Osho :
Love is the only religion, the only God, the only mystery that has to be lived, understood.
When love is understood, you have understood all the mystics of the world.
It is not anything difficult. It is as simple as your heartbeats or your breathing. It comes with you, it is not given to you by the society. And this is the point that I want to emphasize: love comes with your birth -- but of course it is undeveloped as everything else is undeveloped. The child has to grow.
The society takes the advantage of the gap. The child's love will take time to grow; meanwhile the society goes on conditioning the mind of the child with ideas about love which are false. By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false.
For example, every child everywhere has been told in a thousand and one ways that love is eternal: once you love a person you love the person always. If you love a person and later on you feel that you don't love, it only means you never loved the person in the first place. Now this is a very dangerous idea. It is giving you an idea of a permanent love and in life nothing is permanent...the flowers blossom in the morning and by the evening they are gone.
Life is a continuous flux; everything is changing, moving. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. You have been given the idea of a permanent love which is going to destroy your whole life. You will expect permanent love from the poor woman, and the woman will expect permanent love from you. Love becomes secondary, permanence becomes primary.
And love is such a delicate flower that you cannot force it to be permanent. You can have plastic flowers; that's what people have -- marriage, their family, their children, their relatives, everything is plastic.
Plastic has one very spiritual thing: it is permanent.
Real love is as uncertain as your life is uncertain.
You cannot say that you will be here tomorrow. You cannot even say that you are going to survive the next moment. Your life is continuously changing -- from childhood to youth, to middle age, to old age, to death, it goes on changing. A real love will also change.
It is possible that if you are enlightened your love has gone beyond the ordinary laws of life. It is neither changing nor permanent, it simply is. It is no more a question of how to love -- you have become love itself, so whatever you do is loving. It is not that you specifically do something which is love -- whatever you do, your love starts pouring through it.
But before enlightenment your love is going to be the same as everything else: it will change.
If you understand that it will change, that once in a while your wife may become interested in somebody and you have to be understanding and loving and caring and allowing her to go the way her being feels...this is a chance for you to prove to your wife that you love her. You love her -- even if she is going to love somebody else, that is irrelevant. With understanding, it is possible that your love may become a lifelong affair, but remember it will not be permanent. It will have its ups and downs, it will have changes.
It is so simple to understand. When you started loving you were too young, with no experience; how can your love remain the same when you have become a mature person? Your love will also attain to some maturity.
And when you have become old your love will have a different flavor to it. Love will go on changing and once in a while love will need just an opportunity for change. In a healthy society it will be possible and yet your relationship with someone will not be broken.
But it is possible that you may have to change your lovers many times in life. There is no harm in it. In fact, by changing your lovers many times in life you will be enriched, and if the whole world follows what I am saying to you about love, the whole world will be enriched.
But a wrong idea has destroyed all possibility. The moment your partner looks at somebody -- just looking, and his eyes show attraction and you freak out. You have to understand that if the man drops being interested in beautiful women on the road, in beautiful actresses in the movies.... That's what you want; you want him not to be interested in anything except you. But you don't understand human psychology. If he is not interested in women on the road, in the movies, why will he be interested in you? His interest in women is a guarantee that he is interested in you, that there is still a possibility that your love can go on and on.
But we are doing just the opposite. Men are trying so that their women should not be interested in anybody other than themselves; they should be the only focus, her total concentration. The woman is asking the same, and both are driving each other mad. Concentration on one person is bound to lead you into madness.
For a lighter life, for a more playful life, you need to be flexible. You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion:
Anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong.
If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, slowly will start settling on the right path about everything -- your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.
Dropping old concepts, ugly concepts.... For example, in this country, millions have died by jumping alive into the funeral pyre with their husbands. It shows that the possessiveness of the husband is so much that not only does he want to possess the woman while he is alive, he is afraid of what will happen when he is dead! He will not be able to do anything -- it is better to take the woman with him.
And you can see that this was applicable only to women -- not a single man has jumped into the funeral pyre of a woman in ten thousand years. What does it mean? Does it mean that only women love men and men do not love women? Does it mean that the woman has no life of her own? Only the husband's life is her life -- when the husband is dead, she has to be dead.
Such nonsense ideas have settled in our heads. You have to do continuous cleaning -- whenever you see some nonsense in your head, clean it, throw it away.
If you are clear and clean in the mind you will be able to find solutions for every problem that arises in your life.
Love is the only religion, the only God, the only mystery that has to be lived, understood.
