[A sannyasin said that he had been living under a tree in Goa for five years, until he fell in love with a woman and tried to settle down with her, but has been too much for him. When they are apart he loves her; when they are together it is heavy.]

Osho – This is the old story! Love is an old story. Nothing is new in it – it is always the old and the same pattern, and everybody repeats the same thing. Nothing new ever happens in love; it is just a rut… A few things to be understood….

One: love is always beautiful in the beginning, very rarely beautiful in the middle, and almost never beautiful in the end; that’s the whole process of love. So there are two ways: one is to go on changing the partner. Each time you think that the beginning is ending, change immediately. That is one way, and is what the west is doing. The moment you feel that the love is no more the same as it used to be, that the honeymoon is over, you change the partner. Then again you are at the beginning and you can go on changing… but you never grow like that.

The East has another trick: get married to a person with whom you are not in love. Then there will be no bad ending because there is no beginning: it is just finished from the very beginning, it has ended before it begins. That’s what the East has done… but both the eastern and western ways are meaningless. The third possibility – and this is my suggestion – is to be in love but not to start thinking of marriage. That’s what you did – you started thinking of making a home; then you are getting into trouble, the old rut.

Be in love as birds and animals are in love. Be in love but don’t start thinking of settling. Settling is very unsettling, because once you start settling the romance is over. The ordinary life is so heavy that it crushes the flower of romance and kills it. Once you start settling, small things become very important and love becomes secondary.

How to manage for money and where to purchase a house and how to manage for furniture, and
these things become more important, and love becomes secondary. These things are infinite – the list is long – and love comes only in the end and so it never comes! By the time you are finished with the house and the money and the furniture, you are falling asleep.

By and by you completely forget that you were trying to make this house to love this woman.
So don’t do that again – remember it! Always keep a distance between the person you love and
yourself. There is no need to settle: settling means that you start taking the other for granted.

That is the meaning of being a wife and a husband: the other is taken for granted.

You are only lovers if you don’t take the other for granted. Being in love means you have to seduce the other person every day: you cannot take him for granted, you don’t have any property right, you will have to persuade the other, so the cooing continues. And that’s what love is. Once things have settled and you know that you possess the woman and the woman knows that she possesses you, then through that possessiveness all sorts of jealousies, anger, hatred, fight and nastiness arise.

Then you will start repeating the pattern that you have learned from your parents and she has learned from her parents. Remember one thing: you don’t know what your mother did when she fell in love, you don’t know what your father did when he fell in love, but you know what they did when they were settled. You know them as wife and husband, you have not known them as
lovers. This is something very important to understand.

You cannot repeat anything when you are a lover, but when you become a husband or a wife and a householder, then you know. And you have only one programme, your mind is programmed.
… Friendship is always good. It is more civilised than love, mm ? And you are an ancient sannyasin, not a new one, mm?… … So it will be very difficult for you.

That happens to ascetic people, mm? They get starved and worked up, then one day suddenly they start clinging to a woman. They can cling too much and that can destroy the whole thing.
Just continue to be yourself, the way you used to be… and remember one thing: she fell in love with you who was sitting under a tree and meditating.

She never fell in love with a man who was under a roof. Mm? – when you are under a roof you are another man, she is no more in love with you. Always remember that! She had fallen in love with a vagabond and then you start settling. … Start living in Goa under some tree and [she] will be in love again!

Women are always attracted to an ascetic person rather than to householders. So start being in
samadhi again … and you can watch out of the corner of the eye whether [she] is coming, mm?
Little holidays are good; but basically you are an ascetic person, so remain that way!

Source: from Osho Book “This is It”

Osho – This comes again and again in everybody’s life: whatsoever you are doing you get tired of, you get fed up, you get bored with it. It is very easy to be interested in a new thing – it needs great guts to remain interested in an old thing. That’s what makes a person a genius. Otherwise everybody will become a genius. The only difference between a genius and an ordinary person is that the genius has the guts to stick at something even when he is feeling bored, fed up.

These are plateaus that come. Mm? you work with great joy because something is new – there is a great exploration, new territory and you are enchanted… it is like a romance, a honeymoon. But by and by you become acquainted with the territory; you have looked into all the corners of it and there seems to be nothing new. Now you know all about it so the sensation is no more there, the thrill is no more there.

Now, it is at this point that if you can stick at it and make efforts to find something new in it, you will break through one plane, and on another plane the exploration starts again. If you simply listen to this boredom and you drop out, then those seven years will have gone down the drain.
That’s how many people lose their life energy: they don’t stick at things. It really needs courage to remain with the old, because when the plateau comes and everything seems to be just a repetition, doing the same thing again and again and again, one feels to change – change the wife, change the husband, change the job, change the friend, change the town, go somewhere else, do something new. But with the new again after seven years the same will happen!

You can change ten times in your life and after each seven years the same will happen, so the whole life will be a wastage. If you go on digging on the same spot for seventy years you will reach to some depth – and it can be reached from anywhere.

Now photography is such a creative thing and it is going to be more and more creative in the
future because more sophisticated instruments will be available – they are available. You can do
a thousand and one things with photography now; just a few years ago they were just impossible to do. One has to be creative, inventive… one has to look for new ways, new visions, new dreams. And sometimes this is natural, this is part of nature: one feels stuck.

