CHAPTER 5: "LOVE HURTS" AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS

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‌“LOVE HURTS” AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS‌ {#love-hurts-and-other-misunderstandings style=”padding-left: 31pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;“}

Love never hurts anybody. And if you feel you have been hurt by love, it is something else in you, not your loving quality, that feels hurt. Unless you see this you will go on moving in the same circles again and again. What you call love can hide many unloving things in you; the human mind has been very clever, cunning, in deceiving others and in deceiving itself, too. The mind puts beautiful labels on ugly things, it tries to cover your wounds with flowers. This is one of the first things you have to go into, if you want to understand what love is.

“Love” as people ordinarily use the word is not love; it is lust. And lust is bound to cause hurt, because to desire somebody as an object is to offend that person. It is an insult, it is violent. When you move with lust toward somebody, how long can you pretend it is love? Something that is superficial will look like love, but scratch a little bit and hidden behind it is sheer lust. Lust is animalistic. To look at anybody with lust is to insult, humiliate, is to reduce the other person to a thing, to a commodity. No person ever likes to be used; that’s the most ugly thing you can do to anybody. No person is a commodity, no person is a means toward any end.

This is the difference between lust and love. Lust uses the other person to fulfill some of your desires. The other is only used, and when the use is complete you can throw the other person away. It has no more use to you; its function is fulfilled. This is the most immoral act in existence, using the other as a means.

Love is just the opposite of it: respecting the other as an end unto himself or herself. When you love someone as an end unto himself, then there is no feeling of hurt; you become enriched through it. Love makes everybody rich.

Secondly, love can only be true if there is no ego hiding behind it; otherwise love becomes only an ego trip. It is a subtle way to dominate. And one has to be

very conscious because this desire to dominate is very deep-rooted. It never comes naked; it always comes hidden beneath beautiful garments, decorated.

Parents never say that their children are their possessions, they never say that they want to dominate the children, but that’s actually what they do. They say they want to help, they say they want them to be intelligent, to be healthy, to be blissful, but—and that “but” is a great but—it has to be according to their ideas. Even their children’s happiness has to be decided by the parents’ ideas; the children have to be happy according to the parents’ expectations.

Children have to be intelligent, but at the same time obedient, too. This is asking for the impossible! The intelligent person cannot be obedient; the obedient person has to lose some of his intelligence. Intelligence can say yes only when it feels deep agreement with you. It cannot say yes just because you are bigger, more powerful, authoritative—a father, a mother, a priest, a politician. It cannot say yes just because of the authority that you carry with you. Intelligence is rebellious, and no parents would like their children to be rebellious. Rebellion will be against their hidden desire to dominate.

Husbands say they love their wives, but it is just domination. They are so jealous, so possessive, how can they be loving? Wives go on saying they love their husbands, but twenty-four hours a day they are creating hell; in every possible way they are reducing the husband to something ugly. The henpecked husband is an ugly phenomenon. And the problem is that first the wife reduces the husband to a henpecked husband and then she loses interest in him, because who can remain interested in a henpecked husband? He seems to be worthless; he does not seem to be man enough.

First the husband tries to make the wife just his possession, and once she is a possession he loses interest. There is some hidden logic in it: his whole interest was to possess; now that is finished, and he would like to try some other woman so he can again go on another trip of possession.

Beware of these ego numbers. Then you will be hurt, because the person you are trying to possess is bound to revolt in some way or other, is bound to sabotage your tricks, your strategies because nobody loves anything more than freedom. Even love is secondary to freedom; freedom is the highest value. Love can be sacrificed for freedom, but freedom cannot be sacrificed for love. And

that’s what we have been doing for centuries, sacrificing freedom for love. Then there is antagonism, conflict, and every opportunity is used to hurt each other.

Love in its purest form is a sharing of joy. It asks nothing in return, it expects nothing; hence how can you feel hurt? When you don’t expect, there is no possibility of being hurt. Then whatsoever comes is good, and if nothing comes, that too is good. Your joy was to give, not to get. Then one can love from thousands of miles away; there is no need even to be physically present.

Love is a spiritual phenomenon; lust is physical. Ego is psychological; love is spiritual. You will have to learn the very alphabet of love. You will have to start from the very beginning, from scratch; otherwise you will be hurt again and again. And remember, only you can help yourself; nobody else is responsible.

