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ATTRACTION AND OPPOSITION
There are a few very fundamental things to be understood.
First, a man and a woman are on the one hand halves of the other, and on the other hand, opposite polarities. Their being opposites attracts them to each other. The farther away they are, the deeper will be the attraction; the more different from each other they are, the more will be the charm and beauty and attraction.
But there lies the whole problem. When they come close, they want to come closer, they want to merge into each other, they want to become one, a harmonious whole, but their whole attraction depends on opposition, and the harmony will depend on dissolving the opposition. Unless a love affair is very conscious, it is going to create great anguish, great trouble.
All lovers are in trouble. The trouble is not personal; it is in the very nature of things.
They would not have been attracted to each other—they call it “falling in love.” They cannot give any reason why they have such a tremendous pull toward each other. They are not even conscious of the underlying causes; hence a strange thing happens: the happiest lovers are those who never meet! Once they meet, the same opposition that created the attraction becomes a conflict. On each small point, their attitudes are different, their approaches are different. Although they speak the same language, they cannot understand each other.
One of my friends was talking to me about his wife and their continuous conflict. I said, “It seems you cannot understand each other.”
He said, “What to say about understanding her, I cannot even stand her!” And it was a love marriage, not arranged. The parents of both were opposed to it; they belonged to two different religions, their societies were opposed to any
intermarriage between them. But they fought against everybody and got married, only to find that they had entered into a constant struggle.
The way the male mind looks at the world is different from the female mind. For example, the male mind is interested in faraway things: in the future of humanity, in the faraway stars, whether there are living beings on other planets or not. A feminine mind simply giggles at the whole nonsense. She is only interested in a small, close circle around her—in the neighbors, in the family, in who is cheating on his wife, whose wife has fallen in love with the chauffeur. Her interest is local and human. She is not worried about reincarnation; neither is she concerned about life after death. The feminine concerns are more pragmatic, more concerned with the present, with the here and now.
A man is never here and now, he is always somewhere else. He has strange preoccupations: reincarnation, life after death, life on other planets.
If both partners are conscious of the fact that it is a meeting of opposites, that there is no need to make it a conflict, then it is a great opportunity to understand the totally opposite point of view and absorb it. Then the life of a man and woman together can become a beautiful harmony. Otherwise, it is continuous fight.
There are holidays. One cannot continue to fight twenty-four hours a day; one needs a little rest too, a rest to get ready for a new fight.
But it is one of the strangest phenomena that for thousands of years men and women have been living together, yet they are strangers. They go on giving birth to children, but still they remain strangers. The feminine approach and the masculine approach are so opposed to each other that unless a conscious effort is made, unless it becomes your meditation, there is no hope of having a peaceful life.
It is one of my deep concerns: how to make love and meditation so involved in each other that each love affair automatically becomes a partnership in meditation, and each meditation makes you so conscious that you need not fall in love, you can rise in love. You can find a friend consciously, deliberately. Your love will deepen as your meditation deepens, and vice versa: as your meditation blossoms, your love will also blossom. But it is on a totally different level.
But most couples are not connected in meditation. They never sit silently for one hour together just to feel each other’s consciousness. Either they are fighting or they are making love, but in both cases, they are related with the body, the physical part, the biology, the hormones. They are not related with the innermost core of the other. Their souls remain separate.
In the temples and in the churches and in the courts, only your bodies are married. Your souls are miles apart. While you are making love to your partner, even in those moments neither are you there, nor is your partner there. Perhaps the man is thinking of Cleopatra, some movie actress. And perhaps that’s why every woman keeps her eyes closed: not to see her husband’s face, not to get disturbed. She is thinking of Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and looking at her husband, everything falls apart. He looks just like a mouse.
Even in those beautiful moments which should be sacred, meditative, of deep silence—even then you are not alone with your beloved. There is a crowd. Your mind is thinking of somebody else, your partner’s mind is thinking of somebody else. Then what you are doing is just robotlike, mechanical. Some biological force is enslaving you, and you call it love.
I have heard that early in the morning, a drunkard on the beach saw a man doing pushups. The drunkard walked around him, looked very closely from here and from there, and finally said, “I should not interfere in such an intimate affair, but I have to tell you that your girlfriend has gone!”
