NM: My personal view: jealousy is lack of love. It is possessiveness of something that is not yours and will never be yours the possessiveness that comes from a lack of understanding of Love itself. Love never possesses - it let go; if you cling to the object of your love it contradicts Love definition and as a matter of fact you never knew what Love was and what you are experiencing is attachment. Love never tries to keep you next to something - it is freeing you to let go. Keeping is not Love, on the contrary it is Fear, which is lack of Love. The moment you experience jealousy is the moment of lost love. She who tries to possess never loved you; he who possesses is doing it because he never loved you. the poet said: "...и жил-был один Дух, и не знал он, что такое покой, пока не изведал страха, что такое страдание, пока не изведал радости, что такое любовь, пока не изведал унижения, что такое ревность, пока не изведал свободы, что такое свет, пока не изведал прошлое и будущее вне сиюминутного мгновения... и понял он, что дорога к счастью лежит не через страдания, а через веру, потому что он сам - и есть счастье..." You will not know what freedom is till you find out what jealousy is or vise-versa (in this world of duality)...
Let's listen to what wise ones say about jealousy...
Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship.
People think they know what love is – they do not know. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy. By love people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness – without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.
Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open.
But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; it has become ingrained in us so much that we cannot separate love from jealousy. They have become almost one energy.
For example, you feel jealous if your lover goes to another woman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if you don't feel jealous you will be in much more trouble – then you will think you don't love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous. Jealousy and love have become so mixed up.
In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannot be loving, and vice-versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous.
What is the disturbance? You have to look it as if it is not your question – somebody else has asked, it is somebody else's problem – so that you can stand aside and see the whole fabric. The feeling of jealousy is a byproduct of marriage.
In the world of animals, birds, there is no jealousy. Once in a while there is a fight over a love object but a fight is far better than to be jealous, far more natural than to be caught up in jealousy and burn your heart with your own hands.
Marriage is an invented institution, it is not natural; hence nature has not provided a mind that can adjust to marriage. But man found it necessary that there should be some kind of legal contract between lovers, because love itself is dream-stuff, it is not reliable...it is there this moment and the next moment it is gone.
You want to be secure for the coming moment, for your whole future. Right now you are young; soon you will be old and you would like your wife, your husband, to be with you in your old age, in your sickness. But for that, a few compromises have to be made, and whenever there is compromise there is always trouble.
This is the compromise that human beings have made: to be secure about the future, to be certain about the tomorrows, to have a guarantee that the woman who loves you is going to love you forever, that it is not a temporary affair....
That's why religious people say that marriages are "made in heaven"...a strange kind of heaven, because if these marriages are made in heaven, then what can you make in hell? They don't show the signs, the fragrance, the freshness, the beauty of heaven. They are certainly disgusting, ugly...they show something of hell certainly. But man settled for marriage because that was the only way to have private property.
Animals don't have private property – they are all communists, and far better communists than have appeared in human history. They don't have any dictatorship of the proletariat and they have not lost their freedom, but they don't have any private property.
Man also lived for thousands of years without marriage, but those were the days when there was no private property. Those were the days of hunting; man was a hunter. And those people thousands of years ago had no cold-storage system, no technology – whatever food they got they had to finish as quickly as possible. They could only hope that tomorrow they will get some food again.
Because there was nothing to accumulate, there was no question of marriage. People lived in communes, tribes; people loved, people reproduced, but in the beginning there was no word for father. The word mother is far more ancient and far more natural. You will be surprised to know that the word uncle is older than the word father – because all the people who were the age of your father...you didn't know who your father was. Men and women were mixing joyously – without any compulsion, without any legal bondage, out of their free will. If they wanted to meet and be together there was no question of domination. The children never knew who their father was, they knew only their mother. And they knew many men in the tribe; someone amongst those men must have been their father, hence they were all uncles.
As private property came into existence with cultivation.... With hunting, man could not survive long. People have destroyed complete species of animals. Hundreds of species which once used to dance and sing on this earth...man has eaten them up. Something had to be done because hunting was not reliable. Today you may get food, tomorrow you may have to be hungry. And it was very arduous. The search for animals did not allow man to develop any of his other talents, his genius. But cultivation changed the whole life of man.
You must be reminded of the fact that cultivation is the discovery of women, not of men. The woman was confined – she was not able to go hunting. Most of the time she was pregnant, she was weak, she was carrying another soul within her. She needed care, protection...so she was living in the house. She started making the living space more beautiful – and this you can see even today, after thousands of years.
If you enter into a bachelor's room you can immediately say that it is a bachelor's room. You may not be able to decide by seeing the bachelor whether he is bachelor or not, but his room certainly is a bachelor! The woman, her touch, is missing. The house of a bachelor is never a home, it is just a place where he sleeps. It is not something with which he feels a certain intimacy, a certain creative relationship.
The home, the village, the city and the whole civilization are because of the woman, because she was free from hunting and she had different values of the heart and of the mind – she was more aesthetic, more graceful, more earthly, not at all interested in hell and heaven and God and the devil and all that crap! No woman has written a single religious scripture. No woman has been a philosopher thinking about abstract, faraway things.
Woman's consciousness is interested only in the intimate surroundings – she would like a beautiful house, she would like a beautiful garden. She wants to create a small world of her own – cozy, comfortable. She imparts a certain quality to a dead house and it becomes a living home. It is a magical transformation.
Man continued to hunt, and the woman started looking around...the man had no time. He has always been busy without business, but the woman had all the time there is. The basic work of hunting was being done by the groups of men and the woman started looking around. She discovered cultivation because she saw wild fruits growing, she saw many other things growing and she also saw that every year the crop dies, the seeds fall back into the earth and when the rains come, again those seeds sprout in thousands of plants. She started experimenting to find what was edible and what was not edible. Soon, as hunting was becoming more and more difficult, men had to agree with women: "We have to shift our whole economic focus. We have to go for cultivation, for fruits, for vegetables. And these are in our hands – we can produce as much as we want, as we need it, and there is tremendous variety."
Slowly, slowly the nomads, the wandering tribes...because hunters cannot stay in one place. They have to go on moving as the animals escape. Once hunting was dropped and cultivation became our very measure of survival a new thing also happened alongside.
There were people who were powerful people and there were people who were weak people. The people who were physically powerful managed to claim much ground as their property. They earned much...slowly, slowly the barter system started, because when you have too much of one crop, what are you going to do with it? You have to exchange it; then you can have many more things. Life became more complex, with more excitement.
But a problem was felt: after a person dies, who is going to inherit his property? Nobody wanted their property to be inherited by any XYZ. They wanted their property to belong to their own blood.
It is out of economics, not out of the understanding of love that marriage came into existence. Its very birth was wrong, under the wrong stars.