How can anybody help you? Nobody else can destroy your ego. If you cling to it, nobody can destroy it; if you have invested in it, nobody can destroy it. I can only share my understanding with you. The buddhas can only show the way; then you have to go, then you have to follow the way. Nobody can lead you, holding your hand.

That’s what you would like: you would like to play the game of being dependent. And remember, the person who plays the game of being dependent will take revenge. Soon he would like in some way for the other to be dependent on him or on her. If the wife is dependent on the husband for money, then she will try to make the husband dependent on her for other things. It is a mutual arrangement. They both become crippled, they both become paralyzed; they cannot exist without each other. Even the idea that the husband was happy without the wife hurts her, that he was laughing with the guys in the club hurts her. She is not interested in his happiness; in fact she cannot believe it: “How did he dare to be happy without me? He has to depend on me!”

The husband does not feel good that the wife was laughing with somebody, was enjoying, was cheerful. He wants all her cheerfulness to be totally possessed by him; it is his property. The dependent person will make you dependent also.

Fear is never love, and love is never afraid. There is nothing to lose for love. Why should love be afraid? Love only gives. It is not a business transaction, so there is no question of loss or profit. Love enjoys giving, just as flowers enjoy

releasing their fragrance. Why should they be afraid? Why should you be afraid?

Remember, fear and love never exist together; they cannot. No coexistence is possible. Fear is just the opposite of love.

People ordinarily think hate is the opposite of love. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. Fear is the opposite of love. Hate is love standing on its head; it is a headstand but it is not opposite to love. The person who hates simply shows that somewhere, he still loves. The love has gone sour, but it is still there. Fear is the real opposite. Fear means that now the whole love energy has disappeared.

Love is outgoing, fearlessly reaching to the other, tremendously trusting that it will be received—and it is always received. Fear is shrinking within yourself, closing yourself, closing all the doors, all the windows so that no sun, no wind, no rain can reach you, you are so afraid. You are entering into your grave alive.

Fear is a grave, love is a temple. In love, life comes to its ultimate peak. In fear, life falls to the level of death. Fear stinks, love is fragrant. Why should you be afraid?

Be afraid of your ego, be afraid of your lust, be afraid of your greed, be afraid of your possessiveness; be afraid of your jealousy—but there is no question of being afraid of love. Love is divine! Love is like light. When there is light, darkness cannot exist. When there is love, fear cannot exist.

Love can make a great celebration out of your life, but only love—not lust, not ego, not possessiveness, not jealousy, not dependence.

I think I understand what you mean when you say it is not love that hurts. Nevertheless, the kind of love you are talking about is not so easy to find. So the process of learning and growing into a more mature love is often very painful. Is pain just an inevitable part of growth?

Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding them you cannot destroy them, they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains and they remain in your system.

That’s why growth is painful: when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them.

You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if great joy is destroyed you will never be in deep pain. To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.

And the logic has something in it. Both grow together; if you want to have a life of ecstasy you will have to accept many agonies. If you want the peaks of the Himalayas then you will also have the valleys. But nothing is wrong with the valleys; your approach just has to be different. You can enjoy both—the peak is beautiful, so is the valley. And there are moments when one should enjoy the peak and there are moments when one should relax in the valley.

The peak is sunlit, it is in a dialogue with the sky. The valley is dark, but whenever you want to relax you have to move into the darkness of the valley. If you want to have peaks you will need to grow roots into the valley: the deeper your roots go, the higher your tree will grow. The tree cannot grow without roots and the roots have to move deep into the soil.

Pain and pleasure are intrinsic parts of life. People are so much afraid of pain that they repress it, they avoid any situation that brings pain, they go on dodging pain. And finally they stumble upon the fact that if you really want to avoid pain you will have to avoid pleasure, too. That’s why your monks avoid pleasure— they are afraid of it. In fact they are simply avoiding all possibilities of pain. They know that if you avoid pleasure then naturally great pain is not possible; it comes only as a shadow of pleasure. Then you walk on the plain ground; you never move on the peaks and you never fall into the valleys. But then you are part of the living dead, then you are not alive.

Life exists between this polarity. This tension between pain and pleasure makes you capable of creating great music; music exists only in this tension. Destroy the polarity and you will be dull, you will be stale, you will be dusty.

You won’t have any meaning and you will never know what splendor is. You will have missed life. One who wants to know life and live life has to accept and embrace death. They come together, they are two aspects of a single phenomenon.

