What is confidence and what is diffidence?
Diffidence is something that lowers the scale of life when life can happen more beautifully. Overconfident
people are invariably tyrants. What we need is neither confidence nor diffidence.
What we need is awareness and consciousness.
Whatever I face, any kind of situation or people, the moment I sit, I just look at them and I don't
even have to think, I just see them as a part of myself, I speak to them as I would speak to
myself. To speak to yourself, you don't need confidence. The need only arises when you have
to talk to someone else. When you speak to yourself, you can say anything you want. There is
no difficulty in it; there is no greatness about it. If you just behold everybody as yourself, there is
no confidence, no diffidence. What needs to be done, you just do it.
Once there is a sense of inclusion, awareness and consciousness come naturally. Awareness
is life. Life is awareness. There is no other way to be. It is only because of exclusion that
awareness has to be practised. People are trying to be aware simply because they have
excluded themselves from everything.
So what is needed is consciousness. Consciousness is not individual, it is always all-inclusive.
If you are conscious, everything is included. You need neither confidence nor diffidence. You
just function to the fullest of your intellectual capability, without any hesitation.
In the Bhagavad Gita , Krishna says, "Hesitation is the worst of sins". Very strange, isn't it?
Hesitation is the worst of sins because in hesitation, you don't live. Krishna is not a teaching.
Krishna is an affirmative statement of life. He is saying that anything that is not life is the worst
sin, adharma . "Don't hesitate" does not mean to jump into every pit that you see. Your
intelligence is capable of choosing and deciding in a moment whether you need to do
something or not.
The problems of confidence and diffidence have come because you are such an exclusive
character in the world. Most of your exclusiveness you have created unconsciously. A part of it
you have created consciously because you thought that this is the way to get attention, by
trying to be special. Especially in western cultures, right from childhood, they are training you to
be special. Trying to be special is the worst disease because once you get this disease, there is
no salvation. Wherever you go, you have to do something stupid to prove that you are special.
Isha Yoga is not about being special. It is about being extraordinary.
In the old brochures, we used to say " Isha Yoga Ordinary to Extraordinary". People thought if
they come to the programme, they would become very special. After they arrived, I would tell
them, "No, you will become more ordinary than others. Extra-ordinary!" When there is no effort
to make yourself special, you are simply ordinary, you will stand out as extra-ordinary. Allinclusiveness
is extra-ordinary. It is just a way of life. When I say inclusion, it is not something
that I have made up this is the way Existence is. It is only in inclusiveness that Existence is
functioning. If you are so exclusive, why are you inhaling what I exhale? Try to breathe
separately and see; you will be dead. It is only in inclusiveness that life is happening.
When we talk about inclusiveness, we are not teaching you a new philosophy. We are talking
about leading life the way life is, just ordinary, as it is. It is ordinary but it is magnificent.
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