A woman who made love to every man

The story is really beautiful. A very small story, nothing much in it, and yet tremendous is its content.

A woman who made love to every man
who came to her for sex
but her cheek was always wet from tears.

Just a one sentence story, but the story can be the story of the whole humanity. This is what is happening.

Love is possible, but it never rises above sex. Hence all the cheeks are full of tears… wet. I can see your cheeks full of tears, tears rolling down. One of the greatest miseries in human life is that one remains with sexuality and never moves beyond it and never achieves a moment of love. […]

Sex is only the alphabet of love, bricks out of which you can make a Taj Mahal. But Taj Mahal is not just bricks. You can pile up bricks; it will not become a Taj Mahal. Taj Mahal is a composition of infinite love, of infinite creativity. Bricks are only the visible part of it. Taj Mahal is something invisible. Bricks have made that invisible visible in a certain way and you can feel it. Bricks help the invisible to be felt, but the bricks are not the invisible.

Sex is just like bricks. And if you go on piling sex, one is bound to feel in tears. The woman must have been a woman of deep understanding.

People look at each other, but they don’t look at each other at all. They are just looking for the sex object. A woman passes. Have you ever seen a woman as a being? Sometimes you become interested in a woman, but not as a being. You feel a certain attraction, but not as a being, but as a sex object. Or sometimes you are repelled, that too is sexual. Or sometimes you are not interested — bored, neither repelled nor attracted, just indifferent – but that too is sexual.

And unless you can come across a person who can look at you in your eyes as a being, not just as a sexual object; who can love you as a being… then you have found your friend, not before it.

We go on looking for only that which we have a desire for. Men looking at women, women looking at men, are not looking at each other. They are looking for something. They are looking for their own food. They have an appetite, a hunger – that hunger is sexual. Hence whenever somebody looks at you as a sex object you feel offended, because he is reducing your identity to a very muddy state. He is reducing you to the lowest denominator, to the lowest rung of your being.

A person can love you without reducing you. In fact, love never reduces you. Love helps you to rise above the ordinariness, love helps you to soar high. It makes you meditative, ecstatic. Love becomes the first proof that god exists, that life is not just matter, and man is not just body, that soul exists, that there is the world of the beyond.

That woman must have been missing it. She may have loved many people, but whenever she looked into their souls there was nothing but a desire for sex.

Osho, The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1, Ch 4, Q 2

Featured image by Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash

Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales