someone else. If you understand this, half the problem is solved.

A small story:

Brahma Sutra is a great book available to humanity. It is the unabridged edition of world philosophy, from which all other philosophies originated; it is the book of books.

It was written by Veda Vyasa, the greatest Indian scholar ever.

An enlightened master gave this book to one of his disciples, Vachaspati Mishra, and asked him to write a commentary on this book.

Vachaspati Mishra started out on his task earnestly.

He was continuously engaged in writing. It became an intense and transforming meditation for him.

He wrote for months; soon months became years and years became decades.

He saw nothing else, thought about nothing else and heard nothing else during that time.

Finally, he finished the great work. Only the title of the book remained to be given.

He looked up from his work.

He saw an old lady, lighting the lamp next to him.

He was surprised. He asked her, 'Who are you?'

The lady replied, 'Never mind about me. Continue with your work.'

He said, 'I have finished. Tell me who you are.'

The lady said, 'I am your wife.'

Vachaspati Mishra was shocked.

He was simply shocked at what had happened.

For decades he had been writing the book without a single thought about his wife! He could not believe himself.

'Why didn't you remind me all these years!' he cried.

'What for?' She asked. 'You were immersed in the book. I felt no need to disturb you,' she replied quietly.

Vachaspati Mishra continued, 'You have sacrificed your entire life for the sake of humanity! What can I do to make up for it?' Bamati replied, 'It has been a joy to serve you. I feel privileged that I was able to serve you while you wrote this great book. Nothing more is needed.' Vachaspati Mishra shed tears of joy.

He paid his wife the greatest tribute. He named his life's work after her: Bamati*.*

Even today, the most outstanding commentary on humanity's most precious book, carries her name: Bamati*.*

Bamati has become immortal, because of her selfless devotion and love. She was enough unto herself. It is not that she did not want to disturb her husband; she did not need to! There is a big difference between the two. Most of the time we want attention but keep quiet thinking that we should not disturb the other.

But here we are talking of a person who did not need attention – that is the difference. She did not feel that her youth was being wasted; she was not making any compromise. She was being her natural self, that's all. And that was enough for her. It was not difficult for her not disturbing her husband. She was so centered in her own energy that it didn't matter to her at all.

Bamati lives even after she died. We are all dying every minute when we live. That is the difference.

Today, in our houses, can you read the newspaper for half an hour in peace? Can your wife watch her serial on television for half an hour? Just when you are reading the newspaper, your wife will think of telling you all the important things that happened at home the previous day. And she will complain that you are not giving her enough attention. She will say that you are with the newspaper all the time.

And exactly when your wife is watching her favourite television serial, you will feel hungry and want her to serve food for you. You will curse the television for showing the serials at the wrong times!

A small story:

A man was sitting with his wife in a restaurant. They ordered for food and were waiting for it to come. The wife complained, 'Dear, ever since we entered the restaurant, you've been reading that paper.' The husband apologized, 'I'm sorry dear*,*' and signaled to the waiter. 'Can we have another newspaper please?'

You see, all of us are seeking attention all the time. And when we don't get it, we are upset. This is the root cause for all anger, disappointment and frustration in our lives.

We need to stop asking and start giving. We need to radiate energy instead of asking for energy. But we don't even know how to shift the focus from us to the other. We are so used to seeing ourselves as the center of attention. We need to start seeing the world outside as the center of attention. How to do this?

Guaranteed Solutions

Shift that centre

For the next few days, I want you all to do this small exercise: Choose a partner from amongst yourselves, of the same gender. Look after that partner completely. Your first concern should always be for the other person's comfort. You should always look to see if he or she is happy and comfortable. Find out if they need anything. Instead of grabbing a plate for yourself first, give that person the plate and then you take one. If there is no warm water coming in your room, find out if there is warm water for them in their room.

And, I don't want you to pair up with your friends or relatives! I don't want you to choose people with whom you can exchange addresses with later on; with whom you can be friends later! Simply choose a stranger – the person standing closest to you. Just choose at random.

Almost all our lives, we worry only about ourselves. At the most, we worry about our close family, and that too because we feel that it is our duty-bound love. When you start doing this exercise, you will get a chance to see what selfless love is! It is selfless because you don't expect anything from the other person.