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CHAPTER 18
Love the only freedom from attachment
6 April 1988 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium
Just read! Question 1 BELOVED OSHO, MIRDAD SAYS,
“LOVE IS THE ONLY FREEDOM FROM ATTACHMENT. WHEN YOU LOVE EVERYTHING YOU ARE ATTACHED TO NOTHING.”
AND LATER ON:
“MAN MADE PRISONER BY THE LOVE OF A WOMAN AND WOMAN MADE PRISONER BY THE LOVE OF A MAN ARE EQUALLY UNFIT FOR FREEDOM’S PRECIOUS CROWN. BUT MAN AND WOMAN MADE AS ONE BY LOVE, INSEPARABLE, INDISTINGUISHABLE, ARE VERILY ENTITLED TO THE PRIZE.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THIS?
AND ALSO ABOUT SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS, AND IF THEY MATTER IN THE SPIRITUAL GROWTH? I ASK THIS QUESTION, BECAUSE I HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED THIS EXCEPT ONCE THREE YEARS AGO, AND EVERYBODY IS EVEN GOING BEYOND IT. THIS IS WHAT
BOTHERS ME THE MOST. I DON’T WANT TO GET STUCK HERE. DOES EXPERIENCING SEX DEEPLY MAKE IT EASIER TO MEDITATE?
BELOVED OSHO, I AM A BIT EMBARRASSED TO ASK THIS QUESTION, BUT IT WOULDN’T GO AWAY.
Devapria, the BOOK OF MIRDAD is my most loved book. Mirdad is a fictitious figure, but each statement and act of Mirdad is tremendously important. It should not be read as a novel, it should be read as a holy scripture – perhaps the only holy scripture.
And you can see in this statement just a glimpse of Mirdad’s insight, awareness, understanding. He is saying, LOVE IS THE ONLY FREEDOM FROM ATTACHMENT... and you have always heard that love is the only attachment. All the religions agree on that point, that love is the only attachment.
I agree with Mirdad:
LOVE IS THE ONLY FREEDOM FROM ATTACHMENT. WHEN YOU LOVE EVERYTHING YOU ARE ATTACHED TO NOTHING.
In fact one has to understand the very phenomenon of attachment. Why do you cling to something? Because you are afraid you will lose it. Perhaps somebody may steal it. Your fear is that what is available to you today may not be available to you tomorrow.
Who knows about what is going to happen tomorrow? The woman you love or the man you love – either movement is possible: you may come closer, you may become distant. You may become again strangers or you may become so one with each other that even to say that you are two will not be right; of course there are two bodies but the heart is one, and the song of the heart is one, and the ecstasy surrounds you both like a cloud. You disappear in that ecstasy: you are not you, I am not I. Love becomes so total, love is so great and overwhelming, that you cannot remain yourself; you have to drown yourself and disappear.
In that disappearance who is going to be attached, and with whom? Everything is. When love blossoms in its totality, everything simply is. The fear of tomorrow does not arise; hence there is no question of attachment, clinging, marriage, of any kind of contract, bondage.
What are your marriages except business contracts? “We commit to each other before a magistrate” – you are insulting love! You are following law, which is the lowest thing in existence and the ugliest. When you bring love to the court you are committing a crime that cannot be forgiven. You make a commitment before a magistrate in a court that “We want to be married and we will remain married. It is our promise, given to the law: we will not separate and we will not deceive each other.” Do you think this is not a great insult of love? Are not you putting law above love?
I am a lawless man; that’s why two dozen countries are against me, although I have never committed any crime. But I don’t believe in any law either.
I love – there is no need for any law.
Law is for those who do not know how to love.
Law is for the blind, not for those who have eyes. Law is for those who have forgotten the language of the heart and only know the language of the mind.
Mirdad’s statement is of such great value that it should be deeply understood – not only intellectually, not only emotionally, but in your totality. Your whole being should drink it:
LOVE IS THE ONLY FREEDOM FROM ATTACHMENT.
... Because when you love you cannot even think of anything else.
WHEN YOU LOVE EVERYTHING YOU ARE ATTACHED TO NOTHING. Each moment comes with
new splendor, new glory, new songs; each moment brings new dances to dance. Perhaps partners may change, but love remains.
