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SOUL MATES OR CELL MATES?
We are all living lives according to fictions, poetries, film stories. That has given humanity a wrong impression, the impression that when there is love everything will fit, that there will be no conflict. For centuries poets have been giving the idea that lovers are made for each other.
Nobody is made for anybody else. Everybody is different from everybody else. You may love a person without knowing that you love the person only because there is so much difference between you, so much distance. The distance is a challenge, the distance is an adventure; the distance makes the woman or the man worth getting hold of. But things as they appear from a distance are not the same when they come close.
When you are just courting a man or a woman, everything is beautiful, everything fits because both want everything to fit. Anything that does not fit is not allowed to surface; it is repressed in the unconscious. So lovers sitting on the beach looking at the moon do not know each other at all. The marriage is almost finished before the honeymoon is finished.
In the East where the tradition of arranged marriage is still followed, there is nothing like a honeymoon; they don’t give the chance for the marriage to be finished so soon. Couples go on living together and never feel that things are not fitting, that something is missing. There is no chance at all for that to happen. Husbands and wives do not choose for themselves; marriages are organized by the parents, by the astrologers, by all kinds of people except the two who are going to be married.
Even after they get married, the couple cannot see each other alone in the daylight, they can only meet each other deep in the darkness of the night. They live with their families, and those families are so big that they can talk only in whispers; fighting is out of the question. Throwing clothes will not work; no
woman, no man in these traditional communities knows that clothes have to be thrown, otherwise what kind of love affair do you have? Or that plates have to be broken, or that you have to argue over each and every thing. You say one thing and the woman understands something else; she says something, you understand something else.
But in the modern marriages based on love affairs, there seems to be no communication. And it starts with the honeymoon, because there for the first time you are together twenty-four hours a day. Now you cannot pretend; you have to be real. You cannot act. When you live together you have to be real to the other person; you cannot hide, you cannot have any secrets. And we have been given the idea from our very childhood that between wife and husband there is always harmony, everything is always fitting, they are always together, always loving, no fight. That whole ideology is the problem.
I would like to tell you the truth. The truth is that both the persons, whoever they are, are different individuals. If you love somebody you have to understand that the person you love is not your shadow, is not your reflection in the mirror, has his or her own individuality. Unless you have a big enough heart to accommodate somebody who is different from you, who may have different ideas about different things, you should not get into unnecessary trouble. It is better to become a monk or a nun. Why bother? Why create hell for yourself and the other?
But the hell is created because you expect heaven.
I am telling you to accept that this is the situation: the person is going to be different. You are not the master, neither is the other the master; both are simply partners who have decided, in spite of all differences, to be together. And in fact, differences add spice to your love. If you can find a person who is just like you, you will not find much attraction. The other person has to be different, distant, a mystery that invites you to explore.
With two mysteries meeting together, once they drop the idea that they have to agree on everything, there is no question of any fight. The fight arises because you want agreement.
If you are living just like two friends, she has her own ideas, you have your
own ideas, she respects your ideas, you respect her ideas; she has her way, you have your own way and nobody is trying to impose on and indoctrinate the other. Then there is no question of fight. And then there is no question that things are not fitting. Why should they be fitting?
Why should there be any feeling that something is missing? Nothing is missing; it is just that your idea of harmony is not there. Harmony is not something very great, it is boring. Once in a while, even if you fight, once in a while even if you get really hot, that does not mean that love disappears; that simply means love is capable of absorbing even disagreements, fights, overcoming all these hindrances. But the old ideology gets in the way of your understanding.
I am reminded of the old biblical story which is not told very much because it is very dangerous. First, God made one man and one woman. But as you know by looking at the world, God does not seem to be very intelligent. Here, nothing is fitting; from the very beginning you can see it. He made man and woman, two persons, and gave them a small bed, not a double bed.
The very first night, at the beginning of time, was the night of a tremendous fight because the woman wanted to sleep on the bed. The man thought that he should sleep on the bed and she should sleep on the floor. The whole night they went on fighting, hitting each other, throwing things, and in the morning the man said to God, “I asked you to give me a companion but I did not ask you to give me an enemy. If this is your idea of a companion, then I want to tell you I was better off alone. I don’t want this woman; there is never going to be peace between us.”
Now the simple thing would have been to ask for a double bed. I don’t understand what kind of God that was, and what these idiots were asking. The simple solution was a double bed, or two single beds, if things were getting that bad. But instead of that Adam said, “I don’t want this woman; she is trying to be equal to me.” The male chauvinist idea arose that very night.
So God dismantled the woman—naturally, because God is also a male chauvinist. Her name was Lilith. He dismantled her just the way you dismantle any mechanism. He destroyed the woman and said, “Now I will make another woman who will be lower than you and will never ask for equality.” Then he
made the second woman, who was Eve, by taking one of the ribs from Adam. Out of Adam’s rib he made the woman, so that she could ask for equality; she was nothing but a rib.
It is said that every night when Adam would come back home and go to sleep, Eve would count his ribs because she was always afraid that if he lost anther rib, that would mean another woman was also somewhere around.
There is no need for more than friendship. Love has to be a friendly affair in which nobody is superior, in which nobody is going to decide about things, in which both are fully aware that they are different, that their approach towards life is different, that they think differently, and still, with all these differences, they love each other.
Then you will not find any problems. Problems are created by us.
Don’t try to create something superhuman. Be human, accept the other person’s humanity with all the frailty humanity is prone to. Your partner will commit mistakes just as you commit mistakes, and you have to learn. To be together is a great learning: of forgiving, forgetting, understanding that the other is as human as you are. Just a little forgiveness.
There is an old proverb: “To err is human and to forgive is divine.” I don’t agree. To err is human and to forgive is also human. To forgive is divine?—then you are raising it too high, beyond human reach. Bring it within human reach and learn to forgive. Learn to enjoy forgiveness, learn to offer an apology; you don’t lose anything when you can say to your partner, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.”
But nobody wants to say, “I was wrong.” You want to be always right. The man tries to prove through arguments that he is right, and the woman tries through emotions to prove that she is right—screaming, crying, weeping, tears. And most often she wins! The man becomes afraid of the neighbors, and just to cool her down—because the children may wake up—he says, “Cool down, perhaps you are right.” But deep down he still believes he is right.
To be understanding means that you can be wrong, the woman may be right. It is not a guarantee that just by being man you have the power and authority to be right; neither has the woman. If we were just a little more human and a little
more friendly, and we could say to each other, “I am sorry.” And what are the things you are fighting for? So small, so trivial that if somebody asks you to tell them about it you will feel embarrassed.