That’s why growth is painful. You have to go into all those pains that you have been avoiding. It hurts. You have to go through all those wounds that somehow you have managed not to look at. But the deeper you go into pain, the deeper is your capacity to go into pleasure. If you can go into pain to the uttermost limit, you will be able to touch heaven.

I have heard that a seeker came to a Zen master and asked, “How shall we avoid heat and cold?”

Metaphorically, he is asking, “How should we avoid pleasure and pain?” That is the Zen way of talking about pleasure and pain, “heat and cold.”

“How shall we avoid heat and cold?” The master answered, “Be hot, be cold.”

To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted, inevitably and naturally. Pain is pain—a simple, painful fact. Suffering, however, is only and always the refusal of pain, the claim that life should not be painful. It is the rejection of a fact, the denial of life and of the nature of things. Death is the mind that minds dying. Where there is no fear of death, who is there to die?

Man is unique among creatures in his knowledge of death and in his laughter. The miracle is that then, he can even create out of death something new: he can die laughing! And if you can die laughing, only then will you give a valid proof that you must have lived laughing. Death is the final statement of your whole life

—the conclusion, the concluding remark. How you have lived will be shown by your death, how you die.

Can you die laughing? Then you were a grown-up person. If you die crying, weeping, clinging, then you were a child. You were not grown up, you were immature. If you die crying, weeping, clinging to life, that simply shows you have been avoiding death and you have been avoiding life too, with all its pains.

Growth is facing the reality, encountering the fact, whatever it is. And let me repeat: pain is simply pain; there is no suffering in it. Suffering comes from your desire that the pain should not be there, that there is something wrong in pain. Watch, witness, and you will be surprised. You have a headache: the pain is there but suffering is not there. Suffering is a secondary phenomenon, pain is primary. The headache is there, the pain is there; it is simply a fact. There is no judgment about it. You don’t call it good or bad, you don’t give it any value; it is just a fact.

The rose is a fact, so is the thorn. The day is a fact, so is the night. The head is a fact, so is the headache. You simply take note of it.

Buddha taught his disciples that when you have a headache simply say twice, “Headache, headache.” Take note, but don’t evaluate, don’t say, “Why? Why has this headache happened to me? It should not happen to me.” The moment you say, “It should not” you bring suffering in. Now suffering is created by you, not by the headache. Suffering is your antagonistic interpretation, suffering is your denial of the fact.

And the moment you say, “It should not be” you have started avoiding it, you have started turning yourself away from it. You would like to be occupied in something so that you can forget it. You turn the radio or the television on, or you go to the club, or you start reading. You divert yourself, you distract yourself. Now that pain has not been witnessed; you have simply distracted yourself. That pain will be absorbed by your system.

Let this key be very deeply understood: if you can witness your headache without taking any antagonistic attitude, without avoiding it, without escaping from it; if you can just be there, meditatively there—“Headache, headache”—if you can just simply see it, the headache will go in its time. I am not saying that it will go miraculously, that just by your seeing it will go. It will go in its time. But it will not be absorbed by your system, it will not poison your system. It will be there, you will take note of it, and it will be gone. It will be released.

When you witness a certain thing in yourself, it cannot enter into your system. It always enters when you avoid it, when you escape from it. When you are absent, then it enters into your system. Only when you are absent can a pain become part of your being—if you are present, your very presence prevents it

from becoming part of your being.

And if you can go on taking note of your pains you will not be accumulating them. You have not been taught the right clue, so you go on avoiding. Then you accumulate so much pain, you are afraid to face it, you are afraid to accept it. Growth becomes painful; it is because of wrong conditioning. Otherwise growth is not painful, growth is utterly pleasant.

When the tree grows and becomes bigger do you think there is pain? There is no pain. Even when a child is born, if the mother accepts it there will be no pain. But the mother rejects it; the mother is afraid. She becomes tense, she tries to hold the child inside, which is not possible. The child is ready to go out into the world, the child is ready to leave the mother. He is ripe, the womb cannot contain him anymore. If the womb contains him any longer the mother will die and the child will die. But the mother is afraid. She has heard that it is very painful to give birth to a child—birth pangs, birth pain—she is afraid. And out of fear she becomes tense and closed.

