If you want to start playing around with rights, we’ll just say, ‘alright, you have a right to a pen and they have a right to steal it from you. If you want to keep on using the word “right” then you have to use it everywhere. And I always believe in the phrasing, you underline everything, you underline nothing. So if you have rights, then they’ve got rights to take away from you your rights. So if you’ve got rights, and they’ve got the right to take away from you your rights, what are you talking about, anyway?
There really are no such things. There’s either your ability to get something and keep it or not. I hear “rights” as people crying all the time, and feeling they’re “supposed” to, and they’re not having what “should” be, and there’s always the feeling there’s something wrong, “I’m not having what I’m ‘supposed’ to have”, and, “this ‘shouldn’t’ happen”.
These “rights” ideas go into every question. How did you get the unhappiness you have? Because your parents didn’t treat you “right”, or society didn’t treat you “right”, or they “shouldn’t” have done this to you, they didn’t have a “right” to talk to you that way, on and on and on. It’s all based on this false concept, that you have any rights whatsoever. You have no rights, whatsoever. Once you get that in your mind, everything you get is because you got it. Either somebody gave it to you, or you got it, in which case that’s how you got it. That’s it. That’s just simple facts. You can only sit on a chair if there’s a chair to sit on. You don’t have a “right” to sit on a chair in a field unless you bring that chair with you.
And lots of rights just seem to me as ludicrous as that, like somebody drowning in the ocean and saying they have a right to fly. What the #?%! are you talking about? It’s all got to do with unhappiness. People talk about rights and debts and oughts and shoulds. It’s just unhappiness. And it’s very freeing to understand that nothing can make you unhappy.
You don’t need these things that you lose in order to be happy. But you have every right to try to get them back. You can have them if you can have them, but you don’t need to be unhappy. What makes you unhappy is believing you have lost something that you had a right to, something you’re supposed to have. That’s what makes you unhappy–believing you should have had this and you’ve lost it, or it was stolen from you, or you destroyed it through your own ignorance or stupidity and believing it should be there, and you have a right to this.
Understand this, in every unhappy way, right means an obligation. Everything you have a right to, you have an obligation to get. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that. So, it’s a two-edged sword–it’s a real pain in the ass. You have to be unhappy until you get it and you have to be unhappy if you lose it, because then you have to win it back; because if you have a right to something, you have an obligation to have it. You have an obligation to fight for it, even if you don’t want to. If you don’t take your rights, your allowing people to walk on you, step all over you, you have no self respect. See, it’s that double-edged sword of rights.
There are no such things as rights. Let’s just get that truth for today. December 12, 1992, learn once and for all you have no rights. There are no such things as rights. There is only ability or ableness or power. If it’s not those things, there’s no magic, there are no rights.
There are no such things as duties. There is only your choice to do or give as you wish, or as you are able. To believe that you have a duty is a meaningless phrase. You have an obligation–what does that mean? If that convinces you to want something, fine, some bullshit convinced you to want something. The truth is you can only now do it because you want to.
Group Member: It’s the attempt to constrain others by fear to do what you want them to do.
Absolutely! Unhappiness is apparently a very useful tool. But it’s self-engendering because those people are unhappy in the first place, that’s why they want to constrain you by fear–because they operate by fear, too.