That seems to be the situation. When you are making love, is your woman really there? Is your man really there? Or are you just doing a ritual, something which has to be done, a duty to be fulfilled?
If you want a harmonious relationship with your partner, you will have to learn to be more meditative. Love alone is not enough. Love alone is blind; meditation gives it eyes. Meditation gives it understanding. And once your love is both love and meditation, you become fellow travelers. Then it is no longer an ordinary relationship. Then it becomes a friendliness on the path towards discovering the mysteries of life.
Man alone, woman alone, will find the journey very tedious and very long, as they have found it in the past. Because seeing this continuous conflict, all the
religions decided that those who wanted to seek should renounce the other—the monks should be celibate, the nuns should be celibate. But in five thousand years of history, how many monks and how many nuns have become realized souls? You cannot even give me names enough to count on ten fingers. And there have been millions of monks and nuns of all religions: Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. What has happened?
The path is not so long, the goal is not that far away. But even if you want to go to your neighbor’s house you will need both your legs. Just jumping on one leg, how far can you go?
Men and women together in deep friendship, in a loving, meditative relationship, as organic wholes, can reach the goal any moment they want. Because the goal is not outside you; it is the center of the cyclone, it is the innermost part of your being. But you can find it only when you are whole, and you cannot be whole without the other.
Man and woman are two parts of one whole. So rather than wasting time in fighting, try to understand each other. Try to put yourself in the place of the other; try to see as a man sees, try to see as a woman sees. And four eyes are always better than two eyes. You have a full view; all four directions are available to you.
But one thing has to be remembered: that without meditation, love is destined to fail; there is no possibility of its being a success. You can pretend and you can deceive others, but you cannot deceive yourself. You know deep down that all the promises love had given to you have remained unfulfilled.
Only with meditation does love start taking on new colors, new music, new songs, new dances, because meditation gives you the insight to understand the polar opposite, and in that very understanding the conflict disappears.
All the conflict in the world is because of misunderstanding. You say something, your wife understands something else. Your wife says something, you understand something else. I have seen couples who have lived together for thirty or forty years; still, they seem to be as immature as they were on their first day together. Still the same complaint: “She doesn’t understand what I am saying.” Forty years being together and you have not been able to figure out
some way that your wife can understand exactly what you are saying, and you can understand exactly what she is saying?
But I think there is no possibility for it to happen except through meditation, because meditation gives you the qualities of silence, awareness, a patient listening, a capacity to put yourself in the other’s position.
Things are not impossible, but we have not tried the right medicine.
I would like you to be reminded that the word “medicine” comes from the same root as “meditation.” Medicine cures your body; meditation cures your soul. Medicine heals the material part of you; meditation heals the spiritual part of you.
People are living together and their spirits are full of wounds; hence, small things hurt them so much.
Mulla Nasruddin was asking me, “What to do? Whatever I say I am misunderstood, and immediately there is trouble.”
I said, “Try one thing: just sit silently, don’t say anything.”
The next day, I saw him in more despair than ever. I said, “What happened?”
He said, “I should not ask you for advice. Every day we used to fight and quarrel, but it was just verbal. Yesterday, because of your advice, I got beaten!”
I said, “What happened?”
He said, “I just sat there silent. She asked many questions, but I was determined to remain silent. She said, ‘So you are not going to speak?’ I remained silent. So she started hitting me with things! And she was very angry. She said, ‘Things have gone from bad to worse. At least we used to talk to each other; now even we are not on speaking terms!’ The whole neighborhood gathered, and they all started asking, ‘What happened? Why aren’t you speaking?’ And somebody suggested: ‘It seems he is possessed by some evil spirit.’
“I thought, my God, now they are going to take me to some idiot who will
beat me and try to drive the evil spirit out. I said, ‘Wait! I’m not possessed by any evil spirit, I’m simply not speaking because to say anything triggers a fight: I say something, then she has to say something, and then I have to say something, and nobody knows where it is going to end.’ I was simply meditating silently, doing no harm to anybody, and suddenly the whole neighborhood was against me!”
People are living without any understanding. Hence, whatsoever they do is going to end in disaster.
If you love a man, meditation will be the best present that you can give to him. If you love a woman, then the Kohinoor is nothing; meditation will be a far more precious gift, and it will make your life sheer joy.