Just drop the idea that everything has to fit, drop the idea that there is going to be total harmony because those are not good ideas. If everything fits you will get bored with each other; if everything is harmonious you will lose the whole juice of the relationship. It is good that things don’t fit. It is good that there is always a gap so there is always something to explore, something to cross over, some bridge to be made. The whole life can be a tremendous exploration of each other if we accept the differences, the basic uniqueness of each individual, and we make love not a kind of slavery but a friendship.
Try friendship, try friendliness; and remember always, there is nothing that is going to disturb you. When you see a beautiful woman, you feel attracted; you should understand that when your wife sees a beautiful man, she must be feeling attracted. If you are understanding, you will both discuss, lovingly, what a beautiful woman she was, and what a beautiful man he was.
But right now the situation is that you can see from miles away whether the couple coming is married or unmarried. With the married couple, the husband moves very cautiously and very carefully; he does not look here and there, as if he has got some neck problem. And the wife is watching where he is looking, what he is looking at, and taking note of everything. This is ugly.
I was traveling—I was going to Kashmir—and in my compartment there was a beautiful woman. Her husband was coming to her at every station with ice cream, and with bananas, apples. In Kashmir, the fruits are really good.
I asked the woman, “How long have you been married?” She said, “Seven years.”
I said, “Don’t lie to me.”
She said, “What do you mean? Why should I lie to you?”
I said, “This man has been coming to you at every station and bringing all these things. So it’s clear to me that he is not your husband.”
She said, “How did you come to know?”
I said, “If he was your husband, especially if you had been married seven years, then once he had dropped you off in this compartment, only at the last stop—if you were fortunate—would he come back to get you; for the rest of the journey he would be gone. Why should he come to you at every station with all these treats?”
She said, “Strange, but you are right. He is not my husband; he is a friend’s husband, but he loves me. And what you are saying about husbands is true. That has happened between me and my husband. We live together but we are miles apart; I am thinking to divorce him.”
I said, “Don’t do that. Go on living with him and go on loving this man, and don’t let this man divorce his wife. She is probably already seeing somebody else, so don’t be worried. Existence takes care of things. But if you divorce your husband and get married to this man, you will not get these ice creams and fruits and all this attention and love; all of that will disappear.”
If you are just friendly and don’t make your friendliness a legal affair of husband and wife, things will be far better because then you are not a burden to anybody, not a bondage. There will be no question of having to fit with each other. You can have your individuality totally free from each other, and yet be in love.
And really to be totally different in your individuality creates the best possibility of love.
Whenever I am in love with a man, for that time no other man attracts me. But for the man, it’s not the same. Though he is happy and satisfied, and wants to keep the relationship with me, he has his short love affairs every few months. I understand the different nature of man and woman. I also understand every love relationship has its peaks and valleys. Still, sadness in me keeps on coming. I give a long rope to the man. My friends say I make myself so available that I let the man take me for granted and I lose my self-respect. I’m
not clear. I don’t expect anything from him. Would you please like to comment?
There are many things in your question. First, you have a misunderstanding about man’s nature. You think, as many people in the world think, that a man is polygamous and a woman is monogamous, that the woman wants to live with one man, to love one man, to devote and dedicate herself totally to one man, but man is different in nature. He wants to love other women too, at least once in a while.
The reality is that both are polygamous. The woman has been conditioned by man for thousands of years into thinking that she is monogamous. And man is very cunning; he has exploited the woman in many ways. One of the ways is that he has been telling her that men are, by nature, polygamous. All the psychologists, all the sociologists are agreed upon the fact that men are polygamous, and none of them says the same thing about women.
My own understanding is that both are polygamous. If a woman does not behave in a polygamous way, it is nurture, not nature. She has been utterly conditioned so long that the conditioning has gone into her very blood, into her bones, into her very marrow. For centuries the woman had to depend financially on the man, and the man has cut her wings, he has curtailed her freedom, he has undermined her dependence upon herself. He has taken her responsibilities on his shoulders, showing great love, saying, “You need not be worried about yourself, I will take care.” But in the name of love, he has taken the freedom of the woman. For centuries women were not allowed to be educated, to be qualified in any way in any craft, in any skill; she had to be financially dependent on the man. He has taken away even her freedom of movement; she could not move freely the way man moves; she was confined to the house. The house was almost her imprisonment.
And in the past particularly, she was always pregnant because out of ten children, nine children used to die. To have two or three living children a woman had to be continually pregnant the whole time she was capable of reproducing. A pregnant woman becomes even more dependent financially, the man becomes her caretaker. The man was knowledgeable, the woman knew nothing. She was kept ignorant because knowledge is power; that’s why women were deprived of knowledge. And because it has been a man’s world, they all agreed as far as
keeping the woman enslaved was concerned.
She has been told that it is her nature to be monogamous. There was not a single psychoanalyst, not a single woman sociologist to refute this and ask, if man is polygamous then why should woman be monogamous? Man made the way for his polygamy by creating prostitutes. It was an accepted fact in the past that no wife would have objected if her husband, once in a while, visited a prostitute. It was thought that it is just natural for man.
I say to you that both are polygamous. The whole existence is polygamous, it has to be so—monogamy is boredom. However beautiful a woman may be, however beautiful a man may be, you become tired—the same geography, the same topography. How long do you have to see the same face? So it happens that years pass, and the husband has not looked attentively at his wife for a single moment.
In the new world, there should be no marriage, only lovers. And as long as they are pleased to be together, they can be together; and the moment they feel that they have been together too long, a little change will be good. There is no question of sadness, no question of anger, just a deep acceptance of nature. And if you have loved a man or a woman, you will want to give the other person as much freedom as possible.
If love cannot give freedom, then it is not love.
You say, “Sadness in me keeps on coming. I give a long rope to the man.” Now, the very idea is wrong. Is your man a dog that you give him a long rope? You cannot give freedom, freedom is everybody’s birthright. The very idea, “I’m giving a long rope”—still the rope is in your hand! You are the giver of freedom.
You cannot give freedom; you can only accept the freedom of the other person. You cannot keep one end of the rope in your hand, watching the dog pissing on this tree, pissing on that tree. You think that is freedom? No, the very idea is wrong. The other person has his freedom; you have your freedom. Neither does he need to have one end of the rope in his hand, nor do you; otherwise, both are chained. His rope is going to be your chains, your rope is going to be his chains. And you think you give “enough rope.” You think you are being very generous!
Freedom is not something that has to be given to another person. Freedom is something that has to be recognized as the birthright of the other person.
The freedom of a person you love will not hurt you. It hurts because you don’t use your own freedom. It is not his freedom that hurts; what hurts is that you have been incapacitated by centuries of wrong conditioning—you cannot use your own freedom. Man has taken your whole freedom, that is the real problem. Your freedom has to be returned to you, and it will not hurt; in fact you will enjoy it.