Attachment is the desire that the partner should never change. For that you have to commit to the court, to the society – all stupid formalities. And if you go against those formalities you will lose all respect and honor in the eyes of the people amongst whom you have to live.
Love knows nothing of attachment because love knows no possibility of falling from dignity. It is the very honor itself, the very respectability itself; you cannot do anything against it. I am not saying that partners cannot change, but that it does not matter: if partners change but love remains like a river, flowing, then in fact the world will have much more love than it has today.
Today it is just like a tap – drip, drip, drip. It is not able to quench anybody’s thirst. Love needs to be oceanic, not the drip, drip of a public tap. And all marriages are public.
Love is universal. Love does not invite only a few people to celebrate, love invites the stars and the suns and the flowers and the birds; the whole existence is welcome to celebrate.
Love does not need anything else – a night full of stars, what more can you ask for? Just a few friends... and the whole universe is friendly. I have never come across a tree who was against me. I have been to many mountains, but I have never found any mountain antagonistic. The whole existence is very friendly.
Once your own understanding of love blossoms there is no question of attachment at all. You can go on changing your partners, that does not mean you are deserting anybody. You may come back again to the same partner, there is no question of any prejudice.
Man should understand himself just like a child playing on the sea beach, collecting sea shells, colored stones, and immensely enjoying, as if he has found a great treasure. If a man can enjoy small things of life, can live in freedom and can allow others to live in freedom, this whole world can become a totally different kind of world. Then it will have a quality of beauty, grace; it will have great luminosity, every heart on fire.
But as the world is, you look at people, their fire... Now, Devapria’s fire once burned three years ago. Now it is not certain whether it burned or she imagined it – because if it burned three years before, what have you been doing for three years? Once you know the fire, the flames go on growing. Flames of love grow just like trees grow; flames of love bring flowers and fruits just as trees bring.
But what you think is love is not love. That’s why such strange experiences happen. Three years ago somebody must have said to you, “How beautiful you look! I love you so much, there is no woman like you in the whole universe.” And you never objected that “You have no right to say such things, because you don’t know all the women of the whole universe.” When such beautiful things are said, one forgets completely the irrationality of them.
And you have not asked the person who said to you, “I love you” – “What is love? do you know, or without knowing what love is have you started loving? What are your reasons?” That man would have looked very weird and would have tried to escape as soon as possible, because lovers don’t think that when you say to somebody, “Sweetheart” you will have to give explanations: “What do you mean by it? Have you ever eaten a heart – ‘sweetheart’? What do you mean by it? Do you think I am a delicious sweet, some beautiful, eatable thing?”
People in love say to each other, “I want to eat you,” and nobody objects – are you a cannibal or something?
These things people learn from films, from novels – all these dialogues and they don’t mean anything. They simply mean, “Just come to the bed!” But because we are civilized people, without making some introductory remarks, a little preface, you cannot say directly to someone, “Let us go to the bed.” She will run to the police station to report, “This man is saying something very ugly to me.”
No... but if you go in a civilized way, offer some ice cream first – that cools the heart – bring some roses, talk some sweet nothings... and then both understand that finally it has to end up in a morning hangover, a headache, a migraine, and in the morning both will look awkwardly at each other: what were they doing in the bed? One will hide behind the newspaper, as if he is really reading it, and the other will start preparing the tea or coffee, just somehow to forget what happened.
Something like this must have happened, Devapria, three years ago. My god, what have you been doing for three years? Just vegetating! You should have given headaches to hundreds of people in three years – you would have put many people on the track of enlightenment. Without women, nobody can move towards enlightenment.
They say that behind every great man there is a woman. May be or may not be, but behind every enlightened man there are hundreds of women; one will not do. Enlightenment is not so cheap.
In three years you could have done so much service to the universe... what are you doing? And you are reading people like Mirdad!
And later on Mirdad says:
MAN MADE PRISONER BY THE LOVE OF A WOMAN AND WOMAN MADE PRISONER BY THE LOVE OF A MAN ARE EQUALLY UNFIT FOR FREEDOM’S PRECIOUS CROWN.