For others—and in primitive societies those people still exist—childbirth is so simple, with no pain at all. On the contrary, you will be surprised, the greatest ecstasy happens to the woman in childbirth—not pain, not agony at all, but the greatest ecstasy. No sexual orgasm is so satisfying and so tremendous as the orgasm that happens to the woman when she gives birth to a child naturally. The whole sexual mechanism of the woman pulsates as it cannot pulsate in any lovemaking. The child is coming from the deepest core of the woman. No man can ever penetrate a woman to that core. And the pulsation arises from the inside. The pulsation is a must; that pulsation will come like waves, great tidal waves of joy. Only that will help the child to come out, only that will help the passage to open for the child. So there will be great pulsation and the whole sexual being of the woman will have tremendous joy.

But what actually has happened to humanity is just the opposite: the woman comes to feel the greatest agony of her life. And this is a mind creation, this is wrong upbringing. The physical birth can be natural if you accept it, and so it is with your birth as a loving being. Growth means you are being born every day. Birth does not end the day you were born; on that day it simply starts, it is only a beginning. The day you left the womb of your mother you were not born, you just started being born; that was just the beginning. And a person goes on being

born till he dies. It is not that you are born in a single moment. Your birth process continues for seventy, eighty, ninety years, however long you live. It is a continuum.

And every day you will feel joy: growing new leaves, new foliage, new flowers, new branches, rising higher and higher and touching new altitudes. You will be getting deeper, higher; you will be reaching to peaks. Growth will not be painful.

But growth is painful—it is because of you, your wrong conditioning. You have been taught not to grow; you have been taught to remain static, you have been taught to cling to the familiar and the known. That’s why each time the known disappears from your hands you start crying. A toy has been broken, a pacifier has been taken away.

Remember, only one thing is going to help you, and that is awareness— nothing else. Growth will remain painful if you don’t accept life and love in all its ups and downs. The summer has to be accepted and the winter, too.

This is what I call meditation. Meditation is when you are emptied of all that is old and told and done to death. Then you see. Or rather, then there is seeing, the birth of the new. But you will have to go through many pains, many agonies. It is because you have lived in a certain society, in a certain culture—Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, German, Japanese. These are different ways of avoiding pain and nothing else. You have been part of a culture, that’s why growth is painful, because the culture tries to make you not grow; it wants you to remain juvenile. It does not allow you to move psychologically as you move physiologically.

In the First World War and then again in the Second World War, psychologists became aware of a very strange fact: that man’s average mental age is not more than twelve or thirteen. Even the man who is seventy, his mental age is somewhere between ten and thirteen. What does it mean? It simply means he stopped growing at ten; the body continued but the mind stopped. No society allows grown-up minds. Why? Because grown-up minds are dangerous for the social structure; they are rebellious. They are dangerous for the social structure because they will see all the kinds of stupidities that go on in the name of culture, society, nation.

Now see: the earth is one, and man still remains divided. All the problems of humanity can be solved if nations disappear. There is no problem, actually there is no problem; the basic problem is created by the boundaries of nations. Now the technology exists that can feed all the people of the world, there is no need for any starvation. But that is not possible, because those boundaries won’t allow it.

A grown-up person will be able to see all this nonsense, a grown-up person will be able to see it through and through. A grown-up person cannot be reduced to a slave.

Take hold of your being. Face your pains and throw off all kinds of bondages, because only by being free of all bondages will you be able to sing your song and dance your dance.

In spring, hundreds of flowers; in autumn, a harvest moon. In summer, a refreshing breeze; in winter, snow.

If useless things do not hang in your mind, Any season is a good season.

It is a Zen saying. “If useless things don’t hang in your mind…” Growth is painful because you are carrying so many useless things in your mind. You should have dropped them long before. But you have not been taught to drop anything, you have only been taught to hold on to everything—meaningful, meaningless. Because you are carrying so many hang-ups, growth is difficult. Otherwise growth will be so smooth, just like a bud opens into a flower.

My girlfriend told me I am a little boring, very dependent, and a victim. Then I felt guilty and depressed and utterly unworthy. I began to feel inside me a big no: towards existence, life, love. Meanwhile I observed in me this destructive energy and I felt that I somehow enjoyed it! Is it possible to use this energy in some creative way?

Your question is an example of the stupid conclusions that mind comes to. Perhaps you may not have looked into it and its contradictions. I would like to go into the very psychology of such questions. They are not only within you, they are within many. You are courageous to expose yourself.