Freedom is such a joyful experience. Your lover is enjoying freedom, you are enjoying freedom; in freedom you meet, in freedom you part. And perhaps life may bring you together again.
When your man becomes interested in another woman, it does not mean that he no longer loves you; it simply means just a change of taste. Once in a while, you like to go to the pizza place. That does not mean that you have renounced your old food, but once in a while, it is perfectly good. In fact, after visiting the pizza place, you go back to your own table more joyously. It takes a few days for you to forget the experience, and then again one day you again want pizza. These affairs don’t mean much. One cannot live on pizza alone.
Couples who love each other should have a few love affairs once in a while. Those love affairs will renew their relationship, will refresh it. You will start seeing beauty again in your wife. You may start fantasies, dreams of having your wife again. You will realize that you misunderstood her before; this time you are not going to misunderstand. And the same is true about your husband.
In my idea of a loving community, people will be absolutely free to say to their partner: “I would like two days holiday, and you are also free; you need not sit in the house and boil.” If you want to meditate, that is another thing; otherwise you have been interested in the neighbor’s wife too long. The green grass on the other side of the fence—you wanted to explore it for so long, now your wife is giving you a chance! You should say, “You are great! Just go for a holiday and enjoy it. And I’m going to the neighbor’s house, the grass is greener there.” But in two days, you will find that grass is grass, and your own lawn was far better.
But an authentic experience is needed, and when after two days, you meet again it will be the beginning of a new honeymoon. Why not have honeymoons every month? Why be satisfied with one honeymoon in one life? That is strange, and absolutely unnatural. And love is not something bad or evil so that you have to prevent your wife loving somebody else. It is just fun; there is not much to be bothered about. If she wants to play tennis with somebody, let her play! I don’t think that making love has more significance than playing tennis. In fact, tennis is far cleaner.
You say, “I don’t expect anything from him.” Even in your no-expectations, there are hidden expectations unspoken. And they are more subtle, and more binding. Simply, one has to accept a simple fact: your partner is a stranger; it is just an accident that you are together and you never expect anything from strangers.
Love as much as you can. Never think of the next moment; and if your lover goes somewhere else, you are also free. And don’t deceive yourself; can any woman say that while she is in love with one person, she does not get attracted to other people? Maybe it is a repressed desire, maybe she never allows it to surface; but it is impossible not to, because there are so many beautiful people around. You have chosen only one stranger amongst many strangers.
Keep freedom as a higher value than love itself. And if it is possible—and it is possible because it is natural—your life will not be a misery. It will be a continuous excitement, a continuous exploration of new human beings. We are all strangers: nobody is a husband, nobody is a wife. Some idiot registrar cannot, just by putting his seal on a paper, make you a husband and wife. And once that man has put the seal, if you want to separate you have to go to another idiot— bigger idiots—and wait for months or years to be separated. Strange! It is your private affair; it is no business of any registrar, no business of any judge. Why do you go on giving your freedom to the hands of others?
You say, “My friends say I make myself so available that I let the man take me for granted, and I lose my self-respect.” Your friends don’t understand a thing and they are not your friends either because their advice is that of enemies.
One should make oneself absolutely available. Your friends are telling you that when your man wants to make love to you, one day you should say you
have a headache. Another day, you should say you are too tired; the third day, you are not in the mood. Keep the man hanging around. “Don’t give that much rope”—just a little rope, and a beautiful bell around his neck with your name written on it, saying, “Beware, personal property.”
What do you mean by “availability?” You should be available to the person you love, and if once in a while he feels to change, enjoy and let him go joyously. That will bring self-respect to you, and dignity.
A divorced woman, frustrated with married life, ran an ad in the local newspaper that read, “Looking for a man who won’t beat me, who won’t run around on me, and who is a fantastic lover.”
After one week, her doorbell rings. She goes to the door, opens it, and sees no one there. She closes the door, and is about to walk away when the bell rings again.
Opening the door once again, she sees no one there, but happens to look down and notices a man with no arms and no legs sitting on the doorstep.
“I’m here to answer your ad,” he says.
The woman does not know quite what to do, what to say.
So the man continues, “As you can see, I can’t beat you, and it will be impossible for me to run around on you.”
“Yes, I can see that,” said the woman, “but the ad also said I wanted a ‘fantastic lover.’”
The man smiles and says, “I rang the doorbell, didn’t I?”
Although I am deeply satisfied and nourished by my regular food, still from time to time I feel a strong pull towards other dishes, and enjoy Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi. It’s not that I don’t want to eat out occasionally, but I’d like to feel it is in my hands whether I do or not, and not be a victim of this hormonal conspiracy. Can you please give me a clue how to go beyond these biological pulls?
If one allows nature without any inhibitions to take its own course, one transcends biology, body, mind, without any effort. But we are full of inhibitions. Even the so-called young people, who think that they have disowned
repressions, are in a very subtle way repressive. If you are repressive then you cannot transcend biological pulls naturally, without any effort. So, the first thing to be remembered is that nature is right.
All the old traditions have been telling you that nature is not right. You have to divide nature into right and wrong. But nature is indivisible. So while you are dividing it, you are simply making an impossible effort. The whole of nature has to be accepted with great joy and gratitude. Biology is not your bondage, but a certain stage of growth.
Life taken with insight and understanding helps you to go beyond itself without asking you for any discipline, any effort, any arduous conflict. We are children of nature. But all the religions have created one thing certainly: a divided mind, a schizophrenic man who is pulled in two directions. They have all given you moralities.
The natural man needs no morality. Easy is right. To be natural, to be spontaneous is right and transcendence comes on its own. The people who are split against themselves—that biology is something to be transcended, that body is something to be fought, that mind is something to be dropped—anybody who is entangled in all these conflicts will never transcend.
One should go more easily. It is not a war field. Your life is an autonomous growth. The first need is of a total acceptance with no reluctance, no unwillingness, no subtle condemnation anywhere in your mind.
You are saying, “Although I am deeply satisfied and nourished by my regular food….” You say you are deeply satisfied, but you don’t understand the nuances of being deeply satisfied. It becomes a kind of death. To be alive one needs a little discontent, a little restlessness. If you are deeply satisfied, from that deep satisfaction arises your desire to change your food once in a while.
Man is a creature of evolution and growth. Being deeply satisfied brings a full stop to your life. Your partner has an individuality, a grace, a loving heart, and it is very easy to be satisfied with her; she is not a quarreling type, a fighting type. She herself is at ease, and anybody who loves her will find himself soon at ease. A harmony arises but harmony on the one hand is beautiful, and on the other hand is boring.
Perhaps you have never thought that satisfaction is a kind of death. It means you are ready to repeat the same every day, that you have forgotten to change, to evolve.