The moment love becomes attachment, love becomes a relationship... the moment love becomes demanding, it is a prison. It has destroyed the freedom; you cannot fly in the sky, you are encaged. And one wonders... particularly I wonder myself.
People wonder about me, what I go on doing alone in my room. And I wonder about them – what do these two people go on doing together? Alone I am at least at ease. If somebody else is there, there is trouble; something is going to happen. If the other is there the silence cannot remain: the other is going to ask something, say something, do something, force you to do something. Moreover if the same person goes on continuously, day after day.…
The man who invented the double bed was one of the greatest enemies of humanity. Even in the bed, no freedom! You cannot move; the other is by the side. And mostly the other takes most of the space. If you can manage a small space you are fortunate – and remember, the other goes on growing.
It is a very strange world, where women go on growing and men go on shrinking. And the whole fault is of the man: he makes those women grow fatter, pregnant; more trouble is ahead. Once you put two persons together, a male and a female, soon the third will arrive. If it does not arrive the neighbors become anxious: “What is the matter? why is the child not coming?”
I have lived with many people, in many places. I was surprised – why are people so much anxious to create trouble for other people? If somebody is unmarried they are worried: “Why don’t you get married?” – as if marriage is some universal law that has to be followed.
Tortured by everybody, one thinks it is better to get married – at least these people will stop torturing. But you are wrong: once you get married they start asking, “When is the child coming?”
Now, this is a very difficult problem. It is not in your hands: the child may come, may not come – and will come in its own time. But the people will harass you that a childless life... a home is not a home without a child. It is true – because a home seems to be a silent temple without a child; with a child, the home seems to be a madhouse! And with many children, troubles go on multiplying.
I am sitting, silent in my room my whole life. I am not bothering anybody, I have never asked anybody, “Why are you not married, why have you not produced a child?” Because I don’t think that it is civilized to ask such questions, such queries; it is interfering in somebody’s freedom.
In my university, every professor... and I had to go to many colleges, because I was being expelled from this college, from that college. My expulsion was absolutely necessary. And I don’t blame them, the fault was always mine, but my faults were so innocent that they felt, “This is true that you have not committed any crime, but your presence is disturbing.”
I said, “This is very difficult. If I am sitting alone, then my aloneness is disturbing to my family – ‘Why you are sitting alone?’ Are these questions to be asked?”
I never liked buttons on my shirt – now this was the trouble. In one college, one professor was adamant that “If you don’t put buttons on your shirt I will not allow you in the class.”
I said, “This won’t do.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “You will have to physically prevent me.” He said, “You want to fight with me?”
I said, “Yes.”
The professor said, “Have you come here to study or to harass me?”
I said, “Study can be done later on – fight first! And I will sit in the class without buttons, because there is no law of the university that tells you that you have to use buttons. You should think yourself fortunate that I am wearing the shirt! Even that cannot be prevented constitutionally.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “It is clear – I can even come naked.”
He said, “This is a very difficult thing. It is better you come without buttons, because if you come naked it will create trouble. There are girls and there are other students...”
I said, “If next time you even mention my buttons I am going to drop the clothes, then and there.” He said, “No, don’t do that! You can sit down.”
But he was obviously puzzled, as I am puzzled looking at Vimal’s situation. Now the poor fellow is wearing a cap to deceive me. He must be thinking that perhaps I will think somebody else is there. He was even using glasses – and he cannot read with the glasses on, that’s why I had asked him to take off the glasses.
And this shirt, and this cotton pajama... This seems to belong to that fellow who lives in the bamboo hut! Perhaps he forgot to mention about the Gandhi cap – Gandhi cap, Nehru shirt... and the pajama certainly belongs to someone else because I have never seen Vimal in such a situation. He is praying day and night – but Maneesha is also very stubborn. Now she will prolong her cold one knows not how long and poor Vimal is going to suffer every day.…
That was the situation of the professor. I would show him my shirt. He would be teaching, and then he would look at me and forget what he was teaching!
He said to me, “Please, you should not wave your shirt without buttons, because I forget... I am an old man, my memory is not very good.”
I said, “If you like I can try the shirt in a different way.” He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I can turn the front to the back. It won’t hurt anybody.” And I turned my shirt around there in the class.
He said, “What are you doing? That will disturb me more!”