Those who drop out are the rolling stones: they don’t gather any moss. And it has nothing to do with the work itself – it is just the tendency of the mind. Photography or painting or music, or dancing – anything – will come to the same point, and once you have made a pattern it will be repeated. This is really a sheer wastage of energies.

Go on working in it. If you are feeling stuck, that simply means that you have to explore new ways, new directions, new dimensions in it; and they are always there! Life is so mysterious that it is never finished. A man can go on working with a small thing and can devote his whole life to it and still there will be much to be explored after he has died.

This is the whole art of being a genius. The genius is just a little more stubborn than ordinary people, that’s all. He does not listen to the mind – he goes on hammering: he digs a hole. A sufi master – Jalaluddin Rumi – once took his disciples to a field. There were eight holes in the field and no hole had any water; the whole field was wasted. The disciples asked, ’Master, why have
you brought us here?’

He said, ’To teach you something. This farmer wants to dig a well. He digs eight feet, ten feet, then he gets fed up with it and he thinks that this place is not right; he is bored so he starts digging at some other place. He has done this work the whole year round – he has destroyed the whole field and not a single hole has become a well. Now if he had dug at the same spot that well would have been one hundred feet deep.’ Jalaluddin said to his disciples, ’Remember this – the same applies to the inner world too.’

Just gather yourself together and don’t try to find excuses – simply start working with your total energy. From tomorrow morning start without thinking about it! Just go ahead, and within a few days it will be broken… and when it is broken, you will feel so thrilled. Whenever any plateau is broken, life takes on such a beauty and the work becomes such a joy. Then it is a second honeymoon and on a deeper level. And I am saying this to you to be remembered as a golden rule – it is so in every way, in every direction of life.

If you love a man, one day you will feel finished; that is the right moment to go on loving, to gather your energies and to explore the man again. If you can break that plateau you will see a new man arising before you… fresher than ever, younger than ever, more beautiful than ever. In fact you had never known such beauty and such depth. You have broken one more screen – the man is more available to you… again one day you will feel stuck! And remember: those who lose heart and escape, are great losers. Be a little more stubborn, stick to it. For three months do all that you can do with effort and then you tell me, mm?

Source: from Osho Book “This Is It”

Osho – This is my suggestion: if you feel that you are too disturbed you can go and do whatsoever you want to do. But this is my suggestion – that going and fighting for the son is not going to help you, is not going to help the father, is not going to help the son either! If you really love the son then there is no problem you can leave him with the father. There is no problem.

The father loves the son as much as you do, and he may be simply worried that you have gone
berserk or something. Mm? – you have become a sannyasin in orange clothes, and you have fallen into some hypnotic situation, the father must be thinking. And of course he has to think about his son too. If you bring the son, he will become a sannyasin, so the father is afraid, mm?

But my feeling is that there is no harm for the son. And it is always good for the son…. He has been with you for five, seven years; that is quite enough education you have given, as much as he needs from a woman. Let him be with the father and he will be enriched by that; he will not suffer through it. But if he feels this conflict – that the father wants to pull him towards him and you want to pull him towards you – he will be torn. Think of him. If you love him, then think of him.

Never fight over children because then the child starts feeling ’What is happening?’ – he is in a
conflict then. … This is hurting your ego, nothing else, so you want to take the revenge on the son. If he is settled and feeling good, then perfectly good. That’s all love wants – that the child should be happy. If he is happy there, perfectly good! That’s why I am saying that you can be here for three or four months more. First you become really orange, not only from the outside but from the inside too.

When even your blood has become orange juice then you can go. And then the child will see what a beautiful mother! What has happened to the mother? – something beautiful, something tremendous! Then he will be able to come. He will become interested in me. Right now there is no point. Right now you will go and you will be anxious and anxiety-ridden and you will start fighting and that will create a mess. The thing can go to the court and things become ugly, mm? That’s not good, not good for the child.

And what is wrong? He is seven years old, almost old – because children learn fifty percent by the age they are seven. He will learn only fifty percent more in the rest of his life, so he has been taught almost fifty percent by you. Now let fifty percent be done by the father. Nothing Is wrong in it. But if you are worried too much, you can go and have your trip. It is meaningless. Then it will be having it the american way. You can go and fight and force the child… but I don’t see that it has any point. Even there the child can say ’I don’t want to come’ – then? Then you will feel more hurt.

The child must be feeling more freedom with the father, because the father cannot be such a guard for twenty-four hours as the mother can be. The father has a thousand other things to do, so he must be free – looking at tv the whole day! He will be enjoying… more! When he is with you you are after him twenty-four hours!

My feeling is: let him enjoy, and after three months you can go. Then it will be possible. Let him
become interested. Just go on writing letters to him about what is happening to you, that’s all. Let the child be acquainted, and once he wants to come there is no problem. Just wait, mm?

And it will help you, your growth also, to wait. This is just egoistic – and you understand it, but it is hard to follow your own intelligence sometimes. Other things become more valuable: revenge, and ’what does this man think – that he can have the child? I will show him!’ No need to do that, no need.

You have taken such a turn, things are growing and much is possible now. Just going in the middle of it will not be good. You are very fragile. The plant has just come out of the earth. It is very soft and weak; it can be destroyed by anything. By any accident it can be destroyed.

I always allow people to go when I feel they are strong enough and there is no fear, they can go
anywhere, and they will be growing anywhere they are… then I send them. But to you I will not
suggest that right now. And you are going for a very wrong purpose… almost immoral. Wait, mm? just wait. Just enjoy it here and the child will come…