“…Still from time to time I feel a strong pull towards other dishes, and enjoy Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi.” It is absolutely natural. The problem is arising because of your conditionings that when you are absolutely satisfied with a woman, why should you ask? Why should the desire for somebody else even arise in you? It arises because of your deep satisfaction. Deep satisfaction starts deadening you; nothing new, no excitement, no possibility of “No,” always “Yes.” On the one hand it is very sweet; on the other, it is too sweet.
Hence, the desire arises once in a while to have some affair with another woman. It is absolutely natural. If your partner were a fighting type, nagging type, bitchy, this desire would not have arisen so much because she would never have allowed you to be satisfied. She would have kept you always unsatisfied; she would have remained a stranger to you, still to be explored. I know her. She has been open to you, available to you; she has not been holding secrets from you. That is not her fault, that is her beauty. But even the most beautiful rose flowers have their thorns, even the most satisfying situations have their problems.
Because you are too satisfied, you start asking for a change of taste: Italian pizzas, French wine, or Japanese sushi. Nothing is wrong in it. The whole old conditioning goes against what I am saying to you, but if you are intelligent, you will see the point.
Accept it, but don’t keep it a secret from your lover. Don’t let her down. Don’t make her feel that she is not enough for you. Say to her, “You are too satisfying, and my mind wants a little change of atmosphere, some excitement so that I can feel that I am still alive.” And remember, whatever you take for yourself, you have to give her too. It has not to be one-sided, not that only you go to the pizza place, or find a Chinese restaurant; you allow her also. Not only allow. The woman has been repressed by man so much that you will have to pull her out from her conditionings. You will have to help her to move, once in a while, into new pastures. If you can do that you will not only be accepting your nature; you will also be helping her to find out her nature.
As a man, you are also guilty because it is the man who has forced the woman, made her monogamous. In fact, she needs to move with other people more than you do. The most astounding research about men and women is that a man can have only one orgasm, the woman can have multiple orgasms. The reason is simple: because in orgasm, a man loses energy, he will need to recover for some time, according to his age, to have another orgasm. But the woman does not lose any energy. On the contrary, her first orgasm gives her a deep incentive to have more orgasms, and she is capable of at least half a dozen orgasms in a single night.
Because of this fact, man became so afraid that he prevented the woman from knowing the fact that anything like orgasm exists. So he is very quick in making love. The woman will take a little longer time: man’s sexuality is local, genital; woman’s sexuality is spread all over her body. If a man wants her to have an orgasm he has to play with her whole body, the foreplay, so her whole body starts throbbing with energy.
But once she has had one orgasm, she knows the taste, and she knows that now she can have deeper orgasms. But the man is simply impotent after the first orgasm, at least for a few hours. He cannot do anything else, he just turns over and goes to sleep. The poor boy is finished. And every woman weeps, cries because she has not even come and her lover is finished!
To prevent the woman from having the knowledge of orgasm—for centuries the woman was not allowed even to know the beauty and the pleasure of orgasm
—man also has had to prevent himself from having orgasm. All that he knows is ejaculation; ejaculation is not orgasm. Ejaculation is simply throwing out energy: one feels more relaxed, the tensions of the energy are gone, and one snores better.
The woman has become aware of orgasm only in the last century and the whole credit goes to the movement of psychoanalysis. In the more traditional Eastern countries, 98 percent of women are still unaware that there is anything in making love, because she gets no juice, no experience. She in fact hates the whole affair. Ejaculation is not her need, it is man’s need; but both have remained deprived of sex and its ultimate orgasmic experiences.
But the trouble is, how to manage it? Anything looks very immoral. Either
you have to invite all your friends, so that five or six friends make love, one by one, to the woman. Then she will be satisfied, but that looks very hurting to the ego. Or you have to provide her with an electric vibrator. But once she knows the vibrator, you are useless because the vibrator gives her such tremendous orgasmic experiences that you cannot give.
It seems there has been some mistake by nature itself: men and women are not equal in their orgasmic capacity. You are fully satisfied, but have you ever bothered whether your beloved has found even a single orgasm? Because she has not found a single orgasm, she can remain devoted to you, monogamous. But if she knows what orgasmic experience is, she will also want, once in a while, to be with another man.
If you really love your woman, you will help her to come out of her old conditionings, which are far deeper, because man himself is responsible. Man himself does not have those conditionings; his morality is very superficial and a hypocrisy. But the woman’s morality has gone very deep. Man has been enforcing it from the very childhood. If you feel to change it, it is your responsibility; and particularly a man of your understanding should be able to see what I am saying. It is your responsibility to bring Neelam also out into the sun, into the rain, into the wind, so that she can drop all her conditionings. You have to help her; you have to teach her how to enjoy the pizza place, and not go on eating the Punjabi food her whole life. How to enjoy Japanese food or Chinese food? If men and women really love each other, they will help each other to be unconditioned from the past.
Man does not have many conditionings, and they are superficial. He can drop them very easily, the way you drop your clothes. The woman has been conditioned so much that it is not like dropping her clothes, it is like peeling her skin. It is hard, and unless you really love a woman you will not be able to help her much. It will be very difficult, on her own, to get rid of all those conditionings, so help her. Give her also the taste that in the world there are so many other foods; there are many more beautiful men other than you. Your woman should know all of them. It is part of your love that your woman becomes more and more rich in her experiences. And the richer she is, she will not only give you satisfaction; she will start giving you excitement and ecstasy.
You say, “It’s not that I don’t want to eat out occasionally, but I’d like to feel it
is in my hands whether I do or not….” It is in your hands, but it can be in your hands only if it is in the hands of your partner, too. As far as I am concerned there should be equal opportunity for both. Not that you are the master and your woman is your slave; that she can remain satisfied with you, and you can go, once in a while, fooling around the neighborhood. She has every right to fool around in the same neighborhood! And there is no need to feel guilty; you have to help her not to feel guilty.
The woman’s liberation will be the man’s liberation, too; their slavery is together. Because you don’t allow your woman to be free, how can she allow you to be free? Freedom has to be, from both sides, a precious value—loved, recognized, respected.
You say “…and not be a victim of this hormonal conspiracy.” If you want to get beyond the hormones and the biology, live it totally, exhaust it.
My own understanding is that by the age of fourteen your hormones start working, and if you allow them total freedom, if you go with them joyously by the age forty-two, they will like to go to rest. And this transcendence will be natural; it will not be a celibacy imposed. It will be a sacred celibacy that is coming to you from the beyond, because you have lived your life totally and now nothing in the ordinary life interests you. Your interest is in higher values, for a deeper search about life, about truth, about creativity. You have passed a childish age. By the age of forty-two, according to me, a man really becomes adult, but only if he lives naturally. If he lives half-heartedly then it will take a longer time, maybe forty-nine years, maybe seventy-five. Maybe even when he is dying he is thinking only of sex and nothing else; he never transcends it.
You are both understanding people and can see things without screens on your eyes, clearly. Love each other totally, and occasionally allow each other freedom. But it has to be on both sides. And it is not going to destroy your love; it is going to make it richer, deeper, more fulfilling, more orgasmic. And those few occasions when you are on holiday from each other will not take you away from each other; they will go on bringing you closer to each other. Don’t have any secret, be absolutely open, and allow the other person also to be absolutely open, and respect openness. Never, even by your gestures, make the other person feel guilty. That is the greatest crime humanity has been committing, making people guilty. If the other feels guilty because of very deep rooted conceptions, help her
to be free of the guilt.
Love lived in an atmosphere of freedom will transcend sex naturally, easily, effortlessly. Love will remain, sex will be gone, and then love has a purity and a beauty and a sacredness of its own.
Sitting on a bus in New York, a prim old lady was shocked to overhear an Italian say to another, “Emma come-a first. I come-a next. Two ass-a come-a together. I come-a again. Two ass-a come-a together again. I come-a once more. Peepee twice. Then I come-a for the last time.”
When the Italian was finished, the red-faced old maid turned to a policeman sitting nearby, and said, “Are you not going to arrest that terrible old man?”
“What for?” asked the policeman. “For spelling Mississippi?”
Take life more joyously and more jokingly. Let your whole life become a beautiful joke. There is nothing wrong in nature, and to be natural is to be religious.
You both are intelligent, and I hope that you will prove my hypothesis that you can love each other, and yet once in a while have different affairs—joyously, not reluctantly. Not because I am saying it, but out of your own understanding.
It doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to go beyond the biological, sexual attraction that you say is “lust” and grow into the kind of love you are talking about. How does it happen? Where do I start?
Sex is a subtle subject, delicate, because centuries of exploitation, corruption, centuries of perverted ideas and conditioning, are associated with the word “sex.” The very word is loaded, it is one of the most loaded words in existence. You say “God” and it seems empty. You say “sex” and it seems too loaded. A thousand and one things arise in the mind: fear, perversion, attraction, a tremendous desire, and a tremendous anti-desire also. They all arise together. “Sex”—the very word creates confusion, chaos. It is as if somebody has thrown a rock in a silent pool, and millions of ripples arise just from the word! Humanity has lived under the influence of very wrong ideas.
So the first thing to consider is, why do you ask how to go beyond your sexual feelings? Why do you want in the first place to transcend your sexuality? You are using a beautiful term—“go beyond”—but out of a hundred possibilities, ninety-nine are that you mean, “How to repress my sexual feelings?”
A person who has understood that sex can be transcended is not even worried about going beyond it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it. It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences, and those experiences make you more and more mature.
Have you watched that at a certain age, sex becomes important? Not that you make it important. It is not something that you make happen; it happens. At the age of fourteen, or somewhere near there, suddenly your energy is flooded with sex. It happens as if floodgates have been opened in you. Subtle sources of energy that were not open before have become open, and your whole energy becomes sexual, colored with sex. You think sex, you sing sex, you walk sex— everything becomes sexual. Every act is colored. This happens; you have not done anything about it. It is natural. And transcendence is also natural. If sex is lived totally, with no condemnation, with no idea of getting rid of it, then at the age of forty-two—just as at the age of fourteen the door to sex gets opened and the whole energy becomes sexual, at the age of forty-two or near about—those floodgates start to close again. And that too is as natural as sex becoming alive; it starts disappearing.
Sexuality is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort that will be repressive, because it has nothing to do with you. It is inbuilt—in your body, in your biology. You are born as sexual beings; nothing is wrong in it. That is the only way to be born. To be human is to be sexual. When you were conceived, your mother and your father were not praying, they were not listening to some priest’s sermon. They were not in church, they were making love. Even to think that your mother and father were making love when you were conceived seems to be difficult, I know, but they were making love; their sexual energies were meeting and merging into each other. Then you were conceived; in that deep sexual act you were conceived. The first cell was a sexual cell, and then out of that cell other cells have arisen. But each cell remains sexual, basically. Your whole body is sexual, made of sex cells. Now they are millions.
Remember it: you exist as a sexual being. Once you accept it, the conflict that has been created down through the centuries starts to dissolve. Once you accept it deeply, with no ideas in between, when sex is thought of as simply natural, then you live it. You don’t ask how to go beyond eating, you don’t ask how to transcend breathing, because no religion has taught you to transcend breathing. That’s why; otherwise you would be asking, “How to go beyond breathing?” But you don’t ask, you simply breathe! You are a breathing animal. You are a sexual animal, also. But there is a difference. Fourteen years of your life, in the beginning, are almost non-sexual, or at the most there is just rudimentary sexual play, which is not really sexual—just preparing, rehearsing, that’s all. By the age of fourteen, the energy is ripe.
Watch: a child is born and immediately, within just a few seconds, the child has to breathe; otherwise he will die. Then breathing remains for the whole of life, because it has come at the very first step of life. It cannot be transcended. Maybe before you die, then, just a few seconds before, it will stop, but not before that.
Always remember it: both ends of life, the beginning and end, are symmetrical. The child is born, he starts breathing within a matter of seconds. When the person is old and dying, the moment he stops breathing, within a matter of seconds he will be dead.
Sex enters at a relatively late stage: For twelve, fourteen years the child has lived without sex. And if the society is not too repressed and hence obsessed with sex, a child can live completely oblivious to the fact that sex, or anything like sex, exists. The child can remain absolutely innocent. That innocence is also not possible nowadays, because people are so repressed. When repression happens, then side by side obsession also happens. On the one side there are priests, who go on condemning sex, and then there are anti-priests, like Hugh Hefner and others, who go on making sexuality more and more glamorous. The priest and Hugh Hefner exist together as two sides of the same coin. When churches disappear, only then Playboy magazines will disappear, not before. They are partners in the same business! They look like enemies, but don’t be deceived by that. They talk against each other, but that’s how things work.
I have heard about two men who went out of business, they had gone broke, so they decided on a new and very simple business. They started traveling from
one town to another. First one would enter, and in the night he would throw coal tar on people’s windows and doors. After two or three days the second man would come to the same town. He would advertise that he could clean any kind of dirt from the outside of people’s homes, even coal tar, and people all over town would hire him. During that time the other would be doing his half of the business in another town. This way, they started earning lots of money.
This is what is happening between the church and the people who are creating pornography.
I have heard:
Pretty Miss Keenan sat in the confessional. “Father,” she said, “I want to confess that I let my boyfriend kiss me.”
“Is that all you did?” asked the priest, very interested. “Well, no. I let him put his hand on my leg, too.” “And then what?”