And because man had to agree for marriage.... The woman was very willing for the simple reason that for thousands of years in the hunting period she was not financially a part of the society; man was all. Man continued his power, although the whole social structure changed. The hunter's nomadic life became a peaceful life in a village but man's concern about his property.... He wanted a contract with the woman to be certain that the son she was giving birth to is not somebody else's, but his own. For this simple purpose all the woman's freedom had to be destroyed. She had to live almost like a prisoner, or worse.
Man agreed – under compulsion, he compromised. If the woman was losing a few things – her freedom of movement, her freedom in changing lovers – man was also ready to sacrifice his freedom. They would remain devoted to each other forever.
But it is against nature. Even if you want to do it nature is not going to support you. Nature is for freedom, not for any kind of bondage.
So new problems started arising. Men started finding prostitutes who were no-one's wives, or as it was phrased in India, the prostitute was the wife of the whole town: nagarvadhu. She belongs to anybody, she is a commodity; you have to pay and buy her time and her body. Because of marriage it was very difficult to find married women because then there were more complexities: they had their husbands.... Prostitutes were good.
And you will be surprised to know that in India every city had its topmost prostitute – she was the most beautiful girl born in that city. Because she was so beautiful it was not right to let her get married to one person, she had to be shared. She was so beautiful that if she got married there would be trouble, there would be problems – people would go on falling in love with her. It was better to keep her free for anybody who would pay.
Marriage created suspicion. The husband was always suspicious about whether the child born to them was his own or not. And the problem is, the father had no way to determine that a child was his own. Only the mother knew. Because the father had no way of being certain, he created more and more walls around the woman – that was the only possibility, the only alternative – to disconnect her from the larger humanity. Not to educate her, because education gives wings to people, thoughts, makes people capable of revolt, so no education for women. No religious education for women, because religion makes you saints, holy people and it has been a male-dominated society for centuries and man cannot conceive a woman to be higher and holier than himself.
Man has been cutting from the very roots any possibility of woman's growth. She is just a factory to manufacture children. She has not been accepted by any culture in the world as equal to man. There are even cultures like the Chinese which have denied the soul to woman; woman is only a machine, without a soul.
In China you could kill your wife, no law existed against it. The wife was your possession and if you wanted to destroy it, it was nobody's business to prevent it.
All over the world the woman has been suppressed. The more she has been suppressed, the more her whole energy has turned sour. And because she has no freedom and man has every freedom, all her repressed emotions, feelings, thoughts – her whole individuality turns into a jealous phenomenon. She is continuously afraid that her husband might leave her, might go to some other woman, might become interested in some other woman. He might abandon her, and she has problems: she is not educated, she is not financially capable of standing on her own feet. She has been brought up in such a way that she cannot go into the world; she has been told from the very beginning that she is weak....
Indian scriptures say that in childhood the father should protect the girl; in youth the husband should protect the girl; in old age the son should protect the woman. She has to be protected from the very childhood to the grave. She cannot revolt against this male chauvinist society. All she can do is go on finding faults, which are bound to be there. Mostly she is not wrong; she is mostly right.
Whenever a man falls in love with another woman something in him towards the first woman changes. Now they are again strangers, there is no bridge. She has been crippled, enslaved and now she has been abandoned. Her whole life is a life of agony.
Out of this agony arises jealousy. Jealousy is the anger of the weak – one who cannot do anything but is boiling within, who would like to burn the whole world but cannot do anything except cry and scream and throw tantrums.
This situation will continue until marriage becomes a museum piece.
Now there is no need for marriage. Perhaps it was useful. Perhaps it was not useful, but it was only an excuse to enslave the woman. Things could have been worked out in a different way, but there is no point in going into the past.
Right or wrong, one thing is good about the past: it is no more.
As far as the present and the future are concerned, marriage is absolutely irrelevant, inconsistent with human evolution and contradictory to all the values we love – freedom, love, joy.
Because man wanted the woman to be completely imprisoned, he wrote religious scriptures making her afraid of hell, making her greedy for heaven...if she follows the rules. Those rules exist only for women, not for men. Now it is so clear that to let women live any longer in this poisonous situation of jealousy is against their psychological health.
And women's psychological health influences the pyschological health of the whole of humanity – man is also born of woman. The woman has to become an independent individual.
The dissolution of marriage will be a great, festive event on the earth – and nobody is preventing you: if you love your wife or your husband you can live for lives together, nobody is preventing you. Withdrawing marriage is simply giving you your individuality back. Now nobody possesses you.
You are not to make love to a man just because he is your husband and he has the right to demand it. In my vision, when a woman makes love to a man because she has to make love, it is prostitution – not retail, but wholesale!
Retail is better, you have a chance to change. This wholesale prostitution is dangerous, you don't have a chance to change. And you have married for the first time – you should be given chances because you are an amateur. A few marriages at least will help you to become mature; perhaps then you can find the right woman. And by right woman I don't mean the woman who is "made for you."
No woman is made for you and no man is made for any woman. By the right woman or the right man I mean that if you have understood a few relationships, if you have been in a few relationships, you will understand what things create miserable situations amongst you and what situations create a loving, peaceful, happy life. Living with different people is an absolutely necessary education for a right life as far as love is concerned.
You should first graduate from a few relationships. In your college, in your university you should pass through a few relationships. And you should not be in a hurry to decide – there is no need, the world is big, and each individual has some unique quality and beauty.
As you go through a few relationships you start becoming aware of what kind of woman, what kind of man is going to be a friend to you – not a master, not a slave. And friendship needs no marriage because friendship is far higher.
You are feeling jealous because that jealousy you have received as an inheritance. With me you will have to change many things – not because I say to change them but because you understand that a drastic change is needed.
For example, the idea has been spread all over the world that if a husband sometimes goes to some other woman then this is going to destroy the marriage. It is absolutely wrong. On the contrary, if every marriage has the weekend free it will cement your relationship more strongly, because your marriage is not disturbing your freedom, because your wife understands the need for variety. These are human needs.
The priests and the moralists and the puritans first decide on an ideal. They make beautiful ideals and then they force the idea on you, for you to become like the ideals. They want to make you all idealists. For ten thousand years we have lived under a very dark and dismal shadow of idealism.
I am a realist. I don't have any ideal. To me, to understand reality and to go with reality is the only right way for any intelligent man or woman.
My understanding is – and it is based on thousands of experiments – that if marriage is not such a tight thing, rigid, but is flexible, just a friendship...so that a woman can tell you she has met a beautiful young man and she is going this weekend to be with him – "And if you are interested I can bring him back with me, you will also love the person." And if the husband can say, not as a hypocrite but as an authentic human being, that "Your joy, your happiness is my happiness. If you have found someone, forget about the house, I will take care. You enjoy, because I know whenever you come back, enjoying a fresh love will make you fresh also. A fresh love will bring fresh youth to you. You go this week, and next week I may have my own program."