The exposure begins, “My girlfriend told me I am a little boring.” Your girlfriend is very compassionate, because each man finally becomes very boring, not “a little” boring. Do you realize the fact that what you call love is a repetition, the same stupid gymnastics again and again? And in this whole stupid game the man is the loser. He is dissipating his energy, perspiring, huffing, puffing, and the girl keeps her eyes closed, thinking, “It is a question only of two or three minutes and this nightmare will be finished.”

People are so noninventive, they take it for granted that going through the same act again and again is making them more interesting. That’s why I say your girlfriend is very compassionate; she only told you that you are a little boring. I say to you, you are utterly boring.

When the Christian missionaries came to the East, the Eastern people discovered that they knew only one posture of making love: the woman underneath and those ugly beasts on top of the delicate woman. That’s where it got the name “the missionary position.”

India is an ancient land and the birthplace of many sciences, particularly sexology. A book of tremendous importance, by Vatsyayana, has been in existence for five thousand years. The name of the book is Kama Sutra, hints for making love. And it comes from a man of deep meditation—he has created eighty-four positions for lovemaking. Naturally the positions should change; otherwise you are bound to be boring. Vatsyayana recognizes the fact that the same lovemaking position creates boredom, a feeling of utter stupidity, because you are always doing the same thing. He invented eighty-four postures to make the love lives of couples a little interesting. Nobody in the whole world has written a book of the caliber of Kama Sutra. But it could only have come from a man of immense clarity, of deep meditativeness.

What is your lovemaking? If you look at your lovemaking, you yourself will feel that it is all boring. And particularly for the woman it is more boring, because the man is finished in two or three minutes and the woman has not even

started. And all around the world, cultures have enforced in the minds of women that they are not supposed even to enjoy or move or be playful—that is called “dirty” prostitutes do it, not ladies. Ladies have to lie down almost dead and let that old guy do whatsoever he wants to do. So it is nothing new, there is nothing new even to see.

You should not take it as a personal insult. Your girlfriend is telling you something really sincere and honest. Have you given her orgasmic joy? Or have you only used her to throw out your sexual energy? Have you reduced her into a commodity? She has been conditioned to accept it, but this mere “acceptance” cannot be joyful.

You make love on the same bed where you fight every day. In fact fighting is the preface: throwing pillows, shouting at each other, arguing about everything, and then, feeling tired, some negotiation is needed. Your love is only a negotiation. If you are a man of aesthetic sensibility, your love chamber should be a sacred place, because it is in that love chamber that life is born. It should have beautiful flowers, incense, fragrance; you should enter into it with deep respect.

And love should not be just an abrupt thing where you just grab the woman. This hit-and-run affair is not love. Love should have a preface of beautiful music, of dancing together, of meditating together. And it should not be a mind thing, that the whole time you are thinking of how to get her to make love and then go to sleep. It should be a deeper involvement of your whole being, not projected by the mind but coming spontaneously. Beautiful music, fragrance, you are dancing hand in hand, you have again become small children playing with flowers. If spontaneously, lovemaking happens in this sacred atmosphere it will have a different quality.

You should understand that the woman is capable of multiple orgasms, because she does not lose any energy. Man is capable of only one orgasm and he loses energy, looks depressed. Even the next morning you can see his hangover, and as he goes on growing older it becomes more and more difficult. This difference has to be understood. The woman is on the receptive end—she has to be, because in nature’s plan she is to become a mother, she needs more energy. But her orgasm has a totally different way of happening. Man’s sexuality is local, like local anesthesia. A woman’s body is sexual all over, and unless her

whole body starts trembling with joy, each cell of her body starts becoming involved, she cannot have an orgasmic explosion.

So it is not only in your case that the man is boring, it is the case for almost ninety-nine percent of women around the world. The whole situation has to be changed. The woman should not be under the man. In the first place it is ugly— the man has a stronger body, the woman is more fragile. She should be on top of the man, not the man on top of her.

Secondly, the man should remain silent, inactive, so that his orgasm is not finished within two minutes. If you are silent and let the woman go crazy on top of your chest it will give her good exercise and it will bring her to an explosion of orgasmic energy. It takes time for her whole body to warm up, and if you are too active there is no time. You meet, but the meeting is not of beauty, of love, but just utilitarian.

Try with your girlfriend what I am saying. You be the inactive partner and let her be the active partner. Allow her to be uninhibited. She has not to behave like a lady, she has to behave like an authentic woman. The “lady” is just created by men; the woman is created by existence. And you have to fill the gap between her orgasms. The gap can be filled in only one way, that you remain very inactive, silent, and enjoy her going crazy. And she will have multiple orgasms. You should end the game with your orgasm, but you should not begin with it.