“And then I let him pull down my panties.”
“And then, and then…?” questioned the priest, panting with excitement.
“And then my mother walked into the room.” “Ah, shit,” sighed the priest.
It is together; they are partners in a conspiracy. Whenever you are too repressed, you start finding a perverse interest. A perverted interest is the problem, not sex. Now this priest is neurotic. Sex is not the problem, but this man is in trouble.
Sisters Margaret Alice and Francis Catherine were out walking along a side street. Suddenly they were grabbed by two men, dragged into a dark alley, and raped. “Father, forgive them,” said Sister Margaret Alice, “for they know not what they do.”
“Shut up!” cried Sister Catherine, “this one does.”
This is bound to be the situation. So never carry a single idea against sex in your mind, otherwise you will never be able to go beyond it into love. The only people who can go beyond “mere biological sexual attraction” are those who accept sex very naturally. It is difficult, I know, because you are born in a society
that is neurotic about sex. Either condemning it or glamorizing it, but it is neurotic all the same. It is very difficult to get out of this neurosis, but if you are a little alert you can get out of it.
So the real thing is not how to transcend sex, but how to transcend this perverted ideology of the society—this fear of sex, this repression of sex, this obsession with sex.
Sex is beautiful. Sex in itself is a natural, rhythmic phenomenon. It happens when the child is ready to be conceived, and it is good that it happens; otherwise life would not exist. Life exists through sex; sex is its medium. If you understand life, if you love life, you will know that sex is sacred, holy. Then you live it, then you delight in it; and as naturally as it has come, it goes of its own accord. By the age of forty-two, or somewhere near there, your interest in sex as such starts disappearing as naturally as it had come into being.
But it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, you will be surprised when I say forty-two. You know people who are seventy, eighty, and yet they have not gone beyond their obsession with sex. You know “dirty old men.” They are victims of the society because they could not be natural. It is a hangover, because they repressed their sexuality when they should have enjoyed and delighted in it. In those moments of sexual delight they were not totally in it. They were not orgasmic, they were half-hearted.
Whenever you are half-hearted in anything, it lingers longer. If you are sitting at your table and eating, and if you eat only half-heartedly then your hunger will remain. Then you will continue to think about food the whole day. You can try fasting and you will see: you will continuously think about food! But if you have eaten well, and when I say that, I don’t mean only that you have stuffed your stomach. Then it is not necessarily the case that you have eaten well. You might have stuffed yourself, but eating well is an art. It is not just stuffing yourself, it is a great art—to taste the food, to smell the food, to touch it, chew it, to digest the food, and to digest it as divine. It is divine; it is a gift.
Hindus say, Anam Brahma, food is divine, a gift from God. With deep respect you eat, and while eating you forget everything else, because eating is prayer. It is existential prayer. You are eating God, and God is going to give you nourishment. It is a gift to be accepted with deep love and gratitude.
And you don’t stuff the body, because stuffing the body is being antagonistic to the body. It is the other pole. There are people who are obsessed with fasting, and there are people who are obsessed with stuffing themselves. Both are wrong, because in both ways the body loses balance. A real lover of the body eats only to the point where the body feels perfectly quiet, balanced, tranquil; where the body feels to be neither leaning to the left nor to the right, but just in the middle. It is an art to understand the language of the body, to understand the language of your stomach, to understand what is needed and to give only that which is needed, and to give that in an artistic way, in an aesthetic way.
Animals eat, man eats—what is the difference? Man makes a great, aesthetic experience out of eating. What is the point of having a beautiful dining table? What is the point of having candles burning there? What is the point of asking friends to come and participate? It is to make it an art, not just stuffing yourself. But these are outward signs of the art; the inward signs are to understand the language of your body and to listen to it, to be sensitive to its needs. Then you eat, and the whole day you will not think of food at all. Only when the body is hungry again will the remembrance come. Then it is natural.
With sex the same happens. If you have no “anti” attitude about it, then you take it as a natural, divine gift. With great gratitude you enjoy it; with prayerfulness you enjoy it.
Tantra says that before you make love to a woman or to a man, you should first pray because it is going to be a divine meeting of energies. A fragrance of godliness will surround you. Wherever two lovers are, there is godliness. Wherever two lovers’ energies are meeting and mingling, there is life, alive, at its best—a divine energy surrounds you. Churches are empty, but love chambers are full of godliness. If you have tasted love the way Tantra says to taste it, if you have known love the way Tao says to know it, then by the time you reach forty- two, sex starts disappearing of its own accord. And you say good-bye to it with deep gratitude, because you are fulfilled. It has been delightful, it has been a blessing; you say good-bye to it.
And forty-two is the age for meditation, the right age. Sex disappears and that overflowing energy is no longer there. One becomes more tranquil. Passion has gone and now compassion arises. Now there is no more fever; one is not so interested in the “other.” With sex disappearing, the other is no longer a focus.
One starts returning to one’s own source; the return journey starts.
Sex is transcended not by your effort. It happens if you have lived it totally. So my suggestion is, drop all condemnation, all anti-life attitudes and accept the facts: sex is, so who are you to deny it? And who is trying to deny it, to go beyond it? It is just the ego.
Remember, sex creates the greatest problem for the ego. There are two types of people: very egoistic people are always against sex; humble people are never against it. But who listens to humble people? In fact, humble people don’t go around preaching, only egoists.
Why is there a conflict between sex and ego? Because sex is something in your life where you cannot be egoistic, where the other becomes more important than you. Your woman, your man, becomes more important than you. In every other case, you remain the most important. In a love relationship the other becomes very, very important, tremendously important. You become a satellite and the other becomes the nucleus; and the same is happening for the other: you become the nucleus and he or she becomes a satellite. It is a reciprocal surrender. Both are surrendering to the god of love, and both become humble.
Sex is the only energy that gives you hints that there is something that you cannot control. Money you can control, politics you can control, the market you can control, knowledge you can control, science, morality, all these things you can control. Somewhere, sex brings in a totally different world; you cannot control it. And the ego is a great controller. It is happy if it can control; it is unhappy if it cannot control. So there is a conflict between the ego and sex.
Remember, it is a losing battle. The ego cannot win it because ego is just superficial. Sex is very deep-rooted. Sex is your life; ego is just your mind, your head. Sex has roots all over you; ego has roots only in your ideas—very superficial, just in the head.
So who is trying to go beyond biological, sexual attraction? The head is trying to control sex. If you are too much in the head then you want to go beyond your sexual feelings because sex brings you down to the guts. It does not allow you to remain hanging in the head. Everything else you can manage from there; sex you cannot manage from there. You cannot make love with your head. You have to
come down, you have to descend from your heights, you have to come closer to earth.
