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Osho – The basic problem of love is to first become mature

Swami Amitabh — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:36:00 +0000

Osho – You can go on changing your husband or your wife a thousand and one times, you will again find the same type of woman and the same misery repeated in different forms – but the same misery repeated; it is almost the same. You can change your wife, but you are not changed. Now who is going to choose the other wife? You will choose. The choice will come out of your immaturity again. You will choose a similar type of woman again.

The basic problem of love is to first become mature, then you will find a mature partner; then immature people will not attract you at all. It is just like that. If you are twenty-five years of age, you don’t fall in love with a baby two years old, you don’t fall. Exactly like that. When you are a mature person psychologically, spiritually, you don’t fall in love with a baby. It does not happen, it CANNOT happen. You can see that it is going to be meaningless.

In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love. The word ’fall’ is not right. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. They cannot manage and they cannot stand – they find a woman and they are gone, they find a man and they are gone. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have that integrity to stand alone.

A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it – no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love. And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone; they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality, in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual.

Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love? Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That’s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced – they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned.

Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.

Remember, freedom is a higher value than love. That’s why in India, the ultimate we call MOKSHA; MOKSHA means freedom. Freedom is a higher value than love. So if love is destroying freedom, it is not of worth. Love can be dropped; freedom has to be saved: freedom is a higher value. And without freedom you can never be happy – that is not possible. Freedom is the intrinsic desire of each man, each woman – utter freedom, absolute freedom. So anything that becomes destructive to freedom – one starts hating it.

Don’t you hate the man you love? Don’t you hate the woman you love? You hate. It is a necessary evil; you have to tolerate it. Because you cannot be alone you have to manage to be with somebody, and you have to adjust to the other’s demands. You have to tolerate, you have to bear them. Love, to be really love, has to be ’being-love’, ’gift-love’. ’Being-love’ means a state of love. When you have arrived home, when you have known who you are, then a love arises in your being. Then the fragrance spreads and you can give it to others. How can you give something which you don’t have? To give it, the first basic requirement is to have it.

Source: from Osho Book “The Tantra Vision Volume 2″

Osho – When you depend on the other there is always misery

Swami Amitabh — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:29:00 +0000

Osho – The first thing: There are two kinds of love. C.S. Lewis has divided love into these two kinds: ’need-love’ and ’gift-love’. Abraham Maslow also divides love into two kinds. The first he calls ’deficiency-love’ and the second he calls ’being-love’. The distinction is significant and has to be understood.

The ’need-love’ or the ’deficiency-love’ depends on the other; it is immature love. In fact it is not truly love – it is a need. You use the other, you use the other as a means. You exploit, you manipulate, you dominate. But the other is reduced, the other is almost destroyed. And exactly the same is being done by the other. He is trying to manipulate you, to dominate you, to possess you, to use you. To use another human being is very unloving. So it only appears like love; it is a false coin. But this is what happens to almost ninety-nine per cent of people because the first lesson of love that you learn is in your childhood.

A child is born, he depends on the mother. His love towards the mother is a ’deficiency-love’: he needs the mother, he cannot survive without the mother. He loves the mother because mother ishis LIFE. In fact, there is no love; he will love any woman – whosoever will protect him, whosoever will help him to survive, whosoever will fill up his need. The mother is a sort of food that he eats. It is not only milk that he gets from the mother, it is love also – and that too is a need. Millions of people remain childish all their lives; they never grow up. They grow in age, but they never grow in their minds; their psychology remains juvenile, immature. They are always needing love. They are hankering for it like food.

Man becomes mature the moment he starts loving rather than needing. He starts overflowing, sharing; he starts giving. The emphasis is totally different. With the first, the emphasis is on how to get more. With the second, the emphasis is on how to give, how to give more, and how to give unconditionally. This is growth, maturity, coming to you.

A mature person gives. Only a mature person can give, because only a mature person has it. Then love is not dependent. Then you can be loving whether the other is or is not. Then love is not a relationship, it is a state. What will happen if all the disciples disappear and only I am here? Do you think there will be any change? What happens when a flower blooms in a deep forest with nobody to appreciate it, nobody to know its fragrance, nobody to pass a comment and say ’beautiful’, nobody to taste its beauty, its joy, nobody to share – what happens to the flower? It dies? It suffers? It becomes panicky? It commits suicide? It goes on blooming, it simply goes on blooming. It does not make any difference whether somebody passes by or not; it is irrelevant.

It goes on spreading its fragrance to the winds. It goes on offering its joy to God, to the whole.