Then your girlfriend will not call you a little boring. You will be a really interesting, wonderful guy who is behaving like a lady! And keep your eyes closed so that she is not inhibited by your eyes. So she can do anything—moving her hands, her body, moaning, groaning, shouting. You are not allowed to be alive, you simply remain silent. Then she will be mad after you! Right now you must be behaving stupidly, as most of the men in the world do.

Your girlfriend is giving you good advice, and you in your stupidity are thinking that she is condemning you. When she says, “You are dependent and a victim,” I can see even through your question that she is right. A victim you are, just as every human being is a victim—a victim of stupid ideologies, which have created strange guilt feelings and do not allow you to be playful. Although you may be making love, you know you are committing a sin and hell is not far off.

While making love, make it a meditative process. Your whole presence has to be there, showering on the woman you love. The woman has to be there, showering all her beauty and grace on her lover. Then you will not be a victim, otherwise you are, because love is not accepted by your idiotic religions to be a natural and playful experience. They condemn it. Some of them have made it a condition that unless you leave the woman you will never attain to truth. And the conditioning has been going on for so long that it has almost become a truth, although it is an absolute lie.

You are a victim of traditions and you are certainly dependent. When I read your question further you will see how you are dependent, dependent on a girlfriend who tells you that you are boring, not very juicy, and a victim.

Your dependence shows further: “Then I felt very guilty and depressed and utterly unworthy.” If your girlfriend, by saying such simple truths, can make you feel guilty and depressed and utterly unworthy, she certainly seems to be your master. “I began to feel inside me a big no.” And this is where your girlfriend has been kind, not to say to you, “You are a little bit of an idiot too.”

You are saying, “I began to feel inside me a big no towards existence.” Now what has existence done—towards life, towards love”? This shows your utter idiocy. Rather than listening to your girlfriend who was saying sincerely that you are boring, just a little, you should have asked her, “In what way can I become a little more interesting? Do you have any suggestions?” That would have been an intelligent step.

But instead of asking the girl you started having “a big no: towards existence, life, love.” But I understand the reason. Perhaps you may not be able to explain it, but I can see the underlying reason for your big “no.” You believe in your girlfriend too much. Naturally, you could not ask her; that would show your dependence. You must be afraid to make much fuss about these things with her, because girlfriends are not your permanent wives; no law prevents them from moving with someone who is more juicy. And everybody in the beginning is juicy, but just a few days together and the whole juice dries out. You start looking around for some other woman, for some other man, because they all look juicier.

You will repeat the same thing life after life; you have done it already, without

understanding the foundation. Living with one man more than a week the problem arises of how to get rid of him. He is also thinking about how to get rid of you. But it does not look right to either of you, so you start creating trouble so that somehow some other idiot may become interested in your girlfriend, because you both go on seeing that other girls are more juicy, other men are more juicy. It is an old story that the grass on the other side of the fence looks greener than your own grass. Distance creates that phenomenon.

Any woman may look to you more interesting than your wife; she is just a pain in the neck. But what you don’t know is that all these women are following the same philosophy. For one or two days they are so wonderful, and once they have caught hold of you the real story starts—they start becoming a pain in the neck. The same is true about men. Meeting a woman on the beach, in the park, by the side of a river, he pretends to be Alexander the Great, walks like a lion. And within two days the same fellow is reduced to a rat.

Nobody talks about the reality of why this is happening, why so many people are unnecessarily made miserable. This society will never be happy if we don’t allow people to move and not get stuck in marriages, not get stuck in their own promises.

Out of freedom meet with each other, and the moment you feel that you have explored the whole topography of the woman and the woman knows that she has experienced whatever is possible to experience in the man, then it is time to say good-bye to each other in deep friendliness. There is no need to hang around each other’s neck.

A world completely free from any contracts between man and woman will be immensely lovely, beautiful, unboring, interesting. But we have created institutions, and to live in an institution is not a very great experience. Your marriage is an institution, although the newer generation is moving a little more freely, before settling after the age of thirty. I have been looking around the world to find a hippie who is at least thirty-five years old. I have not found any. Around thirty, all hippies disappear; they become just the same conservative people whom they were fighting against before.