This is friendship. And when they come home they can talk about what kind of man she met, how he turned out, that it was not that great.... You can tell her about the new woman you have met.... You have a shelter in the home. You can go once in a while into the sky, wild and free, and come back and always your wife is there waiting for you – not to fight but to share your adventures.
It simply needs a little understanding. It has nothing to do with religion, but just a little more intelligent behavior.
You know perfectly well that howsoever beautiful a man or woman might be, she starts becoming heavy on your nerves sooner or later. Because the same geography, the same topography, the same landscape....
Man's mind is not made for monotony; neither it is made for monogamy. It is absolutely natural to ask for variety. And it is not against your love. In fact, the more you know other women, the more you will praise your own woman – your understanding will deepen. Your experience will be enriching...the more you have known a few men, the more accurately you will be able to understand your own husband.
The idea of jealousy will disappear – you both are free, and you are not hiding anything.
With friends we should share everything, particularly those moments which are beautiful – moments of love, moments of poetry, moments of music...they should be shared. In this way your life will become more and more rich. You may become so attuned to each other that you live your whole life together, but there is no marriage.
Jealousy will persist as long as marriage remains the basic foundation of society.
Just give the man, with your full heart, absolute freedom. And tell him he need not hide anything: "To hide anything is insulting. That means you don't trust me." And the same has to happen to man, that he can say to his wife: "You are as independent as I am. We are together to be happy, we are together to grow into more blissfulness. And we will do everything for each other but we are not going to be jailers to each other."
Giving freedom is a joy, having freedom is a joy. You can have so much joy, but you are turning that whole energy into misery, into jealousy, into fight, into a continuous effort to keep the other under your thumb.
I have heard about a man who was in utter rage and despair because of his wife's behavior. It was not her fault...she was a nymphomaniac. Now what can you do? Somebody has a headache, somebody is a nymphomaniac. She was continuously falling in love with anybody! He took her to the doctor.
She was a beautiful woman. The doctor asked her to go inside the examination room. He went with her and soon, after a few minutes, moans and groans...and the husband was sitting in the office listening – it was too much! He just entered the room and what he saw he could not believe – the doctor was making love to his wife.the husband said, "What is happening?"
The wife said, "You idiot, you will never understand. Now you are asking what is happening! Can't you see?"
But the husband was furious. He said, "I am not asking my wife, I am asking you, doc! What is happening?"
The doctor said, "Nothing is happening, John, you are doing everything. I am simply taking her temperature."
John was afire. He had suffered so much and even the doctor...and what nonsense is he talking, that he is taking her temperature? So he took out his switchblade knife and started rubbing the knife against the doctor's shoulder. The doctor said, "What do you mean? What are you doing?"
He said, "Nothing. Just be careful. When that thing comes out, remember – it had better have numbers on it!"
We have created this circus instead of a culture. It goes on and on in different ways. I hope that in your life you can drop being a part of this stupid game.
And it is easy: if you understand yourself, you will be able to understand your wife too. Don't you have other women in your dreams? In fact, to see your own wife in a dream is a rare phenomenon. People never see their wives or their husbands in their dreams. They have seen enough of them! Now even in the night, even in the dream, no freedom....
In your dreams you have the wives of your neighbors, the husbands of your neighbors...you should understand that somehow we have made a wrong society, a society which is not according to human nature. The desire for variety is an essential quality in anyone who is intelligent. The more intelligent you are the more variety you would like – there is some relationship between intelligence and variety. A buffalo is satisfied with one kind of grass; for her whole life she will not touch another kind of grass. She does not have the mind to change, to know new things, to discover new territories, to adventure into new spaces.
The poets, the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the actors – you will find these people more loving but their love is not focused on individuals. They are more loving but to as many individuals as they come in contact with. They are the intelligent people, they are our creative part.
Idiots don't want to change anything. They are afraid of change because any change means you will have to learn something again. The idiot wants to learn something once and remain with it his whole life. It may be a machine, it may be a wife, it may be a husband – it does not matter. You have known one woman, you know her nagging, you have become accustomed...sometimes not only accustomed, you have become addicted too. If suddenly your woman does not nag you, you will not be able to sleep that night – what happened? What has gone wrong?
One of my friends was continually complaining to me about his wife; "She is always sad, long faced and I am so worried to enter the house...I try to waste my time in this club and that club but finally I have to go back home and there she is."
I said to him, "Do one thing just as an experiment. Because she has been serious and she has been nagging, I cannot imagine that you enter the house smiling."
He said, "Do you think I can manage that? The moment I see her something freezes inside me – smile?"
I said, "Just as an experiment. Today you do one thing: take beautiful roses – it is the season; and the best ice-cream available in the city – tutti frutti; and go smiling, singing a song!"
He said, "If you say so I will do it, but I don't think it is going to make any difference."
I said, "I will come behind you, and see whether there is any difference or not."
The poor fellow tried hard. Many times on the way he laughed. I said, "Why are you laughing?"
He said, "I am laughing at what I am doing! I wanted you to tell me to divorce her and you have suggested I act as if I am going on a honeymoon!"
I said, "Just imagine it is a honeymoon...but try your best."
He opened the door and his wife was standing there. He smiled and then he laughed at himself because to smile...And that woman was standing almost like a stone. He presented the flowers and the ice-cream, and then I entered.
The woman could not believe what was happening. When the man had gone to the bathroom she asked me, "What is the matter? He has never brought anything, he has never smiled, he has never taken me out, he has never made me feel that I am loved, that I am respected. What magic has happened?"
I said, "Nothing; both of you have just been doing wrong. Now when he comes out of the bathroom you give him a good hug."She said, "A hug?"
I said, "Give him one! You have given him so many things, now give him a good hug, kiss him.... "She said, "My God...."
I said, "He is your husband, you have decided to live together. Either live joyously or say good-bye joyously. There is no reason...it is such a small life. Why waste two person's lives unnecessarily?"
At that very moment the man came from the bathroom. The woman hesitated a little but I pushed her, so she hugged the man and the man became so afraid he fell on the floor! He had never imagined that she was going to hug him. I had to help him up. I said, "What happened?"
He said, "It's just that I have never imagined that this woman can hug and kiss – but she can! And when she smiled she looked so beautiful."
Two persons living together in love should make it a point that their relationship is continuously growing, bringing more flowers every season, creating more joys. Just sitting together silently is enough....
But all this is possible only if we drop the old idea of marriage. More than friendship is unnatural. And if marriage is stamped by the court, is killed under that stamp in the court.... You cannot bring love under the rule of law.
Love is the ultimate law. You just have to discover its beauties, its treasures. You have not to repeat, parrot-like, all the great values which make man the highest expression of consciousness on this planet. You should exercise them in your relationship.