I said, “I am trying as much as I can to help you! I can even drop this shirt completely.”
He said, “No!” He informed the principal that, “I have got a very troublesome student and in fact there is nothing to say against him, because there is no law that you should have buttons on your
shirt. There is no law even that you should not wear your shirt backside front. So he is perfectly rational, but it creates a strange feeling within me. I forget to teach what I was teaching. I start again and as I look at him... and he sits just in front of me!”
He asked me, “It will be very kind of you if you can sit just at the back.”
I said, “There is no problem, I can sit anywhere, but I will remain in your attention.” He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I will keep one of my hands up. There is no law against it, it is my own hand. I am not raising anybody else’s hand.”
He said, “It seems either I have to resign or you have to be expelled.”
I said, “It will be easier for me to be expelled, because this is routine. I have been to many colleges.”
Just as I went around the world and every country refused me, I went around all the colleges – and the city had twenty colleges – and every college was simply closed.
Slowly the news reached everybody, that “He is not dangerous, he does not do anything that you can call a crime or something punishable, but he will do something very innocent and can create so much disturbance!”
People go on living with their wives, with their children, and because the presence of every new member that enters your family is going to disturb many things, you automatically become less and less sensitive. You hear less, you see less, you smell less, you taste less.
You will be surprised that you are not using all your senses in their intensity. That’s why when somebody falls in love for the first time you can see, his face glows; you can see, his walk has a new freshness, a dance in it; you can see, his tie is rightly tied, his clothes are well pressed. Something has happened.
But it does not last long. Within a week or two the same boredom settles; you see the dust has started gathering again. The light is gone; again he is dragging, not dancing. Flowers are still flowering, but he does not see any beauty. Stars go on provoking him, but he does not look at the sky.
There are millions of people who have never looked upwards; their eyes are glued on the earth as if they are afraid that some star will fall on them. There are very few people who would like to sleep under the sky with all the stars – the fear of vastness, aloneness, darkness. It is good in the bamboo hut with a girl-enemy and if God is willing the girl-enemy will go on changing. But mostly God is not interested and you become rusted. He is not interested and you become rusted, the same girl and the same boy...
For three years! And life is not very long. Your remaining without any experience of love is indicative of an understanding that the first love has been bitter and the taste is still on your tongue. It has
been an imprisonment. Millions of people go on, deep down feeling that if they had remained alone, if they had never bothered about love and marriage... but now nothing can be done. You cannot go back; you cannot be a bachelor again.
In fact you may have become so much accustomed of the prison that you cannot leave the prison. It is a kind of safety; it is cozy, although miserable. The blanket is rotten, but the double bed – at least you are not alone in your misery, somebody is sharing it. The fact is, somebody is creating it for you and you are creating it for him or her.
People have become so desperate that now there are countries where they have allowed men to marry men. A few countries have allowed women to marry women. Just today there was news that one court in Canada has refused a lesbian marriage on the grounds that “Unless you can produce a child, we cannot accept you as a couple.”
Strange definition, because that means... there are many couples, man-woman couples, who have not produced children. According to this wise guy they cannot be called couples.
But why is this happening – that men should marry men? Homosexuals, lesbians, women should marry women – why? A certain boredom, a long, long, centuries-old boredom is erupting. Men and women are becoming aware of the fact that their togetherness is always a trouble, misery. It is not without reason that homosexuals are called gay people, because they are the only people who seem to be laughing, enjoying. Homosexuals’ wives don’t have periods, do not throw tantrums, do not become pregnant and the hospital and the surgery and there is no end to the trouble. There is no worry; it seems to be lighter.
And the man cannot understand the woman because they have different centers of understanding. The woman from the heart, the man from the mind – they run like parallel railway lines, together but never meeting. Very close, but never close enough. But two men find it easier to understand each other. In fact two men together can discuss intellectual, philosophical, theological things. You cannot discuss philosophy with a woman. She is interested in the groceries, “and you are talking unnecessary things. Philosophy? Are you going to eat philosophy? What is the worry about whether there is a God or not, it is none of your concern. You should do your thing, polish your shoes, clean the room.” Their interests are different.