Seeing the situation that living in institutions is—marriage, community, society, Lions Club, Rotary Club—you cannot live joyously, you have

experimented. This is the first time in history that we have a younger generation. I don’t mean that in the past there were not young people, but there was no “younger generation.” A small child, seven years old, would start following the father’s business, would start going to the fields, taking care of the cows; or if the father was a carpenter, the child would start helping him. At the age of seven he had already joined the society.

For the first time in history there is a generation which can be authentically called younger, and which has created a generation gap. Schools are there, colleges are there, universities, and it takes twenty-five years, twenty-six years to come out of the university with a postgraduate degree. But by that time you are no longer young. By that time you start having responsibilities: profession, family, marriage.

But during the time that you spend in the universities, before entering life, there is a long gap in which you are not engaged in any utilitarian, purposive activity. That has created the generation gap. Men and women become sexually mature—women by the age of thirteen, men by the age of fourteen—and they will be married perhaps ten or twelve years afterwards. These twelve years have made girlfriends and boyfriends possible.

It is a great opportunity for the future to understand the whole phenomenon and its psychology. You have the choice to change the old habits, to create trouble but drop old habits. Every man needs to be aware of many women. Every woman needs the experience of many other men before deciding to marry. Their experience will help them to find the right person with whom they can melt and merge without any difficulty.

“Meanwhile,” you are saying, “I observed in me this destructive energy and I felt that I somehow enjoyed it!” Everybody has destructive energy, because energy, if left to itself, is bound to be destructive unless it is used with awareness and becomes creative. But the most important thing that you are saying is that, “Somehow I enjoyed it.”

Then how are you going to change it? With anything that you enjoy you are bound to remain on the same level; you cannot change it, because you may not enjoy the change. And all this has come to your mind only because your girlfriend told you that you are “a little boring, very dependent, and a victim.”

You have energy. To enjoy destructive energy is suicidal, to enjoy destructive energy as destructive is in the service of death. If you are aware of it you have to go through a transformation. Use your energy creatively; perhaps that will make you less boring, more interesting, less dependent, less of a victim. And the most important part will be that you will not feel guilty and depressed. No creative person feels depressed and guilty. His participation in the universe through his creative actions makes him tremendously fulfilled and gives him dignity. That is the very birthright of every human being, but very few people claim it.

Moreover, this big “no” will become a big “yes” if the energy moves into creative dimensions. And there is no difficulty, it is so easy to use energy in creative fields. Paint, do gardening, grow flowers, write poetry, learn music, dance. Learn anything that changes your destructive energy into creative energy, and immediately the big no will become even a bigger yes. Then you will not be angry at existence, you will be grateful. You will not be against life.

How can a creative person be against life, love? It is impossible, it has never happened. It is only the uncreative people who are against everything. And if you can be creative, life-affirmative, you will have moved in the direction of becoming an authentic, sincere, celebrating individual.

Your girlfriend has raised very important questions for your life. The easiest way would be to change the girlfriend, but I suggest that she is certainly a friend to you and that whatever she has said is absolutely sincere, authentic. Be grateful to her and start changing things. The day your girlfriend accepts you as alive, interesting, will be a great day in your life. So don’t be a coward and change girlfriends just because this one creates trouble in your mind, and you want to find some other one.

You are fortunate to find a very compassionate woman. Your next choice will be very difficult; she will make you feel absolutely guilty and unworthy, because what have you done to be worthy? What have you done not to be boring? What have you done to declare your independence? What have you done not to be a victim? It is time you should do it. You will remain always grateful to your girlfriend.

And I would like to tell your girlfriend, “Go on hitting this fellow until you are satisfied that he is not boring but full of life, utterly interesting, playful,

celebrating. You may lose him somewhere on the path of life, but you will have prepared him for some other woman; otherwise the way he is now he is going to torture many women and torture himself.”

I am trying to prepare the future man, who will respect the woman as equal to himself, who will give opportunity for her growth as he takes opportunity for his own growth. And there will not be any kind of bondage. If two persons can live in love their whole life, nobody is going to disturb them. But there is no need of any marriage and there is no need of any divorce. Love should be an absolute act of freedom.

But you have also been told for thousands of years that, “If you really love then your love has to be permanent.” I don’t see that anything in life has the quality of being permanent. Love cannot be an exception. So don’t expect that love has to be permanent. It will make your love life more beautiful, because you know today you are together, tomorrow perhaps you will have to depart. Love comes like a fresh, fragrant breeze into your home, fills it with freshness and fragrance, remains as long as existence allows it and then moves out. You should not try to close all your doors or the same fresh breeze will become absolutely stale.