And this has been my strange experience: if one partner starts moving on the right lines, the other follows sooner or later. Because they both are hungry for love, but they don't know how to approach it.
No university teaches that love is an art and that life is not already given to you; that you have to learn from scratch.
And it is good that we have to discover by our own hands every treasure that is hidden in life...and love is one of the greatest treasures in existence.
But instead of becoming fellow travelers in search of love, beauty and truth, people are wasting their time in fighting, in jealousy.
Just become a little alert and start the change from your side – don't expect it from the other side. It will begin from the other side too. And it costs nothing to smile, it costs nothing to love, it costs nothing to share your happiness with somebody you love.
.... and this is my favourite: Simply drop it [jealousy]. Seeing the futility and seeing the misery of it, just drop it, with no condition, unconditionally. Because dropping it is so blissful, carrying it is such a misery. So simply drop it and never take it up again. Old habits may sometimes catch hold of you but forget about it. And you will be surprised – it will bring [him, your man] also to his senses. Seeing that [you are] going so high in spirituality, he will forget all about those small things that he goes on doing [flirting with other women]... but that will also disappear. When he sees that you are going so far ahead and he is lagging behind, he will start feeling jealous of you. But you start – my feeling is that you can start it. And you are on that point from where you can drop it because you have suffered enough for it. It can immediately make him not do those things but that will not help – you will remain the same. This fire is good. Use it.
"Your question is, 'Can you talk about the art of nourishing oneself with love?' There is no art because there is no need of any effort. Love is the nourishment. But humanity has been so confused by its leaders that one does not know the most inner realms of one's own being. Love is nourishment in itself. The more you love, the more you will find untrodden spaces where love goes on and on spreading around you like an aura.
"But that kind of love has not been allowed by any culture. They have forced love into a very small tunnel: you can love your wife, your wife can love you; you can love your children, you can love your parents, you can love your friends. And they have made two things so deeply rooted in every human being. One is that love is something very limited – friends, family, children, husband, wife. And the second thing they have insisted is that there are many kinds of love.
"You love in one way when you love your husband or your wife; then you have to bring another kind of love when you love your children, and another kind of love when you love your elders, your family, your teachers, and then another kind of love for your friends.
But the truth is, love cannot be categorized the way it has been categorized throughout the whole history of mankind. There were reasons for them to categorize it but their reasons are ugly and inhuman, because in this categorization they killed love...
Either you can have a loving heart…it has nothing to do with who you are loving; the emphasis of existence is that you are loving. It has not to be directed towards a certain person, because that is accepting that if someone is not part of the direction in which you are forcing your love to move, you become indifferent to them; you become even unloving to them. There are possibilities that you may even become hateful to them.
Either you can have a loving heart…it has nothing to do with who you are loving; the emphasis of existence is that you are loving. It has not to be directed towards a certain person, because that is accepting that if someone is not part of the direction in which you are forcing your love to move, you become indifferent to them; you become even unloving to them. There are possibilities that you may even become hateful to them.
"The reason why all the cultures have insisted on categorization is because they have been very much afraid of love, is because if there is existential love, then it does not know boundaries – then you cannot put Hindus against Mohammedans, then you cannot put Protestants against Catholics. Then you cannot draw a line saying that you cannot love this person because he is Jewish, Chinese. The leaders of the world wanted to divide the world, but to divide the world they have to do the basic division which is of love."
And it has to be insisted so deeply in your unconscious that in wars, in riots, when you kill other people who don’t belong to your clan or to your country or your tribe, you don’t feel anything. It is simply the way things are. A German killing an Italian will not think, “I don’t have any personal enmity with him, and just as my wife will be waiting for me and my old mother may be praying for me and my children will be hoping that soon I will be back home, the person I am killing is in the same situation. He also has a wife, he also has old parents, he also has children, and they are waiting for him to come back. I don’t have any reason to kill him; neither has he any reason to kill me, except that some idiotic politicians are not satisfied with the power they have. They want more power. They want to be world conquerors.”
Sentiments Are Not Stones, They Are Like Rose Flowers
"There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self. Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word love seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones – everything material is involved in it…
"Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves. But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person's heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.
"Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together. People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like rose flowers…"
"Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a rose flower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it. The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend.
"I don't know which kind of love you know – most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love? Certainly it will be gone – but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness."
Just think: the woman you have fallen in love with goes to our doctor, Leeladhar, gets her sex changed, starts growing a beard and mustache. Will you be still loving her? Nothing has changed, only chemistry, hormones. Where has your love gone?
Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves.
Remember it as a ground rule: Wherever you live, you cannot see beyond that. If you live in your body, if you think you are only your body, you can be attracted only to somebody’s body. This is the physiological stage of love.
But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person’s heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.
Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together.
People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like roseflowers.
It is better to have a plastic roseflower, because it will be there always, and every day you can give it a shower and it will be fresh. You can put some French perfume on it. If its color fades you can paint it again. Plastic is one of the most indestructible things in the world. It is stable, permanent; hence people stop at the physiological. It is superficial, but it is stable.
Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a roseflower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it.
The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend.
I don’t know which kind of love you know – most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love?
Certainly it will be gone – but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness.
Only Love and Its Failure Can Throw You Inside
You have tried the other; it does not work. The other is not responsible. The other has not created the universal law. The other is as much part of this universal law as you are. If your understanding goes a little deeper…. Sartre was just on the brink where he could have turned toward himself, but he stopped there: “The other is hell.” He condemned the other, but he didn’t turn to give a try to himself.
You have given a try to many people in your life, reaching to the farthest person, trying to bring him close to you. You succeeded in bringing him very close, very close, and at the last moment, just one step more…and it has failed. The human mind says, “Perhaps this is not the right person. Find another person. Go on finding another person.” The mind goes on giving you hope: “If it has not happened with this woman, this man, it may happen with somebody else. Perhaps you were trying with the wrong person.” The mind goes on finding consolations, excuses, explanations, rationalizations, but all those are futile. Those rationalizations, explanations, excuses, consolations, will keep you away from religion.
Sartre could have become one of the religious men, which is very rare: a very ordinary phenomenon, but very rare, because nobody tries the ordinary; everybody is after the extraordinary.
Religion is when love has failed.
"I am for love. I have been teaching my whole life in favor of love. The reason is strange, but I am an eccentric man. I have been teaching you to go for love because I know that unless you come to this crucial point, where the other is hell, you will never become religious.
I am not for love. My whole effort is for religion.
"The pseudo-religions just give you readymade formulas, and I want to give you the real experience – which I cannot give…I can only show you the path, can explain to you how it happens, and then leave you free to experiment with it if you want. If love has not failed, then you are not yet adult enough for religion. You are below the age. Whatsoever your age it does not matter; it may be sixty, may be seventy, it does not matter. If you are still hoping that love can succeed, then you're yet under age. But if you have come to realize this totally, that it is against the nature of things, existence does not work that way…. You are you, the other is other.
