Osho, Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language # THE RADICAL REVOLUTION Question 4

 

Osho,

Is it possible for two people in a relationship to be bad
for each other? Does it happen that two people’s energy just does not mix? How
to know the difference between the thorns of a healthy relationship and an
unhealthy relationship?

I have never come across a single individual who is bad, but
I have come across couples - thousands and thousands of couples - who are bad.
In fact I have never come across a couple who is not bad. Persons are beautiful
and couples are ugly. Something goes wrong somewhere. It should not be so but
it is so.

The way love has been understood has been wrong. What you
call love is not love; it is something else. Sometimes you are alone and you
cannot tolerate your loneliness, and just to fill the gap, the inner hole, you
find somebody. It is not love. And of course things are going to be bad. From
the very beginning the very basis is wrong. 

Love is a sharing of two
individuals. And I call a person individual when he is happy with his
aloneness. Otherwise he is not an individual, if he cannot be happy alone. Just
think. If you cannot be happy alone, how can you be happy together? Two persons
are unhappy separately, and you think there is going to be a miracle? - two
unhappy persons together and suddenly happiness arises? Unhappiness is doubled
- not only doubled, multiplied.

Out of your unhappiness you seek the other; then the
relationship is going to be wrong. Seek the other out of happiness, and then
the relationship will never be wrong. Seek out of happiness.

First meditate, first feel your own being, first pray. First
grow into love; otherwise what are you going to do when you have found the
lover? Then you don’t know what to do.

An anecdote:

His friend was a shy one, but after being told that if he
went to the dance all he would have to do would be stand in the corner, he went.
The friend shoved him immediately into the arms of a pretty girl on the dance
floor.

For an hour or so he lost track of his shy friend, but then
spotted him standing happily next to the girl he had been shoved upon. What is
more, he had his arm around her waist and she was looking up at him with
adoring eyes.

“We are engaged,” the shy one told his friend.

“Good heavens!” said the friend. “How did that happen?”

“Well,” said the shy one, “I danced with her six times and I
just could not think of anything else to ask her.”

Your love affairs are so stupid. And then you are waiting
for something great to happen out of them. In the first place you don’t have
any love in your heart. That’s why everybody wants to be loved. You want to be
loved; your woman also wants to be loved. 

Naturally there is conflict: both are
ready to take and nobody is ready to give. And how to give? You don’t have it
in the first place. Only a loving person - one who is already loving - can find
the right partner.

This is my observation. If you are unhappy you will find
somebody who is unhappy. Unhappy people are attracted toward unhappy people.
And it is good, it is natural. It is good that the unhappy people are not
attracted towards happy people, otherwise they will destroy their happiness. It
is perfectly okay. Only happy people are attracted towards happy people. The
same attracts the same. 

Intelligent people are attracted towards intelligent
people, stupid people are attracted towards stupid people.

You can watch it. In Pune there are thousands of people, but
only a few people will be attracted toward me - only those who are really
concerned with knowing who they are. Others won’t be attracted. Even my
neighbors, just the next-door neighbors. They have not come to listen. In fact
they are very worried.

It happened.

I lived in one town for ten years, and a person used to live
just over my head, but he never came to see me. Thousands of people would come
and go, but he never came. He was simply puzzled as to why people came to me.

Then he was transferred - he was a principal in a college -
he was transferred to another town. I visited the other town. I was invited to
his college to speak to the students; then he heard me for the first time. He
had to because he was the principal. Then he became more puzzled. He said, “For
ten years I lived just on top of you, and I missed, I never came. And I never
knew that you had something to share, that you had something to give to us.” He
started crying.

I said, “Don’t be worried. Just tell me, during these two
years you have not been in that town, what has happened?”

He said, “My wife died and I became very miserable. Then I
started meditating, thinking maybe it will help. Then something really started
happening in me and I started feeling very happy. I was worried I would not be
able to be alone without my wife, but now I am so happy that I don’t want to
get entangled with anybody.”

I told him, “Maybe that’s why you could understand me. The
meditation that you tried, the happiness that you are feeling - then there is a
possibility to have contact with me. Before you were on a different plane.”

You meet people of the same plane. So the first thing to
remember is: a relationship is bound to be bitter if it has grown out of
unhappiness. First be happy, be joyful, be celebrating, and then you will find
some other soul celebrating and there will be a meeting of two dancing souls
and a great dance will arise out of it.

Don’t ask for a relationship out of loneliness, no. Then you
are moving in a wrong direction, then the other will be used as a means and the
other will use you as a means. And nobody wants to be used as a means. Every
single individual is an end unto himself. It is immoral to use anybody as a
means. First learn how to be alone. Meditation is a way of being alone.

And if you can be happy when you are alone, you have learned
the secret of being happy. Now you can be happy together. If you are happy,
then you have something to share, to give. And when you give you get; it is not
the other way. Then a need arises to love somebody. Ordinarily the need is to
be loved by somebody. It is a wrong need. It is a childish need; you are not
mature. It is a child’s attitude.

A child is born. Of course, the child cannot love the
mother; he does not know what love is and he does not know who the mother is
and who the father is. He is totally helpless. His being has still to be
integrated; he is not one piece, he is not together yet. He is just a
possibility. The mother has to love, the father has to love, the family has to
shower love on the child. Now he learns one thing: that everybody has to love
him. And he never learns that he has to love. 

Now the child will grow, and if
he remains stuck with this attitude that everybody has to love him, he will
suffer his whole life. His body has grown, but his mind has remained immature.

A mature person is one who comes to know the other need:
that now I have to love somebody. The need to be loved is childish, immature.
The need to love is mature. And when you are ready to love somebody, a
beautiful relationship will arise; otherwise not.

“Is it possible for two people in a relationship to be bad
for each other?” Yes, that’s what is happening all over the world. To be good
is very difficult. You are not good even to yourself. How can you be good to
somebody else? You don’t even love yourself - how can you love somebody else?
Love yourself, be good to yourself.

And your so-called religious saints have been teaching you
never to love yourself, never to be good to yourself - be hard on yourself!
They have been teaching you to be soft toward others and hard toward yourself.
This is absurd.

I teach you the first and foremost thing is to be loving
toward yourself. Don’t be hard, be soft. Care about yourself. Learn how to forgive
yourself again and again and again - seven times, seventy-seven times, seven
hundred and seventy-seven times. 

Learn how to forgive yourself. Don’t be hard,
don’t be antagonistic toward yourself. Then you will flower.

And in that flowering you will attract some other flower. It
is natural. Stones attract stones, flowers attract flowers. And then there is a
relationship which has grace, which has beauty, which has a benediction in it.
And if you can find such a relationship, your relationship will grow into
prayerfulness, your love will become an ecstasy, and through love you will know
what God is.

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language

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