Two men living together will discuss great things and the room remains dirty. Both once in a while think, “Somebody should come and clean the room.” But they become accustomed to it, it feels perfect to them. Just a little bit of dust here and there, the clothes are not so fresh and clean, but these are small things. The real problem is how many solar systems there are. Is there, on any planet in any solar system, human life? These are real things, not the room – who cares about it?
Two women together find it very good – perfect communication. They can have a dialogue about jewelry, about clothes, about the movies. They are simple things about which there is no dispute, just appreciation.
This phenomenon has started only in this past half of the twentieth century. It had never even been conceived of by anybody that a man would ask to be married to another man – just the whole thing seems to be so dirty. That two women should want to be married to each other – what are they
going to do? Just wastage, a sheer wastage of two beautiful women who could have made many people enlightened.
And these gay people... I have never heard of a single gay person becoming enlightened. They have reached to very great intellectual heights, but still they have not become enlightened.
For example Socrates was a homosexual. Nobody wants to talk about his homosexuality. And that was one of the reasons that although intellectually he reached great heights, he could not become enlightened. Although he had every possibility – in fact more possibility than any other enlightened man like Gautam Buddha.
Gautam Buddha had one of the most beautiful women, still he became enlightened. And Socrates had a woman, a monster, just repeat her name and you will start trembling: Xanthippe. And she used to beat Socrates; she burned Socrates’ face by pouring hot tea water on him. Still, because he was a homosexual... otherwise this was such a good chance to move towards enlightenment. Rather than becoming enlightened he must have gone to his boyfriend.
This situation is absolutely intolerable. And some basic changes in human understanding have become absolutely necessary.
Love should not be a prison if you want man and woman to be in love in the future. Love should give more freedom than aloneness can give. Love should create for you better possibilities of growth, of inquiries into your spirituality; love should help in creating more meditative states.
Unless this happens the future is going to face – we are already facing in many countries, particularly the rich countries – the problem. The men are no longer interested in women, because they don’t want so much trouble. They don’t want to talk about what is called “small talk.” And their women are absolutely concerned about it: “The neighbor has purchased a new car – now do you want to change the neighborhood or to purchase a new car?” Something has to be done. It is an existential question, life and death depends on it. Now find another neighborhood, where nobody has a better car than you have.
In America they even have names of neighborhoods – that is a Chevrolet neighborhood, this is a Mercedes neighborhood, these are Cadillac people.
The women are looking every day for hours in catalogues. That is an American phenomenon. It has not yet spread around the world, but it is spreading. Their whole life is dependent on the catalogues, which go on continuously coming – about cars, about bed sheets, about sauce pans, about every nonsense, and they will get so much excited.
Look at Avirbhava! She is one of the greatest shoppers, continuously reading catalogues. She even brings things for me, it is not that... she is very generous, but shopping is absolutely necessary. Just now she was going for shopping to Singapore. I have prevented her. To Singapore! Now Poona is not much – where will you go for shopping? But she must have made arrangements with Kaveesha, because Kaveesha is going – “Look for these things...” I know what goes on happening in people’s minds. She must have chosen some things for me as a bribe.
But if this situation continues, then men and women will become more and more separate. Their concerns are separate, their bank balances are separate, their clubs are separate. They don’t know how to talk with each other. When a man sits with a woman, silence prevails.
In the ancient days, if you wanted to be silent you had to go away from the woman. That situation has changed. Now, just sit with your wife and you will be as silent as you can. More silent than that you cannot be, even in the Himalayas. In front of your wife, suddenly you forget that there is anything to say. You have said it many times; whatever she wanted to say she has said thousands of times.
So wife and husband sit silently. They could have used this situation for meditation. But they are not using it for that, they are using it for gathering more anger, rage, and they are waiting to burst upon each other, just a chance. Even this much is enough for the woman to say, “Why are you sitting silently? When you go outside you talk with everybody and inside you sit silently. What is the matter with you?”
Now what can you say? Open your mouth and your bank balance is attacked. Just show a little sign of lovingness, friendliness, and your pocket is cut, because the woman is already reading her catalogue. Whenever your wife is in her bathroom, just look in the catalogue and you will find which pages are turned down, and then remember God.