"If you want to taste the experience of existence, it is not via the other, it is a direct jump within yourself. It is via you, through you. And only love and its failure can throw you inside. Nothing else can throw you inside, because everything else is far below love."
And only love and its failure can throw you inside. Nothing else can throw you inside, because everything else is far below love.
Love Yourself
"We begin with one of the most profound sutras of Gautama the Buddha: 'Love yourself…'
"Just the opposite has been taught to you by all the traditions of the world, all the civilizations, all the cultures, all the churches. They say: "Love others, don't love yourself." And there is a certain cunning strategy behind their teaching.
"Love is the nourishment for the soul. Just as food is to the body, so love is to the soul. Without food the body is weak, without love the soul is weak. And no state, no church, no vested interest, has ever wanted people to have strong souls, because a person with spiritual energy is bound to be rebellious.
"Love makes you rebellious, revolutionary. Love gives you wings to soar high. Love gives you insight into things, so that nobody can deceive you, exploit you, oppress you. And the priests and the politicians survive only on your blood – they survive only on exploitation. All the priests and all the politicians are parasites.
"To make you spiritually weak they have found a sure method, one hundred percent guaranteed, and that is to teach you not to love yourself. If a man cannot love himself he cannot love anybody else either. The teaching is very tricky. They say "Love others," because they know if you cannot love yourself you cannot love at all. But they go on saying, "Love others, love humanity, love God, love nature, love your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, but don't love yourself" – because to love oneself is selfish according to them.
They condemn self-love as they condemn nothing else – and they have made their teaching look very logical. They say: "If you love yourself you will become an egoist, if you love yourself you will become narcissistic." It is not true. A man who loves himself finds that there is no ego in him. It is by loving others without loving yourself, trying to love others, that the ego arises.
"The missionaries, the social reformers, the social servants, have the greatest egos in the world – naturally, because they think themselves to be superior human beings. They are not ordinary: ordinary people love themselves; they love others, they love great ideals, they love God. And all their love is false, because all their love is without any roots. A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love."
A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love.
It is like throwing a pebble into a silent lake: the first circular ripples will arise around the pebble, very close to the pebble, naturally – where else can they arise? And then they will go on spreading; they will reach the farthest shore. If you stop the ripples arising close to the pebble, there will be no other ripples at all. Then you cannot hope to create ripples reaching to the farthest shores; it is impossible.
The priests and the politicians became aware of the phenomenon: stop people loving themselves and you have destroyed their capacity to love. Now whatsoever they think is love will be only pseudo. It may be duty, but not love – and “duty is a four-letter dirty word.” Parents are fulfilling their duties towards their children, and then in return children will fulfill their duties towards their parents. The wife is dutiful towards her husband and the husband is dutiful towards his wife. Where is love?
Love knows nothing of duty. Duty is a burden, a formality. Love is a joy, a sharing; love is informal. The lover never feels that he has done enough, the lover always feels that more was possible. The lover never feels, “I have obliged the other.” On the contrary, he feels, “Because my love has been received, I am obliged. The other has obliged me by receiving my gift, by not rejecting it.” The man of duty thinks, “I am higher, spiritual, extraordinary. Look how I serve people!”
These servants of the people are the most pseudo people in the world, and the most mischievous too. If we can get rid of the public servants, humanity will be unburdened, will feel very light, will be able to dance again, sing again.
Real Love Is Capable of Being Alone
It is paradoxical only because you want to impose a certain logic. The storm, and creating silence? It does not fit with your idea – that is true – then you become confused. But why should it fit with your idea? Life has to be perceived – not conceived. See what is the case, don’t have ready-made answers. Don’t go through life with prejudices, with a prejudiced mind, don’t have any a priori conceptions. Go innocent, naked, go ignorant. Function from the state of not knowing. And then…then life is not confusing. It is a tremendous joy, it is ecstasy. Then what appears today as confusing, you will feel thankful for it, grateful for it, that it is so, that it is not logical.
Life would have been utterly boring if God had followed Aristotle. It is a great relief that he is not an Aristotelian; it is a great relief that God knows nothing of Aristotle, that he has not read his books, that he does not believe in logic, that he believes in dialectics. Hence these paradoxes.
"One can be in deep love and yet be alone. In fact, one can be alone only when one is in deep love. The depth of love creates an ocean around you, a deep ocean, and you become an island, utterly alone. Yes, the ocean goes on throwing its waves on your shore, but the more the ocean crashes with its waves on your shore, the more integrated you are, the more rooted, the more centered you are. Love has value only because it gives you aloneness. It gives you space enough to be on your own.
"But you have an idea of love; that idea is creating trouble – not love itself, but the idea. The idea is that, in love, lovers disappear into each other, dissolve into each other. Yes, there are moments of dissolution – but this is the beauty of life and all that is existential: that when lovers dissolve into each other, the same are the moments when they become very conscious, very alert. That dissolution is not a kind of drunkenness, that dissolution is not unconscious. It brings great consciousness, it releases great awareness. On the one hand they are dissolved – on the other hand for the first time they see their utter beauty in being alone. The other defines them, their aloneness; they define the other. And they are grateful to each other. It is because of the other that they have been able to see their own selves; the other has become a mirror in which they are reflected. Lovers are mirrors to each other. Love makes you aware of your original face.
"Hence, it looks very contradictory, paradoxical, when stated in such a way: "Love brings aloneness." You were thinking all along that love brings togetherness. I am not saying that it does not bring togetherness, but unless you are alone you cannot be together. Who is going to be together? Two persons are needed to be together, two independent persons are needed to be together. A togetherness will be rich, infinitely rich, if both the persons are utterly independent. If they are dependent on each other, it is not a togetherness – it is a slavery, it is a bondage.
"If they are dependent on each other, clinging, possessive, if they don't allow each other to be alone, if they don't allow each other space enough to grow, they are enemies, not lovers; they are destructive to each other, they are not helping each other to find their souls, their beings. What kind of love is this? It may be just fear of being alone; hence they are clinging to each other. But real love knows no fear. Real love is capable of being alone, utterly alone, and out of that aloneness grows a togetherness."
Love Needs no Reference
"Love needs no reference – that's the beauty of love and the freedom of love. Hate is a bondage. Hate is imprisonment – imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates hate, hate provokes hate. If you hate somebody you are creating hate in that person's heart for yourself. And the whole world exists in hate, in destructiveness, in violence, in jealousy, in competitiveness. People are at each other's throats either in reality, actuality, in action, or at least in their minds; in their thoughts, everybody is murdering, killing. That's why we have created a hell out of this beautiful earth – which could have become a paradise.
"Love, and the earth becomes a paradise again. And the immense beauty of love is that it has no reference. Love comes from you for no reason at all. It is your outpouring bliss, it is your sharing of your heart. It is the sharing of the song of your being. And sharing is so joyful – hence one shares. Sharing for sharing's sake, for no other motive.
