Love knows responsibility

Beloved Osho,

I took sannyas ten years ago and felt at home for the first time in my life. Since then, silence, peace and clarity are growing. Yet I feel that I am moving more towards death than towards life and love. My girlfriend tells me I am cold and know nothing about love. She may be right. Am I keeping my heart closed? Is my meditation an escape and a protection from involving myself completely in life?

Deva Sudheer, I do not agree with your analysis. You say, “I took sannyas ten years ago and felt at home for the first time in my life.” That is right.

“Since then, silence, peace and clarity are growing.” That too is right.

“Yet I feel that I am moving more towards death than towards life and love.” That is not right and that is not your idea. That is your girlfriend’s idea.

Because you are becoming silent, peaceful, and a clarity is growing in you and you are feeling for the first time at home in life, it will change immensely all your relationships – particularly the relationship with your girlfriend. You cannot be the same old person who used to be passionately, hotly in pursuit of the woman. You have become cooler, and the person who will note it first will be the woman you are with. She will not think that it is coolness, she will think it is coldness.

You, yourself are saying, “My girlfriend tells me I am cold and know nothing about love. She may be right.” She is not right, because you are not cold, you are just cool. And it is not true that you don’t know love. But people are accustomed to a hot love, and in their mind there are only two possibilities – either you are hot about them, or you are cold.

The golden mean does not exist for people.

A man of meditation never becomes cold and never remains hot either: he becomes cool, calm and quiet. His love takes a totally new dimension, which will appear to ordinary people as indifference. To those who understand, his love becomes less noisy, less stupid, less retarded, less biological, but starts having a flavor of spirituality, which needs an understanding; otherwise the other person, your partner, is bound to think you have become cold. And coldness is a sign of death, not of life.

You are saying, “Am I keeping my heart closed?” No, your heart is as open as it has never been before. But your girlfriend is not growing with you in your meditations. She is no longer a fellow traveler; she has been left behind, and a distance has grown.

You have to help her. But on the contrary, she is trying to pull you back. And it seems she is powerful, because she has convinced you that you are growing and moving towards death and towards coldness, and not towards life and love. And you say, “She may be right.”

This is a dangerous idea if you carry it in your mind; then rather than helping her, she will destroy you. Now it is an urgent duty for you to share your meditation, your silence, your clarity, your coolness with your girlfriend. I know it is a difficult job. Particularly if the man goes ahead and the woman is left behind, it is more difficult. She will create tantrums, she will throw things, she will have pillow fights, she will disturb your meditations. She can do anything, because you are slipping out of her hands, out of her possession.

And it is not only about small people, even a man like Socrates… his wife poured boiling water, which she was preparing for tea, over his head and burnt half of his face for his whole life. He was teaching his students – and you will see what I mean by coolness: he wiped the water and continued with what he was teaching.

The students were shocked; they could not believe it. At least the woman could have waited if she wanted to fight with her husband; she had every right, but not before the students who have come from faraway places to seek the wisdom of Socrates. But they were more impressed by the way Socrates responded to the incident, as if nothing had happened.

He simply wiped his face, and started where he had been stopped by his wife – this is coolness, this is calmness – this is suchness. And when a student asked, “We cannot understand, and we have forgotten all that we had come to ask you. Now this question has become more important to us: Your wife has misbehaved, and you have not even taken note of it.”

Socrates said, “Whatever she is capable of she has done, and whatever I am capable of I am doing. Our capacities are different – this is nobody’s fault.” He is not angry about his wife; on the contrary he is very compassionate. He said, “Any woman would have done the same, because I am continually concerned with my students, with philosophers coming from faraway places to visit me, and I am discussing things in which she is not interested at all. Sometimes the whole day passes and I don’t have any time for her. She is a poor woman, and she is behaving just as any unconscious human being is supposed to behave.”

But if it happens otherwise – my experience is of both the types – if the woman progresses in meditation, in silence, in blissfulness, she manages to pull her husband closer to her state. Husbands are very obedient people.

It rarely happens that the couple grow together; then it has a beauty of its own, no conflict. I would like couples to grow together, hand in hand, dancing the same dance, singing the same song, so as they grow, their understanding about each other also grows and nobody creates trouble. Otherwise, whoever is left behind feels offended.

Your wife, Sudheer, or your girlfriend, is suffering from a natural phenomenon. She has been left behind. You have not cared to keep her hand in your hand; you have grown alone. Now, don’t be convinced by her ideas.

You, yourself say, “I feel for the first time that I have arrived home.” You feel your serenity, your silence, your clarity, and still you are convinced by your wife that you are moving towards death, and that you are not moving towards love and life because you are becoming cold. Now it is your responsibility.

Love knows responsibility.

