We should not rely on others all the time. If you rely on other people in order to be happy and secure, you are destroying these people, or at least you are exploiting them. At the same time you neglect essential aspect of self-reliance.

Dependence has been dominating our life since we were born. In child-hood when we cannot help ourselves physically, we need to rely on other people to take care of us. As a result of this dependence we neglect the cultivation of self-reliance. Whenever we have difficulties, we always think of going back to our parents to ask them for assistance.

When we have relationship with friends, we also create a kind of emotional, and even physical, dependence. We depend on our friends in order to feel that we have someone who can comfort us or who can help us when we feel lonely or when we are in trouble.

Loneliness is the enemy of self-reliance. It arises because of dependence. If you are not dependent, you do not feel lonely and you do not have the desire to dominate or control, to play certain games of relationship.

The domineering person feels deeply lonely because the desire to dominate and control puts him in a situation of agony and despair. Such a person feels empty when this desire cannot be fulfilled.

An old saying goes, thousands of rivers flow to the sea, but a sea can never be full of water. In the same way, desires flow with our life but they cannot be always fulfilled.

What does it mean to be free from desire? Does it mean we must not have desire at all? Or does it mean that we have some control over desire?

It means we use desire for a constructive purpose and a creative way of living. But we cannot be satisfied with anything forever. That is why the search for gratification and satisfaction has no end.

We become slaves if we search and search according to this driving force of desire. The freedom from desire is freedom from the compulsion of desire.

When we are free from his compulsion in any aspect of lie, we feel free to move and to act. When we are free from compulsion, the general natural desires will be used of sustaining life. Nobody will reject the use of natural desires—the desire for food, water, clothes, shelter, and so on. All these are essential. But freedom from compulsiveness of desire is essential.

Let us look more closely into emotional self-reliance. Can we feel emotionally secure, at home with ourselves, firm and stable in our relationships, in our way of living or with any work we do, in any situation we happen to be in?

Are we emotionally disturbed, insecure, emotionally lacking, always wanting? The want is the lack. When we want more, it means we lack more. We feel we have nothing inside us. There is emotional insecurity within, which means lack of self-reliance.

How do we depend on our environment, on people around us? We have to observe all these relationships and the conditions of life which we maintain.

If you can understand, you do not need external support. You can sit in your room quietly, peacefully, without feeling lonely. When you go out with your friends, you can appreciate being with them. It does not mean that you reject social contact, but you do not seek it our continually.

If we depend on other people or social occasions, in order to feel happy, then there is something lacking in us, especially if that tendency is very strong. If we simply want to appreciate and understand deferent ways of living, that is another matter. Self-reliance is not the same as negative detachment, a neurotic avoidance of people. People who are negatively detached are self-conscious. They find it very difficult to speak up, to talk or even to ask questions, because they think they may hurt the other person, or that they will be considered stupid.

These reactions indicate a lack of self-reliance. If you keep away from people, it does not mean that you rely on yourself. You keep away because of a fear of meeting people, because of a fear of not being able to face whatever comes up.

This attitude of keeping away is not healthy to life. You create a very small world or yourself. If you cannot meet the world, you put yourself in a prison.

One can keep away from people in the sense of withdrawing for a constructive purpose; you can withdraw into a quiet place in order to look more deeply into yourself to see who you are in that quiet silent way of living.

You can see whether you have certain reactions to the silent life, which is impossible if you live in a noisy world, surrounded b people. There must be a balance between keeping away from people and being with them.

These are lessons to test us as show whether we are relying on ourselves or whether we are still looking for dependency, even unconsciously.

When we cannot rely on ourselves and on our own inner resources, we experience envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred. We feel jealous of other people because we feel that they have qualities that we lack. We then try to compete with them, which aggravates the jealousy.

It you accept yourself and rely on whatever you have and try to bring out your potentialities, your human resources, you take other people as the mirrors in which you are something lacking or something useful.

The relationship then becomes one of liberation and mutual sharing. This is love. Love is giving and sharing and not taking. If we take, we do not love; and when we try to take, to hold on, there is dependency.

If our relationship is based on love and understanding and freedom in the sense of being free to be ourselves, allowing the other person to be as he or she is then it becomes a healthy one.

The flow of love stops the moment you want to hold on, to grasp, to possess. Possessiveness is the greatest enemy of freedom.

Can we really live without possessing things? Possessing means being attached to things. It is different from having things. We must satisfy our basic heeds in life, however.

Nothing can remain forever. At the moment we lose something, we understand, thus avoid frustration and unhappiness. This does not mean that you will not feel sad about what is lost. You feel sad naturally, but you understand it.

Sadness is the feeling arising because of mental contact with something we lose. When we see it is feeling, we see it as a bubble which melts away. It does not remain there or become negative unless we form a negative attitude towards it.

How can we overcome envy, jealousy and resentment? We simply do not try. Any efforts will lead to supersession. Just accept that you are envious or jealous or resentful, and then look at how those feelings arose.

How did you come to such feelings? How do you hold on to them? How do you allow them to dominate your life? Look at the structure of these emotions. When you do not have complete self-reliance, you have competition if life.

You play the comparing game. It may give you a sense of pride, but very often it creates frustration and unhappiness. The comparing game rings about more competition in life. The more you compete with the others, the more envious, jealous or resentful you become.

Turn to yourself, rely on yourself. Be the light unto yourself, the refuge unto yourself. This is essential, particularly at emotional level. Because we are grown up, we think we can rely on ourselves, but emotionally we are more like children, always wanting comfort from somebody else. If we do not grow up emotionally, we cannot be happy, we cannot be free. We cannot be self-reliant.

We are always trying to depend on something outside, looking for a father-figure, or a mother-figure, or and authority-figure here and there. But there is no authority unless we give authority to someone. Authority is only our creation.

Everybody has a function, but it does not mean that they automatically have authority over us. When you are self-reliant you are not submissive in your relationships with people. Neither do you dominate: your relationship is equal. At the same time, you respect other people for what they are, recognizing people according to their status and function, but this recognition does not bring about fear.

When you go to so-called gurus, do not give authority to them, submitting yourself completely, receiving everything blindly without questioning and enquiring. This does not mean you should be arrogant. You accept people and respect them not accepting blindly what they say.

What we understand is very clear to us. We see it. We are neither over-respective nor over-rejecting. When we do not embrace extreme practices we walk the middle path. Our lives are balanced. When we differ strongly with what someone says, we have to look into our reactions. Everyone has the freedom to speak and the freedom to pick up or to let go. When you see and feel something which is not right, you must speak your mind according to how you feel. This sharing helps each person to grow, to live in a peaceful way. Mutual sharing does not destroy self-reliance; it does not bring about this dependence.