Sex is humiliating to the ego, so egoistic people are always against sex. They go on finding ways and means to transcend it. They can never transcend it. They can, at the most, become perverted. Their whole effort from the very beginning is doomed to failure.
I have heard:
A boss was interviewing applicants to replace his private secretary who was resigning because of expectant motherhood. The boss’s right- hand man sat with him as he looked the applicants over. The first girl was a beautiful, buxom blond. She turned out to be intelligent, and had excellent secretarial skills. The second was a dark-haired beauty who was even more intelligent and proficient than the first. The third one was cross-eyed, had buck teeth, weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, and had almost no skills. After interviewing all three candidates, the boss informed his associate that he was hiring the third applicant.
“But why?” asked the astonished employee.
“Well,” boomed the boss, “in the first place, she looks very intelligent to me! In the second place, it is none of your damned business, and in the third place, she is my wife’s sister.”
So you may pretend that you have won over sex, but an undercurrent remains. You may rationalize, you may find reasons, you may pretend, you may create a hard shell around you, but deep down the real reason, the reality, will stand untouched: “She is my wife’s sister”—that is the real reason. “She looks intelligent”—that is just a rationalization. “And it is none of your damned business”—that is being annoyed and irritated because you are afraid that the other may find out the real case! But the real case will explode no matter what you do; you cannot hide it, it is not possible.
So you can try to control sex, but an undercurrent of sexuality will run through your being, and it will show itself in many ways. Out of all your rationalizations, it will again and again raise its head.
I will not suggest that you make any effort to go beyond your sexuality. What
I suggest is just the contrary: forget about going beyond it. Move into it as deeply as you can. While the energy is there, move as deeply as you can, love as deeply as you can, and make an art of it. It is not just to be “done.”
That is the whole meaning of Tantra, making an art of lovemaking. There are subtle nuances, which only people who enter with a great aesthetic sense will be able to know. Otherwise, you can make love for your whole life and still remain unsatisfied because you don’t know that real satisfaction is something very aesthetic. It is like a subtle music arising in your soul. If through sex you fall into harmony, if through love you become non-tense and relaxed, if love is not just throwing out energy because you don’t know what else to do with it, if it is not just a relief but a relaxation, if you relax into your partner and your partner relaxes into you, if for a few seconds, for a few moments or a few hours you forget who you are and you are completely lost in oblivion, you will come out of it purer, more innocent, more virgin. And you will have a different type of being: at ease, centered, rooted.
If this happens, one day suddenly you will see that the flood has gone and it has left you very, very rich. You will not be sorry that it has gone. You will be thankful, because now richer worlds open. When sex leaves you, the doors of meditation open. When sex leaves you, then you are not trying to lose yourself in the other. You become capable of losing yourself in yourself. Now another world of orgasm, inner orgasm, of being with oneself, arises.
But that arises only through being with the other. One grows, matures through the other. Then a moment comes when you can be alone, tremendously happy. There is no need for any other. The need has disappeared but you have learned much through it, you have learned much about yourself. The other became the mirror. And you have not broken the mirror! You have learned so much about yourself, now there is no need to look into the mirror. You can close your eyes and you can see your face there. But you would not be able to see that face if there had been no mirror from the very beginning.
Let your woman be your mirror; let your man be your mirror. Look into your partner’s eyes and see your face; move into your partner to know yourself. Then one day the mirror will not be needed. But you will not be against the mirror! You will be so grateful to it, how can you be against it? You will be so thankful, how can you be against it? Then, transcendence happens.
Transcendence is not repression. Transcendence is a natural growth of your being; you grow above, you go beyond, just as a seed breaks and a sprout starts rising above the ground. When sex disappears, the seed disappears.
In sex, you were able to give birth to somebody else, a child. When sex disappears, the whole energy starts giving birth to yourself. This is what Hindus have called dwija, the twice-born. One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself. Then your whole energy is turning in—it becomes an inner circle.
Right now it will be difficult for you to make an inner circle. It will be easier to connect it with another pole—a woman or a man—and then the circle becomes complete. Then you can enjoy the blessings of the circle. But by and by you will be able to make the inner circle, because inside you also you are man and woman, woman and man. Nobody is just man and nobody is just woman, because you come from the communion of a man and a woman. Both have participated; your mother has given something to you and you father has given something to you. Fifty-fifty, they have contributed to you. Both are there. There is a possibility that both can meet inside you. Again your father and mother can love inside you. Then your reality will be born. Once they met when your body was born; now, if they can meet inside you, your soul will be born.
That’s what transcendence of sex is; it is a higher sex.
Let me tell you this: when you transcend sex, you reach to a higher sex. Ordinary sex is gross, higher sex is not gross at all. Ordinary sex is outward- moving, higher sex is inward-moving. In ordinary sex, two bodies meet, and the meeting happens on the outside. In higher sex, your own inner energies meet. It is not physical, it is spiritual, it is Tantra. Tantra is transcendence. If you don’t understand this and you go on fighting with sex…
The question has been asked by a woman whom I know is passing through some critical moments in her mind. She would like to be independent, but it is too early. She would like not to be bothered by anybody else but it is too early, and it is too egoistic. Right now transcendence is not possible, only repression is possible. And if you repress now, in your old age you will repent because then things become messed up.
Each thing has its own right time. Each thing has to be done in its moment. While young, don’t be afraid of love, and don’t be afraid of sex. If you are afraid while you are young, in old age you will become obsessed; and then it will be difficult to move deeply into love, and the mind will remain obsessed.
It is my understanding that people, if they have lived rightly, lovingly, naturally, then by the forty-second year they start going beyond sex. If they have not lived naturally and they have been fighting with sex, then forty-two becomes their most dangerous time—because by the time they are forty-two their energies are declining. When you are young you can repress something because you are energetic. Look at the irony of it! A young person can repress his or her sexuality very easily because young people have the energy to repress it. They can just put it down and sit on it. When the energies are declining, then that repressed sexuality will assert itself and you will not be able to control it.
I have heard an anecdote:
A sixty-five-year-old man visited the office of his son, who was a doctor, and asked for something that would increase his sexual potential. The son gave his father a shot, and then refused to accept a fee. Nevertheless, the old man insisted on giving him ten dollars. A week later the old man was back for another injection, and this time handed his son twenty dollars.
“But Pop, the shots are only ten dollars.”
“Take it!” said Stein. “The extra ten is from Momma.”
That will continue. So before that happens to you, please be finished with it. Don’t wait for old age, because then things go ugly. Then everything goes out of season.
I know my love stinks, so why do I cling to the smell?
We live according to the past. Our lives are rooted in the dead past, we are conditioned by the past. The past is very powerful, that’s why you go on living in a certain pattern; even if it stinks, you will go on repeating it. You don’t know what else to do, you have become conditioned to it. It is a mechanical phenomenon. And this is not only so with you, it is so with almost every human
being unless he or she becomes a buddha.