"But the love you have known in the past is not the love Buddha is talking about or I am talking about. Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. Hence, your love has reference: somebody has been beautiful to you yesterday, he was so nice that you feel great love for him. This is not love; this is the other side of hate – the reference proves it. Or somebody is going to be nice to you tomorrow: the way he smiled at you, the way he talked to you, the way he invited you to his house tomorrow – he is going to be loving to you. And great love arises.
"This is not the love buddhas talk about. This is hate disguised as love – that's why your love can turn into hate any moment. Scratch a person just a little bit, and the love disappears and hate arises. It is not even skin-deep. Even so-called great lovers are continuously fighting, continuously at each other's throats – nagging, destructive. And people think this is love…
You can ask Astha and Abhiyana – they are in such a love that Astha has a black eye almost every day. A great fight! But when great fighting goes on, people think something is happening. When nothing is happening – no fight, no quarrel – people feel empty. “It is better to be fighting than to be empty” – that’s the idea of millions of people in the world. The fight at least keeps you engaged, the fight at least keeps you involved, and the fight makes you important. Life seems to have some meaning – ugly meaning, but at least some meaning.
"Your love is not really love: it is its very opposite. It is hate disguised as love, camouflaged as love, parading as love. True love has no reference. It thinks not of the yesterdays, it thinks not of the tomorrows. True love is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it, and the showering of it – for no other reason, for no other motive, than just the joy of sharing it."
The birds singing in the morning, this cuckoo calling from the distance – for no reason. The heart is just so full of joy that a song bursts forth. When I am talking about love I am talking about such love. Remember it. And if you can move into the dimension of this love, you will be in paradise immediately. And you will start creating a paradise on the earth.
Love creates love just as hate creates hate.
In this world hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.
Love Basically Is a State of Being
"The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love but one is love. Whenever I talk about love remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained to the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension, because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is, and you don't know. Love basically is a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.
"And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling but by rising, soaring upwards, higher than you. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.
"Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, "Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you." Love is like breathing: when it happens you are simply love. It does not matter who comes close to you, the sinner or the saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, is rejoiced. Love is unconditional giving – but only those are capable of giving who have."
One of the most mysterious things about man is that he goes on giving things which he doesn’t have. You go on giving love and you don’t have it in the first place, and you go on asking love from others who don’t have it in the first place. Beggars begging from beggars.
Love first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. It is the quality of being alone, happily alone, joyously alone. It is the quality of being a no-mind, of being silent. Contentless consciousness is the space, the context in which love arises in you.
And when it arises in you it is so much, it is unbearable. Its pleasure is so unbearable that it becomes almost pain. It is heavy like the clouds which are full of rain; they haveto shower, they haveto rain, they haveto unburden themselves. When love arises in the silent heart, it has to be shared, it has to be given; you are helpless.
And the person you give your love to is not obliged to you in any way. In fact, you are obliged to the person because he helped you unburden, he shared something that was too much in you. And the economics of love is: the more you give, the more you have, because in your silent being you are joined with the oceanic, the divine source of all. And you can go on sharing…more and more goes on flowing in you, it goes on welling up.
Yes, you are right, love is the only hope of the world. And we are coming close to that turning point: either total war or total love. And this is a question of either/or, there is no third alternative. There is nothing like a compromise now, you cannot be in the middle. Man has to choose. And it is a question of life and death: war is death, love is life.
The First Ripple of Love Has to Be Around Yourself
Will you please speak about the difference between a healthy love of oneself and egoistical pride?
There is a great difference between the two, although they both look very alike.
"The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you.
"It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one's body, one has to love one's soul, one has to love one's totality.
"And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself.
"If you don't love your house you will not clean it; if you don't love your house you will not paint it; if you don't love you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself.
"And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality."
The man who does not love himself hates, will have to hate – life knows no neutrality. Life is always a choice. If you don’t love that does not mean that you can simply remain in that not loving state. No, you will hate.
And the person who hates himself becomes destructive. And the person who hates himself will hate everybody else – he will be so angry and violent and continuously in rage. The person who hates himself, how can he hope that others will love him? His whole life will be destroyed. To love oneself is a great religious value.
I teach you self-love. But remember, self-love does not mean egotistical pride, not at all. In fact it means just the opposite. The person who loves himself finds there is no self in him. Love always melts the self: that is one of the alchemical secrets to be learned, understood, experienced. Love always melts the self. Whenever you love, the self disappears. You love a woman and at least in the few moments when there is real love for the woman, there is no self in you, no ego.
Relationship Destroys Love
Remember: in your whole life, once you have taken birth, only death is certain and everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is the very core of life. Insecurity is its very spirit.
But we are always hankering for a structure.
"Relationship is a structure, and love is unstructured. So love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship. Loving people need not have any relationship – love is enough.
"Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship – because relationships happen one day and disappear another day. They are flowers; in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone.
"You be a loving person.
"But people find it very difficult to be a loving person, so they create a relationship – and befool that way that "Now I am a loving person because I am in a relationship." And the relationship may be just one of monopoly, possessiveness, exclusiveness.
"Relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security – financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. Relationship is a substitute.
"Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth."
Second thing. You say:
“How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?”
As far as I know, Mantra is still alone. As far as I know, it will be very difficult for her to move in love – that’s what my feeling is about her. Whenever I have looked into her eyes, I have found a very stony heart. In fact, the relationship has not even started and she is asking how to end it. Clever mind. Wants to have everything clear. Even before it has started, you want to be certain how to end it.
Fear of going into love is such that one wants to be perfectly alert and capable so that if things are too much and one needs to get out, one knows when and how to know when it is time to get out. And Mantra has not yet entered into love and she is asking how to end it! She wants to know every possibility beforehand. She wants to go into it prepared – and nobody can go prepared into a love relationship.
Nobody can go prepared. When you are too much prepared, that very preparedness prevents. Love has to happen! When it happens it is almost from the unknown. It comes…surrounds you…drives you crazy…into unknown directions…into unknown dimensions. It takes you away. It is always a surprise. You cannot plan for it. The more you plan for it, the less is the possibility of its happening.
Without Love, Life Has no Poetry in it
"A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That's why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin: you have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning; it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. Without love, temples are just ordinary houses; with love an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love you remain just possibilities – empty gestures. With love, for the first time you become substantial. With love, for the first time, the soul arises in you. The ego drops but the soul arises...