We are potentially capable of sheer joy, but we don’t know how to manage it. Alone, we are at the most sad. Together, it becomes really hell.
Even a man like Jean-Paul Sartre, a man of great intelligence, has to say that the other is hell, that to be alone is better, you cannot make it with the other. He became so pessimistic that he said it is impossible to make it with the other, the other is hell. Ordinarily, he is right.
With meditation the other becomes your heaven. But Jean-Paul Sartre had no idea of meditation.
That is the misery of Western man. Western man is missing the flowering of life because he knows nothing about meditation, and Eastern man is missing because he knows nothing of love. And to me, just as man and woman are halves of one whole, so are love and meditation. Meditation is man; love is woman. In the meeting of meditation and love is the meeting of man and woman. And in that meeting, we create the transcendental human being, which is neither man nor woman. And unless we create the transcendental man on the earth, there is not much hope.
You have spoken about the ultimate harmony to be found in what seem to be opposites, but I feel that hate destroys love and anger kills
compassion. When these extremes are fighting inside me, how can I find the harmony?
You are caught in a misunderstanding. If hate destroys love and anger destroys compassion then there is no possibility for love or compassion to exist. Then you are caught, then you cannot get out of it. You have lived with hate for millions of lives, so it must have destroyed love already. You have lived with anger for millions of lives, so it must have murdered compassion already.
But look, love is still there. Hate comes and goes, and love survives. Anger comes and goes, and compassion survives. Hate has not been able to destroy love; night has not been able to destroy the day, and darkness has not been able to murder the light. No, they survive.
So the first thing to understand is that love and compassion have not been destroyed. The second thing, to understand the harmony of opposites, will be possible only later on, when you really love.
You have not really loved, that is the trouble. Not hate; hate is not the trouble, the trouble is that you have not really loved. Darkness is not the trouble, the trouble is that you don’t have light. If light is there, darkness disappears. You have not loved. You fantasize, you imagine, you dream, but you have not loved.
Love! And I’m not saying that just by loving, the hate will immediately disappear—no. Hate will fight against you, because everybody wants to survive. Hate will struggle. The more you love, the stronger hate will come back with its struggle. But you will be surprised to discover that the hate comes and goes. It doesn’t kill your love; rather, it makes love stronger. Love can absorb hate also. If you love a person, in some moments you can hate the same person. But that doesn’t destroy love, it brings a richness to love.
What is hate in fact? It is a tendency to go away. What is love? A tendency to come closer. Hate is a tendency to separate, a tendency to divorce. Love is a tendency to marry, to come near, to become closer, to become one. Hate is to become two, independent. Love is to become one, interdependent. Whenever you hate, you go away from your lover, from your beloved. But in ordinary life going away is needed to come back again.
It is just like when you eat: You are hungry, so you eat; then hunger goes because you have eaten. When you love a person it is like food. Love is food— very subtle, spiritual, but it is food and it nourishes you. When you love a person the hunger subsides; you feel satiated, then suddenly the impulse to go away arises and you separate. But then you will feel hungry again; you would like to come nearer, closer, to love, to fall into each other. You eat, then for a few hours you forget about food; you don’t go on sitting in the kitchen, you don’t go on sitting in the restaurant. You go away; then after a few hours suddenly you start coming back. Hunger is arising.
Love has two faces, one of hunger and one of satiety. You misunderstand love as only hunger. Once you understand that there is no hate, but only a situation to create hunger, then hate becomes part of love. Then it enriches love. Then anger becomes part of compassion, it enriches compassion. A compassion without any possibility of anger will be impotent, it will have no energy in it. A compassion with the possibility of anger has strength, stamina. A love without the possibility of hate will become stale. Then the partnership will look like an imprisonment, you cannot get away. A love with hate has a freedom in it; it never becomes stale.
In the mathematics of life, divorces happen because every day you go on postponing them. Then divorce goes on accumulating and one day the marriage is completely killed by it, destroyed by it. If you understand me, I would suggest to you not to wait: every day divorce and remarry. It should be a rhythm just like day and night, hunger and satiety, summer and winter, life and death. It should be like that. In the morning you love, in the afternoon you hate. When you love you really love, you totally love; when you hate you really hate, you totally hate. And suddenly you will find the beauty of it: the beauty is in the totality.