To become a buddha means to get rid of the past and to live in the present. The past is immense, huge, enormous. For millions of lives you have lived in a certain way. Now you may have become aware that your love stinks, but that awareness is also not very deep; it is very superficial. If it becomes really deep, if it penetrates to the very core of your being, you will immediately jump out of it.
If your house is on fire, you will not ask anybody how to get out of it. You will not consult the Encyclopedia Britannica, nor will you wait for some wise man to come and tell you. You will not consider whether it is appropriate to jump out of the window or not, you won’t bother about any of that. Even if you are taking a bath, naked, you will jump naked out of the window! You won’t even bother about clothes. When the house is on fire, your life is at risk; now everything else is secondary.
If your love stinks—if this has really become your experience—then you will come out of it. You will not simply ask a question, you will jump out of it.
But I think it is just an intellectual idea, because each time you are in love some misery arises. Each time there is some conflict, some struggle, some fight, some jealousy, some possessiveness. So you have started taking an intellectual standpoint: “My love stinks, so why do I cling to the smell?” Because it is not yet really an existential experience for you.
And it is your own smell! One becomes accustomed to one’s own smell. That’s why when people are alone they don’t experience that smell, they experience it only when they are together with somebody else. When you are in love, then you start showing your real face. Love is a mirror. The other starts functioning as a mirror. Every relationship becomes a mirror. Alone, you don’t experience your own smell, you cannot; one becomes immune to it. You have lived with it so long, how can you smell it? It is only with the other that you start feeling that he stinks and he starts feeling that you stink. And the fight starts. That is the story of all the couples all over the world.
“Where are you going with that goat, Juan?” asked the policeman. “I’m taking him home to keep as a pet!” replied Juan.
“In the house?” “Sure thing.”
“But what about the smell?”
“So what? He ain’t gonna mind the smell!”
Your own smell is not disturbing to you. In fact, if it suddenly disappears you will feel a little jolted, you will feel a little uprooted. You will not feel like your natural self; you will feel something has gone wrong. If you love and there is no jealousy, you will start wondering whether you love or not. What kind of love is this? There seems to be no jealousy!
Yes, your love stinks, as everybody else’s love stinks, but you feel it only when you are in relationship. You have not yet felt that it really has something to do with you. Deep down you still feel it must be something wrong with the other. That’s how the mind functions: it throws the responsibility on the other. It accepts itself and it is always finding faults in others.
Several people are sitting in the front row of a movie theater. The show has already begun when suddenly there is a terrible smell. One of the spectators turns to the man sitting beside him and asks, “Did you shit in your trousers?”
The man beside him answers, “Yes, why?”
People accept themselves totally! Whatever they are doing is right: “Why? What is wrong in it?” They are his trousers, so who are you to interfere? And freedom is everybody’s birthright!
If your love stinks, then try to find out what exactly it is that stinks. It is not love, it is something else. Love itself has a fragrance; it can’t stink, it is a lotus flower. Something else must be in it—jealousy, possessiveness. But you have not mentioned jealousy and possessiveness. You are hiding them. Love never stinks, it cannot; that is not the nature of love. Please try to see exactly what it is that creates the trouble. And I am not saying to repress it. All that is needed is a clarity about it, what it is.
If it is jealousy, then I would only suggest one thing: be more watchful of your jealousy. When it arises next time, rather than getting angry close your doors, sit silently, sit in meditation and watch your jealousy. See exactly what it is. It will
surround you like smoke, dirty smoke. It will suffocate you. You would like to go out and do something, but don’t do anything. Just be in a state of non-doing, because anything done in a moment of jealousy is going to be destructive. Just watch.
And I am not saying repress it, because that is again doing something. People are either expressive or repressive, and both ways are wrong. If you express you become destructive to the other person. Whoever is your victim suffers, and he is going to take revenge. He may not take revenge consciously, but unconsciously it is going to happen.
Just a few months ago, KB fell in love with a woman. Nothing extraordinary about it, but his girlfriend Deeksha got mad! She could not accept the idea. For centuries we have been told that if a man loves you or a woman loves you and the man or the woman goes to somebody else, that is a rejection of you.
That is utter nonsense. It is not rejection; in fact, it is just the opposite. If a man loves the woman and he enjoys the woman, he starts fantasizing how it will be with other women. It is really the joy that this woman has given him that triggers his fancy. It is not that he is rejecting this woman; it is really an indication that this woman has been such a nourishment that he would like to see and know how other women are. And if he is allowed, he is not likely to go very far, he will come back because with the other woman it may be novelty, it will be something new, but it can’t be that nourishing because there will not be any intimacy. It will have something empty about it. It will be sex without love.
Love needs time to grow, it needs intimacy to grow. It needs a really long time. It is not a seasonal flower that is there within three or four weeks, but then within another few weeks it is gone. It is a long process of growing intimacy. Slowly, two persons melt and merge into each other; then it becomes nourishing. So the other woman, or the other man, cannot be nourishing. It may be just an adventure, a thrill. But then suddenly the feeling will arise—it is bound to arise
—that it was good as fun, but not very nourishing. And the person will be back.
And KB would have been back, but Deeksha went mad. She behaved just like any other woman! But I was watching to see if sooner or later she was going to take revenge. And now she is taking revenge. KB fell ill, he was in the hospital, and Deeksha had a little freedom—she fell in love with her own handyman! He
really proved handy! So now KB is in hell.
There is no need to be so worried about it. I have sent KB a message: “Wait, don’t be worried. Just let her take revenge. It is good that her unconscious burden has a chance to be finished.”
If we understand each other a little more, if we understand human nature a little more, there should be no jealousy. But it is a past heritage of centuries. It is not so easy to get rid of it, I am not saying you can just drop it right now. You will have to meditate over it. Whenever it possesses you, meditate over it. Slowly, the meditation will create the distance between you and the jealousy. And the greater the distance the less jealousy will arise. One day, when there is no jealousy, your love releases such a fragrance that no flower can compete with it. All flowers are poor compared to the flowering of love.
But your love is crippled because of jealousy and possessiveness and anger. It is not love that stinks, remember, because I have seen people who think it is love that stinks so they close up, they become closed, they stop loving. That’s what has happened to millions of monks and nuns down the ages: they became closed to love, they dropped the whole idea of love. Rather than dropping jealousy, which would have been a revolution, rather than dropping possessiveness, which would have been something of immense value, they dropped love. That is easy, that is not much; anybody can do that.
To be a monk or a nun is very easy, but to love and not to be jealous, to love and not to be possessive, to love and let the other have all their freedom, is really a great achievement. Only then will you experience love and its fragrance.
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