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Chapter 20 - Your longing is the seed
Neither the lover knows himself nor you know yourself. Two unknown beings, two strangers who don't know anything about themselves are trying to know each other -- it is an exercise in futility. It is bound to be a frustration, a failure. And that's why all lovers are angry at each other. They think perhaps the other is not allowing an entry into his private world: "He is keeping me separate, he is keeping me a little far away." And both go on thinking in the same way. But it is not true, all complaints are false. It is simply that they don't understand the law of nature.
On the level of body, you can come close but you cannot become one. Only on the level of the heart, can you become one -- but only momentarily, not permanently.
At the level of being, you are one. There is no need to become one; it has only to be discovered.
Amiyo, you are saying, "Still there is an intense longing to overcome the separation between us." If you go on trying on the physical level, you will go on failing. The longing simply shows that love needs to go beyond the body, that love wants something higher than the body, something greater than the body, something deeper than the body.
Even the heart-to-heart meeting -- although sweet, although immensely joyful -- is still insufficient, because it happens only for a moment and then again strangers are strangers.
Unless you discover the world of being, you will not be able to fulfill your longing of becoming one. And the strange fact is: the day you become one with your lover, you will become one with the whole existence, too.
You are saying, "It almost feels as if we are lines running parallel to each other but destined never to meet." Perhaps, Amiyo, you don't know non-Euclidean geometry because it is still not taught in our educational institutes. We are still taught, in the universities, Euclidean geometry which is two thousand years old.
In Euclidian geometry, parallel lines never meet. But it has been found that if
you go on and on and on they meet. The latest finding is that there are no parallel lines; that's why they meet. You cannot create two parallel lines.
New findings are very strange: you cannot even create a line, a straight line, because the earth is round -- if you create a straight line here, if you go on drawing it from both the ends and go on and go on, finally you will find it has become a circle. And if a straight line drawn to the ultimate becomes a circle, it was not a straight line in the first place; it was only part of a very big circle, and a part of a big circle is an arc, not a line. Lines have disappeared in the new, non- Euclidean geometry and when there are no lines, what to say about parallel lines?
There are no parallel lines, either.
So if it were a question of parallel lines, there is a chance that lovers could meet somewhere -- perhaps in old age when they cannot fight, they don't have any energy left; or they have become so accustomed... what is the point? The same arguments they have had, the same problems they have been having, the same conflicts; they both are bored of each other.
In the long run, lovers stop even speaking to each other. What is the point? Because to start speaking means to start an argument, and it is the same argument; it is not going to change. And they have argued it so many times and it comes to the same end. But even then, parallel lines as far as lovers are concerned... in geometry they may start meeting, but in love there is no hope; they cannot meet.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 204
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