A total hate is also beautiful, as beautiful as total love; a total anger is also beautiful, as beautiful as total compassion. The beauty is in totality. Anger alone becomes ugly, hate alone becomes ugly—it is just the valley without the hill, without the peak. But with the peak the valley becomes a beautiful scene. From the peak the valley becomes lovely, from the valley the peak becomes lovely.
You move; your life river moves between these two banks. And, by and by, the more and more you understand the mathematics of life, you won’t think that hate is against love. It is complementary. You won’t think that anger is against
compassion; it is complementary. Then you don’t think that rest is against work, it is complementary; or that night is against day; it is complementary. They make a perfect whole.
Because you have not loved, you are afraid of hate. You are afraid because your love is not strong enough. Hate could destroy it. You are not certain, really, whether you love or not; that’s why you are afraid of hate and anger. You know that it may completely shatter the whole house. You are not certain whether the house really exists or is just imagination, an imaginary house. If it is imagination the hate will destroy it; if it is real the hate will make it stronger. After the storm a silence descends. After hate, lovers are again fresh to fall into each other completely fresh, as if they are meeting for the first time again. Again and again they meet, again and again for the first time.
Lovers are always meeting for the first time. If you meet a second time, then love is already getting old, stale. It is getting boring. Lovers always fall in love every day, fresh, young. You look at your woman and you cannot even recognize that you have seen her before—so new! You look at your man and he seems to be a stranger; you fall in love again.
Hate does not destroy love, it only destroys the staleness of it. It is a cleaning, and if you understand it you will be grateful to it. And if you can be grateful to hate also, you have understood; now nothing can destroy your love. Now you are for the first time really rooted; now you can absorb the storm and can be strengthened through it, can be enriched through it.
Don’t look at life as a duality, don’t look at life as a conflict—it is not. I have known—it is not. I have experienced—it is not. It is one whole, one piece, and everything fits in it. You have just to find out how to let them fit, how to allow them to fit. Allow them to fit into each other. It is a beautiful whole.
And if you ask me, if there were a possibility of a world without hate I would not choose it; it would be absolutely dead and boring. It might be sweet, but too sweet; you would hanker for salt. If a world were possible without anger I would not choose it, because just compassion without anger would have no life in it. The opposite gives the tension, the opposite gives the temper. When ordinary iron passes through fire it becomes steel; without fire it cannot become steel. And the higher the degree of temperature, the greater will be the temper, the
strength, of the steel. If your compassion can pass through anger, the higher the temperature of the anger the greater will be the temper and the strength of the compassion.
Buddha is compassionate. He is a warrior. He comes from the kshatriya race, a samurai. He must have led a very angry life—and then suddenly, compassion. The Jain master Mahavir comes from a kshatriya clan. On the face of it this looks absurd, but it has a certain consistency to it: all the great teachers of nonviolence have come from the warrior races. They talk about nonviolence, compassion; they have lived violence, they know what violence is, they have passed through it. Only a kshatriya, a warrior, who has lived through fire, has such a strong compassion or the possibility for it.
So remember, if inside your heart these extremes are fighting, don’t choose. Allow them both to be there. Be a big house, have enough room inside. Don’t say, “I will have only compassion, not anger; I will have only love, not hate.” You will be impoverished.
Have a big heart, let them both be there. There is no need to create a fight between them; there is no fight. The fight comes from your mind, from your teachings, upbringing, conditioning. The whole world goes on saying to you, “Love, don’t hate.” How can you love without hate? Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” And I tell you, “Hate your lovers also.” Then it becomes a complete whole. Otherwise Jesus’ saying is incomplete. He says, “Love your enemies.” You only hate your enemies, and he says you should love them also. But the other part is missing. I tell you, hate your friends also; hate your lovers also, and don’t be afraid. Then by and by you will see there is no difference between the enemy and the friend, because you hate and love the enemy and you love and hate the friend. It will be only a question of the coin upside down or downside up. Then the friend is the enemy and the enemy is the friend. Then distinctions simply disappear.
Don’t create a fight inside, allow them both to be there. They both will be needed. Both will give you two wings; only then can you fly.
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