It is impossible to live without love, so humanity has created a trick. Humanity has invented a trick, a device. The device is: to live in a false love so that the ego continues on its own. Nothing is changed and you can play the game of being in love: you can go on thinking that you love, you can go on believing that you love. But look at your love – what happens out of it? – nothing except misery, nothing except hell, nothing except conflict, quarrel, violence. Look deeply into your love relationships. They are more akin to hate relationships than to love. It is better to call them hate relationships than to call them love relationships. But because everybody is living in the same way, you never become aware. Everybody is carrying the false coin; you never become aware. The real coin of love is very costly: you can purchase it only at the cost of losing yourself. There is no other way.
So the question is perfectly relevant. It is from one that I know. I know her love towards me, I know her deep possibilities. She is just on the brink. Any moment the ego can collapse, but she is somehow holding herself together. She will not be able to for long though; she will have to collapse. Hence, the fear.
“How is it possible?” she asks. “I’m afraid when I feel your love deep inside me.”
She thinks it is a sort of contradiction: if she loves so much, then why this fear? And I tell you, the fear is there because she loves so much. There is no contradiction in it. It is an absolutely consistent thing – whenever you love you are afraid.
"Moving towards love is moving towards an abyss. One starts wavering, one feels dizzy. Go to a height in the Himalayas and look down at the valley; that valley is no-thing. When you look down at the valley of love, a tremendous fear grips you. You are almost paralyzed: you cannot run away, you cannot take the jump. You simply tremble in infinite fear. What to do? Going back is not possible because love attracts: love calls your depth, love calls your future, love calls your potentiality; love gives you a glimpse of what you can be. You cannot run away from it, and you cannot jump because the cost is too high. You will have to drop yourself – all that you have been thinking yourself to be – the image, the past, the identity.
"But I tell you, the cost only seems to be too much before the jump. Once you take the jump…then you will know that whatsoever you have given up is nothing, and what you have attained is infinitely valuable. Let me tell you a paradox: love demands that you drop that which you don't have, and love offers you that which you already have. Love wants you to get rid of that which you don't have."
Love Is a Door
"If there is passion in love, then love will become hell. If there is attachment in love, then love will be a prison. If love is passionless it will become heaven. If love is without attachment then love itself is the divine.
"Love has both possibilities. You can have passion and attachment in love: then it is as if you have tied a stone around the neck of the bird of love so that it cannot fly. Or as if you have put the bird of love in a golden cage. However precious the cage may be – it may be studded with diamonds and jewels – a cage is still a cage and it will destroy the bird's capacity to fly.
"When you remove passion and attachment from love, when your love is pure, innocent, formless, when you give in love and don't demand, when love is only a giving, when love is an emperor, not a beggar; when you are happy because someone has accepted your love and you don't trade love, you ask nothing in return, then you are liberating this bird of love into the open sky. Then you are strengthening its wings. Then this bird can set out on the journey to the infinite.
"Love has made people fall and love has made people rise high. It all depends on what you have done with love. Love is a very mysterious phenomenon. It is a door – on one side is suffering, on the other side is bliss; on one side is hell, on the other side is heaven; on one side is sansara, the wheel of life and death, on the other side is liberation. Love is a door.
"If you have only known a love full of passion and attachment, then when Jesus says, "God is love," you will not be able to understand it. When Sahajo starts singing songs of love you will become very uneasy: "This makes no sense! I have also loved but I got back only misery. In the name of love I reaped only a crop of thorns, no flowers ever blossomed for me." The other love will seem to be imaginary. The love which becomes devotion, which becomes prayer, which becomes liberation, will look like just a play of words.
"You have also known love – but whenever you knew love you knew only a love full of passion and attachment. Your love was not really love. Your love was only a curtain to hide the passion, attachment and sex. On the outside you called it love, inside it was something else. What did you long for when you were in love with a woman or a man? – your longing was sexual and love was only the outside decoration.
If you search deep within yourself you will see that your love is only a word, the flames of sexual desire are burning inside it. But it is not acceptable to express those flames to someone directly, diplomacy is needed. So you say to the woman whose body you want to enjoy that you love her soul. You don’t even know your own soul, so how can you know the other’s soul? But people who are full of lust for the body talk about the soul. Their desire is to enjoy the other’s body but they talk about inner beauty.
The World will Drop Wars Only when Love Enters into the World Again
So wherever arranged marriage continues the family continues. And wherever love-marriage has come into being the family is disappearing.
In the West the family is disappearing. Now you can see the whole logic of why there is arranged marriage: the family wants to exist. If you are destroyed, if your very possibility of love is destroyed that is not the point; you have to be sacrificed for the family. If a marriage is arranged then a joint family exists. Then in a family a hundred persons can live – if marriage is arranged.
But if some boy falls in love or some girl falls in love then they become a world unto themselves. They want to move alone, they want their privacy They don’t want a hundred persons around: uncles and uncles’ uncles and cousins’ cousins and…they don’t want this whole market around; they would like to have their own private world. This whole thing seems to be disturbing.
Family is against love. You must have heard that family is the source of love, but I tell you family is against love. Family has existed by killing love, it has not allowed love to happen.
"The society does not allow love because if a person is really in deep love he cannot be manipulated. You cannot send him to war; he will say: I am so happy! Where are you sending me? And why should I go and kill strangers who may be happy in their home? And we have no conflict, no clash of interests…
"If the young generation. moves deeper and deeper in love, wars will disappear because you will not be able to find enough mad people to go to the war. If you love, you have tasted something of life; you would not like death and killing people. When you don't love you have not tasted something of life; you love death.
"Fear kills, wants to kill. Fear is destructive, love is a creative energy. When you love you would like to create – you may like to sing a song, or paint, or create poetry, but you would not take a bayonet, or an atom bomb, and go rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown to you, who have done nothing; who are as unknown to you as you are unknown to them.
"The world will drop wars only when love enters into the world again. Politicians don't want you to love, the society does not want you to love, the family doesn't allow you to love: they all want to control your love energy because that is the only energy there is. That's why there is fear.
"If you understand me well drop all fears and love more and love unconditionally – and don't think that you are doing something for the other when you love, you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don't wait; don't say that when others love, you will love – that is not the point at all.
"Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people – you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it.
"And when love goes deeper fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness."
Love Is the Only Meaning
"Really, when you fall in love you throw your reason completely. That is why we say man "falls" in love. Falls from where? Falls from the head down into the heart. We use this term of condemnation, "falling in love," because the head, the reason, cannot look at it without condemning it. It is a fall. Is love really a fall or a rising? Do you become more with it or do you become less? Do you expand or do you shrink? With love you become more! Your consciousness is more, your feeling is more; your ecstatic sensation is more, your sensitivity is more. You are more alive, but one thing is less: reasoning is less. You cannot reason it out; it is blind. As far as reason is concerned it is blind. The heart has its own reason – that is another thing – and the heart has its own eyes, but that is another thing. The eyes of reason are not there, so reason says it is a fall; you have fallen.