If I am alone, then too, I will be as loving as when I am with you. It is not you who are creating my love. If you were creating my love, then naturally, when you are gone, my love will be gone. You are not pulling my love out – I am showering it on you: it is ’gift-love’, it is ’being-love’.

And I don’t really agree with C.S. Lewis and Abraham Maslow. The first love that they call ’love’ is not love, it is a need. How can a need be love? Love is a luxury. It is abundance. It is having so
much life that you don’t know what to do with it, so you share. It is having so many songs in your
heart that you have to sing them – whether anybody listens or not is not relevant. If nobody listens, then also you will have to sing it, you will have to dance your dance.

The other can have it, the other can miss it – but as far as you are concerned, it is flowing, it is overflowing. Rivers don’t flow for you; they are flowing whether you are there or not. They don’t flow for your thirst, they don’t flow for your thirsty fields; they are simply flowing there. You can quench your thirst, you can miss – that’s up to you. The river was not really flowing for you, the river was just flowing. It is accidental that you can get the water for your field, it is accidental that you can get water for your needs.

A Master is a river, the disciple is accidental. The Master is flowing; you can partake, you can enjoy, you can share his being. You can be overwhelmed by him, but he is not FOR you. He is not flowing for you in particular, he is simply flowing. Remember this. And this I call mature love, real love, authentic love, true love.

When you depend on the other there is always misery. The moment you depend, you start feeling miserable, because dependence is slavery. Then you start taking revenge in subtle ways, because the person you have to depend upon becomes powerful over you. Nobody likes anybody to be powerful over them, nobody likes to be dependent; because dependence kills freedom, and love cannot flower in dependence. Love is a flower of freedom – it needs space, it needs absolute space. The other has not to interfere with it. It is very delicate.

When you are dependent, the other will certainly dominate you, and you will try to dominate the other. That’s the fight that goes on between so-called lovers; they are intimate enemies – Continuously fighting. Husbands and wives – what are they doing? Loving is very rare; fighting is the rule, loving is an exception. And in every way they try to dominate – even through love they try to dominate. If the husband asks the wife, the wife denies – she is reluctant. She is very miserly: she gives, but very reluctantly; she wants you to wave your tail around her. And so is the case with the husband. When the wife is in need and asks him, the husband says that he is tired. In the office there was too much work, ’really overworked’, and he would like to go to sleep.

Source: from Osho Book “The Tantra Vision Volume 2″

Osho – There are two traditions of tantra – one is Hindu, another is Buddhist.

Swami Amitabh — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:14:00 +0000

Osho – Tara is also the name of a tantra goddess. There are two traditions of tantra – one is Hindu, another is Buddhist. In the Buddhist tradition tara is the name of the tantra goddess. And every Buddhist tantrika has to practise the idea of the goddess with the beloved.

When a tantra worshipper is making love to his woman, first, for months he has to visualise the woman as being the goddess Tara. By and by the visualisation becomes settled; by and by he completely forgets that she is a human being. When she is no more a human being, only then is love allowed, not before it. The master goes on watching, the master has to observe, and until the moment that the master allows them to move into love-making they are to remain celibates because before that moment it will not be love; it will be simply lust.

So every day for hours the practitioner will sit in front of the woman. The woman will be on a high pedestal, sitting naked, nude, and he will simply sit and look at her for hours together and imagine – in the beginning it is imagination, visualisation – that she is divine, that she is not his woman, that she is the mother-goddess Tara. And by and by, months, sometimes years pass, by and by the body is no more human – it is no more
made of bones and skin and blood; it starts becoming golden.

In fact it is so; the visualisation does not create a projection – it simply helps you to see the reality as it is. It simply helps you to drop the concept, the hypnotic concept, that the body consists only of the physical. Once you are helped through imagination this body no more really seems relevant; there is another body hidden behind it that starts being realised.

And this happens not only to the man: the woman is also continuously meditating on the same phenomenon – that she is no more a human being, that she is no more a woman and the man in front of her is no more a lover but a child and she a mother-goddess.

They both go on creating this harmony; one day it happens and it happens together – to both of them. That’s the beauty of it, it synchronises: when it happens, it happens to both. And then there is no doubt about it. It is not that the man is still uncertain as to whether it is his imagination – if he is uncertain, it has not happened. When it really happens there is no uncertainty, no doubt – it is one hundred percent so. And suddenly both become divine; it is a transfiguration. In that moment one can see their auras meeting, and the master then allows them: now they can move in love. Now there will really be love, no lust, it is no more sex. It is something divine, something of samadhi.