But these things are going to happen. The only literature that women read is catalogues – who bothers about old Shakespeare, and all those days that are gone? If you want to talk about Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu the woman will say, “Stop, don’t dig up graves. Those people are dead. Those who are gone, are gone. Say something about real people – what is happening to the neighbors? The wife is trying to escape and you are not aware at all. And your friend – that neighbor, your friend – knows nothing of what is happening underneath. That chauffeur one day is going to take his wife, I declare.”
Now these great things... man has become tired. Woman has become more and more interested, because she has become more and more educated, she can read the catalogues. What is the education for? Do you want her to read Anagoras, Pythagoras, Plato, when everybody else is talking about a film actor, a pop singer? Real things are happening and you are reading Anagoras. Anagoras committed suicide twenty-five centuries before. He himself was not interested in his life and you are interested?
BUT MAN AND WOMAN MADE AS ONE BY LOVE... if this is not going to happen, life in the future will become darker. Even if it survives the world war, it will not be worth living. It will become more and more sad, more and more meaningless.
Except love there is no survival, no savior. But love has to be of the quality that gives freedom, not new chains for you; a love that gives you wings and supports you to fly as high as possible.
MAN AND WOMAN MADE AS ONE BY LOVE, INSEPARABLE, INDISTINGUISHABLE, ARE VERILY ENTITLED TO THE PRIZE.
“Would you like to talk about this and also about sex and relationships and if they matter in the spiritual growth?
“I ask this question because I have never experienced this except once three years ago and everybody is even going beyond it.”
Before I discuss it, one thing I must tell you: all those about whom you say, “everybody is already going beyond it” – they are simply talking. You can also talk!
Nobody is going beyond it. Even Niskriya is sitting silently – beyond? What will happen to his camera? But talking is good.
One can go beyond it, but first one should know about it.
Sex is not just a matter of biological reproduction. If that were the case there would be no problem.
Sex is also your energy of creativity. No impotent person in the whole history of man has been a creator, a poet, a painter, a mystic, a dancer, a musician, a scientist – in no direction, no dimension. Sex is not only the energy of reproducing children, it is also the energy of being creative in many, many ways.
It has not been taken note of and I have been condemned continuously because I say every great man in the world has been more sexual – oversexual – than ordinary people. It is because of his oversexuality that he is not satisfied by only creating children. That is not enough. Unless he has created great statues, temples and cathedrals, unless he has painted like Picasso, unless he has written poetry like Rabindranath, his creative energy will kill him. It is too much and too overwhelming, it needs a release.
And these people were not very much interested in women – not that they were against women, once in a while it was good, but their basic interest was to create something.
If sex is simply creating children, then nobody – neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo da Vinci nor Van Gogh – nobody was interested if it was just to create children. Yes, once in a while, just for a change they all loved women – and not one, but many women – but that was only a holiday; a holiday from their creativity, the weekend. If you were to tell them to choose between the two they would have chosen their poetry, their music, their dance. They would not have chosen to produce children. Many of them have not produced children. And those who have produced, have not produced children of any great quality; even their names are not remembered. Do you know the names of any of the children of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, Tolstoy? It was simply on the side, they were not much concerned about it.
But they created great novels which will live as long as man lives on the earth. One simply cannot imagine that there can come a time when Dostoevsky’s novels will become out of date – impossible. They are so far ahead, we are not even contemporaries to them. And perhaps there will never be anybody who can call himself a contemporary of Dostoyevsky. The novels are of such great beauty that one cannot conceive how a man could create just with words, ordinary words, so much beauty and so much poetry, so much truth! So much joy and so much blissfulness.
This BOOK OF MIRDAD is one of those books which will live eternally, as long as a single human being survives on the earth. But nobody knows... The man who wrote the book is completely
forgotten. Mirdad is a fiction, Mirdad is the name of the hero. The man who wrote the book... his name was Mikhail Naimy, but his name does not matter. His book is so great, greater than himself. He himself tried his whole life to create something similar again, but he failed. He has written many other books, but the BOOK OF MIRDAD is the Everest. The others are small hills, hillocks, they don’t matter much.
If love is understood as the meeting of two souls – not just a sexual, biological meeting of male and female hormones – then love can give you great wings, it can give you great insights into life. And lovers can become for the first time friends. Otherwise they have always been enemies in disguise.