"Unless the heart center starts functioning again man will not be capable of love, and the whole misery of modern life is because unless he loves he cannot feel any meaning in his life. Life looks meaningless. Love gives it meaning; love is the only meaning. Unless you are capable of love you will be meaningless, and you will feel that you are existing without any meaning, futilely, and suicide will become attractive. Then you will like to kill yourself, to finish with yourself, to end, because what is the use of existing?
"Mere existing cannot be tolerated. Existence must have a meaning; otherwise, what is the use? Why go on prolonging yourself unnecessarily? Why go on repeating the same pattern every day? Getting out of the bed and doing the same thing, and again falling asleep and the next day the same pattern: why?
"You have done it so far, and what has happened? And you will do it unless death comes and relieves of you of your body. So what is the use? Love gives meaning. It is not that through love any result comes into being or any goal – no! Through love every moment becomes of value in itself. Then you never ask this. If someone asks what is the meaning of life, know well that love is lacking. Whenever someone asks what is the meaning of life, he is asking because he has not been able to flower in a love experience. Whenever someone is in love, he never asks what is the meaning of life. He knows the meaning; there is no need to ask. He knows the meaning! The meaning is there: love is the meaning in life."
And through love prayer is possible because prayer is again a love relationship – not between two individuals, but between one individual and existence itself. Then the whole existence becomes your beloved or lover. But it is possible only through love experience that you can grow into prayer or into meditation, and the ultimate ecstasy is just like love. That is why Jesus says that “God is love,” not that “God is loving.”
Christians have been interpreting it in this way – that God is kind, loving. That is not the meaning. Jesus says that God is love. He simply equates God and love. You can say “love” or you can say “God”; they both mean the same. God is not loving; God is love itself. If you can love, you have entered the divine. And when your love grows to such an infinity that it is not concerned with anyone in particular – rather, it has become a diffused phenomenon; when there is no lover for you – rather, the whole existence, all that is, has become the lover or beloved – then it has become prayer.
And Tantra is a love method. So the first thing is how to love, and then the second thing is how to grow in love so that love becomes prayer. But one must start from love. And don’t be afraid of love because that fear shows you are afraid of the heart. The head is cunning; the heart is innocent. With the head you feel protected; with the heart you become vulnerable, open. Anything can happen.
A Man Who Is Filled With Love Is in Heaven
"Without love a man stands alone, separated from the core of existence. Without love everyone is a lone entity, lacking any connection with others of his kind. Today, man finds himself totally alone. We are all shut off from each other, trapped within ourselves. This is like being in the grave. Even though he is alive, man is a corpse.
"Do you see the truth in what I am saying? Are you alive? Do you feel the flow of love in your veins? If you do not feel that flow, if the throbbing of love in your heart has ceased, then you should understand well that you are not really alive at all.
"Once I was on a journey and someone asked me which word in a man's vocabulary was the most valuable. My reply was,Love. The man was surprised. He said he had expected me to answer soul or God. I laughed and said "Love is God."
"Rising on the ray of love one can enter the enlightened kingdom of God. It is better to say that love is God than to say that truth is God, because the harmony, the beauty, the vitality and the bliss that are part of love are not part of truth. Truth is to be known; love is to be felt as well as known. The growth and perfection of love lead to the ultimate merger with God.
"The greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven. You can look at man as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison. If a man lives by hate he reaps a harvest of poison; if he lives by love he gathers blossoms laden with nectar."
If I mold my life and live it with the well-being of all men in mind, that is love. Love results from the awareness that you are not separate, not different from anything else in existence. I am in you; you are in me. This love is religious.
The doors of love only open for the person who is prepared to let his ego go. To surrender one’s ego for someone else is love; to surrender one’s ego for all is divine love.
Love is not sexual passion. Those who mistake sex for love remain empty of love. Sex is only a passing manifestation of love. It is part of nature’s mechanism, a method of procreation. Love exists on a higher plane, and as love grows, sex dissipates. The energy that has been manifested in sex is transformed into love.
Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures, is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through suppression. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.
To Love and to Need Love are Two Different Things
"Fill your life with love. But you will say, "We always love." And I tell you, you rarely love. You might be longing for love…and there is a vast difference between the two. To love and to need love are two very different things. Most of us remain like children all our lives because everyone is looking for love. To love is a very mysterious thing; to long for love is a very childish thing. Small children want love; when the mother gives them love they grow. They want love from others also and the family loves them. Then when they grow older, if they are husbands they want love from their wives, if they are wives they want love from their husbands.
"And whoever wants love suffers because love cannot be asked for, love can only be given. In wanting there is no certainty that you will get it. And if the person from whom you expect love also expects love from you, it is a problem. It will be like two beggars meeting and begging together. All over the world there are marital problems between husbands and wives, and the only reason for this is that both expect love from each other but are unable to give love.
"Think about this a little – your constant need for love. You want someone to love you, and if someone loves you you feel good. But what you don't know is that the other loves you only because he wants you to love him. It is just like someone throwing bait to fish: he does not throw it for the fish to eat, he throws it to catch the fish. He does not want to give it to the fish, he only does it because he wants the fish. All the people that you see in love around you are only throwing bait to get love. They will throw the bait for a while, until the other person starts feeling that there is a possibility of getting love from this person. Then he too will start showing some love until eventually they realize that both of them are beggars. They have made a mistake: each had thought the other was an emperor. And in time each one realizes that he is not getting any love from the other, and that's when the friction starts."
That’s why married life is thought to be hell, because you all want love but you don’t know how to give it. This is the basic cause of all fights. As long as what I am saying does not happen, the relationship between a husband and a wife will never be harmonious, no matter what adjustments you make, no matter what kind of marriage you have, no matter what rules society makes. The only way to make it better is if you realize that love can only be given and not asked for. It can only be given. Whatever you receive is a blessing, it is not a reward for loving. Love is to be given and whatever you receive is just a blessing, it is not a reward. And even if you don’t receive anything you are always happy that you were able to give.
If the husband and wife were to start giving love instead of asking for it, life could become heaven for them. And this world is so mysterious that if they love more and stop asking for it, they will receive more love and experience this mystery. And the more they love the less they will be involved in sex.
Gandhi was visiting Sri Lanka with his wife, Kasturba. When Gandhi told the person who was to introduce him at the first function that Ba, his wife, was also with him, this person thought that Gandhi meant his mother. From the word ba, mother, he had taken it to mean that Gandhi’s mother had also come with him. So introducing Gandhi he said, “It is a great privilege to have Gandhi here, and his mother is also here.”
Ba was a bit surprised. Gandhi’s secretary was also present, and he was afraid that he had made a mistake because he should have told the man who it was that was with Gandhi. He was afraid that Gandhi would be angry with him and feel insulted.
But what Gandhi said was quite amazing. He said, “The person who introduced me has by mistake said something true about me, because for a few years Ba has stopped being my wife and she has now become my mother.”