That’s what people’s lives have become—stale, ugly—and the reason lies in their idea of permanent love. In life everything is changing. And change is beautiful; it gives you more and more experience, more and more awareness, more and more maturity.

All the joy and fun has gone out of my relationship, although I feel the love is still there and I don’t really want us to break up. How can we put that joy and fun back into our relationship?

There is some misunderstanding in your mind. The joy is not gone, joy has never been there—it was something else. It is excitement that has gone, but you thought that excitement was joy. The joy will come now; when the excitement subsides, only then does joy come. Joy is a very silent phenomenon; it is not excitement at all, it is not feverish at all. It is tranquil, calm and cool.

But this misunderstanding is not unique to you; it has become very prevalent.

People think that excitement is joy. It is a kind of intoxication; one feels occupied, tremendously occupied. In that occupation one forgets one’s worries, problems, anxieties. It is like drinking alcohol: you forget your problems, you forget yourself, and at least for the moment you are far, far away from yourself. That is the meaning of excitement: you are no longer inside, you are outside yourself; you have escaped from yourself. But because of this being outside yourself, sooner or later you become tired. You miss the nourishment that comes from your innermost core when you are close to it.

So no excitement can be permanent; it can only be a moment’s phenomenon, a momentary thing. All honeymoons end; they have to end, otherwise you will be killed! If you remain excited you will go berserk. It has to subside, you have to be nourished within yourself again. One cannot remain awake for many nights in a row. For one night, two nights, three nights it is okay, but if you remain awake for too many nights you will start feeling tired, utterly tired and exhausted. And you will start feeling dull and dead too; you will need rest. After each excitement there is a need for rest. In rest you recapitulate, you recover; then you can move into excitement again.

But excitement is not joy, it is just an escape from misery.

Try to understand it very clearly: excitement is just an escape from misery. It gives only a false and superficial experience of joy. Because you are no longer miserable you think you are joyous; not to be miserable is equivalent to being joyous. Real joy is a positive phenomenon. Not to be miserable is just a kind of forgetfulness. The misery is waiting back home for you, and whenever you come back it will be there.

When excitement disappears, one starts thinking, “Now what is the point of this love?” What people call “love” dies with excitement, and that is a calamity. In fact, love had never been born. It was just a love of excitement; it was not real love. It was just an effort to move away from yourself. It was a search for sensation.

You rightly use the word “fun” in your question; it was fun, but it was not intimacy. When excitement disappears and you just start feeling loving, love can grow; now the feverish days are over. This is the true beginning of love.

To me, the true love begins when the honeymoon is over. But by that time your mind thinks that all is over, finished: “Search for another woman, search for another man. Now what is the point in continuing? There is no more fun!”

If you go on loving now, love will take on a depth, it will become intimacy. A quality of grace will arise in it. It will have a subtlety now, it will not be superficial. It will not be fun, it will be meditation, it will be prayerfulness. It will help you to know yourself. The other will become a mirror, and through her you will be able to know yourself. Now is the time, the right time for love to grow because all the energy that was being channeled into excitement will not be wasted: it will be poured into the very roots of love, and the tree will be able to have great foliage.

If you can go on growing in this intimacy, which is no longer excitement, then joy will arise: first excitement, then love, then joy. Joy is the ultimate product, the fulfillment. Excitement is just a beginning, a trigger; it is not the end. And those who finish things at excitement will never know what love is, will never know the mystery of love, will never come to know the joy of love. They will know sensations, excitement, passionate fever, but they will never know the grace that is love. They will never know how beautiful it is to be with a person with no excitement but with silence, with no words, with no effort to do anything. Just being together, sharing one space, one being, sharing each other, not thinking of what to do and what to say, where to go and how to enjoy; all those things are gone. The storm is over and there is silence.

And it is not that you will not make love, but it will not be a “making” really; it will be love happening. It will happen out of grace, out of silence, out of a rhythm; it will arise from your depths, it will not be of the body, really. There is a sex that is spiritual, which has nothing to do with the body. Although the body partakes in it, participates in it, it is not the source of it. Then sex takes on the color of Tantra—and only then.

So my suggestion is: watch yourself. Now that you are coming closer to the temple don’t escape. Go into it. Forget excitement, it is just childish. And something beautiful is ahead. If you can wait for it, if you have patience and can trust in it, it will come.

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