Share whatever you have gained in these ten years. Help her to grow; otherwise, she will poison your own mind and destroy your growth. Your heart is not closed; neither is your meditation an escape and a protection from involving yourself completely in life.

Your meditation is a preparation for a higher life, for a deeper life, for a more divine life. But you will have to be more loving and more compassionate towards your girlfriend, and don’t be, in any way, pulled back by her.

A man walks into a department store and goes up to the good-looking woman behind the counter.

“Excuse me,” he says, “do you keep stationery?”

She blushes and says, “Well, as long as I can, but then I go absolutely crazy.”

Now the word stationery, one would have never thought would be understood in this way. But words are words; how you interpret them, what meaning you give them, becomes their meaning.

Your girlfriend must be troubling you. And I am not condemning her, I am simply saying that it is your fault. If you wanted to remain in a relationship, then you should not go too far away. The distance will destroy your relationship.

Meditate together, and help her to come closer to you. And don’t be taken by her attitudes, don’t allow her to poison your mind. That’s what you are doing, you are accepting her ideas.

It is not yet understood by humanity that women are in many ways stronger than men. Just the other day, Neelam was showing me a woman’s picture. I could not believe my eyes. She was preparing for a national competition in Japan, and now that kind of competition is becoming popular all over the world.

The competition is to show that a woman can also be muscular. This has been up to now the monopoly of men. And men have been convincing women all through history, “That is our superiority, our strength: we are muscular; you are weak, fragile, you need protection.” Seeing that woman, I could not believe that she was a woman. She was looking like a great wrestler, with such good muscles.

And these competitions are proving it, that to be muscular is not men’s monopoly. They have just convinced women that they cannot have muscles; otherwise, there is no reason. They can do the same gymnastics, the same exercises, and they can have a muscular body – although a muscular body in a woman is not beautiful, it looks ugly.

But in every way, the woman is stronger than man. This has to be understood. She lives longer – five years more than man. All over the world, her average life is five years more. And when children are born, a hundred girls are born to every one hundred and fifteen boys, because fifteen boys are going to pop off before the time of marriage comes. At that time there will be a hundred girls and a hundred boys. Girls don’t pop off. They have more resistance against diseases than man has.

Now it all depends what we mean by power. Women fall sick less, men fall sick more. Women remain younger longer than men. Women go mad less than men. One would expect that things should be otherwise – because women behave so crazily they should go mad more. But because they are throwing out their madness every day, in installments, they don’t gather it enough. And because man goes on controlling himself, he accumulates his madness, and then one day it is too much and he has a nervous breakdown.

Less women commit suicide than men; although women say almost every day that they are going to commit suicide. They even make attempts – but very safe ones. A few pills, sleeping pills they will take, knowing perfectly well that that is not going to kill them. It is enough to harass the husband and make him condemned by all the neighbors, and the doctor, and the whole crowd: “You should behave, and you should treat her in a more gentlemanly way. This is not right.”

But women don’t commit suicide. They talk about it, they manage the drama also, but their number of suicides is half the number of men’s. Man does not play the drama; he feels that that kind of drama is womanish… it is not good to take sleeping pills and make yourself look stupid in the morning.

And it is strange – if the man takes the pills, then nobody is going to tell the wife, “You should behave better.” Still the man will be told, “How stupid you are, is this the way to behave with a poor woman and children?”

If a man is developing spiritually, it is for his own sake that his girlfriend – or wife, or whatsoever is her name – should not be left behind. Otherwise she will go on pulling your leg. She is not worried about your spirituality. In the first place, she does not believe that you are spiritual. Just sitting with closed eyes, she knows you are simply avoiding her. It is not meditation, it is escape.

No woman has any good ideas about her husband or boyfriend. She knows that this stupid guy… “Who does he think he is befooling, that he has become serene, silent, cool, attained clarity?” No woman with whom you are sexually related is going to believe that you have any intelligence. She goes on worshiping people who have renounced the world, who have renounced the woman particularly. That man may have no other qualities, may be just a complete idiot, but the women will go and touch his feet – here is a great saint. So remember that your fellow traveler is not to be left behind.

When Hymie comes back from visiting the doctor, he looks terrible. Hymie tells his wife that the doctor had said that he was going to die before the night was out. She hugs him, and they cry a little, and Becky suggests they go to bed early to make love one more time.

They make love until Becky falls asleep, but Hymie is frightened to sleep because it is his last night on earth. He lies there in the dark while Becky snores.

Hymie whispers in his wife’s ear, “Becky, please, just one more time for old times’ sake.” But Becky keeps snoring.

Hymie looks at his watch, leans over to his wife and shakes her hard, “Please Becky, just one more time for old times’ sake!”

Becky simply looks at him and says, “Hymie, how can you be so selfish? It is alright for you, but I have to get up in the morning.”

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

Osho, The Razor’s Edge, Ch 17, Q 2