The religions and the so-called saints who have escaped from the world, cowards who cannot face and encounter life, have poisoned the whole idea of love as the only spirituality. They have condemned sex, and with their condemnation of sex they have also condemned love, because people think sex and love are synonymous.
They are not. Sex is a very small part of your biological energy. Love is your whole being, love is your soul. You have to learn that sex is simply a need of the society, of the race, to continue itself. You can participate if you want, but you cannot avoid love. The moment you avoid love all your creativity dies and all your senses become insensitive; great dust gathers around you. You become the living dead.
Yes, you breathe and you eat and you talk and you go to the office every day till death comes and releases you from the boredom that you were carrying your whole life. If sex is all that you have then you don’t have anything; then you are just an instrument of biology, of the universe, to reproduce. You are just a machine, a factory.
But if you can conceive love as your real being, and loving another person as a deep friendship, as a dance of two hearts together with such synchronicity that they become almost one, you don’t need any other spirituality. You have found it.
Love leads to the ultimate experience – called god, called the absolute, called the truth. These are only names. In fact the ultimate has no name; it is nameless, but love leads towards it.
If you think only of sex and never become aware of love, then you are going down the drain. Yes, you will produce children and you will live in misery and you will play cards and you will go to see the movie and you will watch football matches and you will have great experiences of utter futility, boredom, war, and a constant undercurrent of anxiety, called by the existentialists, “angst.” But you will never know the real beauty of existence, the real silence and peace of the cosmos.
Love can make it possible.
But remember, love knows no boundaries. Love cannot be jealous, because love cannot possess. It is ugly, the very idea that you possess somebody because you love. You possess somebody – it means you have killed somebody and turned him into a commodity.
Only things can be possessed. Love gives freedom. Love is freedom. Devapria, now it is time to go beyond it.
Gloria Lovejoy, an ageing Hollywood starlet who has been married eight times, eventually dies. She is buried next to her first husband, Reginald. Two of her old friends are putting flowers on her grave when they notice the inscription, which reads: “Together at last.”
One of the old ladies says,
“I did not realize Gloria was so fond of Reginald.”
“Don’t be silly,” replies the other, “it is referring to her legs.”
When Leo the lion tamer gets mauled by one of his lions, the circus owner advertises for a replacement. Eliza, an attractive young woman, applies for the job and goes with the circus owner and Leo to look at the lions.
The circus owner is reluctant, but finally lets her into the cage with the lions.
Eliza closes the door behind her and proceeds to undress and lie down naked on the floor of the cage.
Immediately two lions race over to her, stop dead, and then start to lick her body all over. The circus owner turns to Leo, who is still nursing his injured arm.
“Hey, Leo, why can’t you do that?” he asks.
“I can, I can!” cries Leo. “Just get those two crazy lions out of there!”
Old man Finkelstein, the ancient millionaire, marries a sixteen-year-old girl but is unable to perform sexually. He is so desperate that he goes to see his doctor, who gives him a massive injection of hormones.
“Now look,” says the doctor, “every time you want an erection, you have to say ‘Beep.’ And then to make it lie down, you have to say ‘Beep-beep.’”
“How marvelous!” says Fink.
“Yes, but I must warn you,” continues the doctor, “it is only going to work three times before you die.” On his way home, old Fink decides to try it out just once.
“Beep,” he says, and immediately he gets an erection. Thrilled, he says, “Beep-beep” and it lies down again.
At that moment, a little Toyota overtakes his limousine and goes, “Beep” and the car in the opposite lane goes, “Beep-beep.” Aware that he has only one time left, the old man tells his chauffeur to go faster. He runs into the house as fast as he can and shouts, “Honey, don’t ask any questions. Just take off your clothes and jump into bed!”
The girl does as she is told and old man Finkelstein hurries after her. Just as he climbs into bed, he says, “Beep.”
His young wife rolls over and says, “What is all this ‘Beep-beep’?”
Now we can do our prayer. Two minutes of absolute silence, and no movement. And when I say, “Let go,” then simply allow your body to fall, without any effort on your part. So, begin. Relax...
... Okay, come back.
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