When love is understood, you have understood all the mystics of the world.
It is not anything difficult. It is as simple as your heartbeats or your breathing. It comes with you, it is not given to you by the society. And this is the point that I want to emphasize: love comes with your birth -- but of course it is undeveloped as everything else is undeveloped. The child has to grow.
The society takes the advantage of the gap. The child's love will take time to grow; meanwhile the society goes on conditioning the mind of the child with ideas about love which are false. By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false.
For example, every child everywhere has been told in a thousand and one ways that love is eternal: once you love a person you love the person always. If you love a person and later on you feel that you don't love, it only means you never loved the person in the first place. Now this is a very dangerous idea. It is giving you an idea of a permanent love and in life nothing is permanent...the flowers blossom in the morning and by the evening they are gone.
Life is a continuous flux; everything is changing, moving. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. You have been given the idea of a permanent love which is going to destroy your whole life. You will expect permanent love from the poor woman, and the woman will expect permanent love from you. Love becomes secondary, permanence becomes primary.
And love is such a delicate flower that you cannot force it to be permanent. You can have plastic flowers; that's what people have -- marriage, their family, their children, their relatives, everything is plastic.
Plastic has one very spiritual thing: it is permanent.
Real love is as uncertain as your life is uncertain.
You cannot say that you will be here tomorrow. You cannot even say that you are going to survive the next moment. Your life is continuously changing -- from childhood to youth, to middle age, to old age, to death, it goes on changing. A real love will also change.
It is possible that if you are enlightened your love has gone beyond the ordinary laws of life. It is neither changing nor permanent, it simply is. It is no more a question of how to love -- you have become love itself, so whatever you do is loving. It is not that you specifically do something which is love -- whatever you do, your love starts pouring through it.
But before enlightenment your love is going to be the same as everything else: it will change.
If you understand that it will change, that once in a while your wife may become interested in somebody and you have to be understanding and loving and caring and allowing her to go the way her being feels...this is a chance for you to prove to your wife that you love her. You love her -- even if she is going to love somebody else, that is irrelevant. With understanding, it is possible that your love may become a lifelong affair, but remember it will not be permanent. It will have its ups and downs, it will have changes.
It is so simple to understand. When you started loving you were too young, with no experience; how can your love remain the same when you have become a mature person? Your love will also attain to some maturity.
And when you have become old your love will have a different flavor to it. Love will go on changing and once in a while love will need just an opportunity for change. In a healthy society it will be possible and yet your relationship with someone will not be broken.
But it is possible that you may have to change your lovers many times in life. There is no harm in it. In fact, by changing your lovers many times in life you will be enriched, and if the whole world follows what I am saying to you about love, the whole world will be enriched.
But a wrong idea has destroyed all possibility. The moment your partner looks at somebody -- just looking, and his eyes show attraction and you freak out. You have to understand that if the man drops being interested in beautiful women on the road, in beautiful actresses in the movies.... That's what you want; you want him not to be interested in anything except you. But you don't understand human psychology. If he is not interested in women on the road, in the movies, why will he be interested in you? His interest in women is a guarantee that he is interested in you, that there is still a possibility that your love can go on and on.
But we are doing just the opposite. Men are trying so that their women should not be interested in anybody other than themselves; they should be the only focus, her total concentration. The woman is asking the same, and both are driving each other mad. Concentration on one person is bound to lead you into madness.
For a lighter life, for a more playful life, you need to be flexible. You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion:
Anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong.
If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, slowly will start settling on the right path about everything -- your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.
Dropping old concepts, ugly concepts.... For example, in this country, millions have died by jumping alive into the funeral pyre with their husbands. It shows that the possessiveness of the husband is so much that not only does he want to possess the woman while he is alive, he is afraid of what will happen when he is dead! He will not be able to do anything -- it is better to take the woman with him.
And you can see that this was applicable only to women -- not a single man has jumped into the funeral pyre of a woman in ten thousand years. What does it mean? Does it mean that only women love men and men do not love women? Does it mean that the woman has no life of her own? Only the husband's life is her life -- when the husband is dead, she has to be dead.
Such nonsense ideas have settled in our heads. You have to do continuous cleaning -- whenever you see some nonsense in your head, clean it, throw it away.
If you are clear and clean in the mind you will be able to find solutions for every problem that arises in your life.
Osho,
Sermons in Stones,Chapter 13
Sermons in Stones,Chapter 13
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