Mullah Nasruddin married a very ugly woman, the ugliest possible. Naturally the friends were puzzled and they asked Mullah, ’You have money, you have prestige, you could have got any beautiful woman that you wanted, why have you chosen this ugly woman?’
He said, ’There is a reason for it. I will never suffer from jealousy. This woman will always be faithful to me. I cannot believe anybody falling in love with her. In fact, even I am not in love with her. It is impossible. So I know nobody can love her.’
With Mohammedans it is a tradition that when the wife comes for the first time she asks the husband – because the Mohammedan woman has to remain behind a purdah, behind a curtain, she cannot show her face to everybody – so the woman asks the husband, ’To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show my face?’ So when the woman asked Mullah, ’To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show it?’ Mullah said, ’You can show it to everybody except me!’
If you are falling in love with a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, you are getting into trouble. There is going to be jealousy, there is going to be murder, there is going to be something. You are in trouble. And from the very beginning you will start possessing so that there is no possibility of anything going wrong or beyond your control. You will start destroying the woman or the man. You will stop giving freedom. You will encroach on the woman from all sides and close all the doors. Now the woman was beautiful because she was free. Freedom is such an ingredient in beauty that when you see a bird on the wing in the sky, it is one kind of bird, but if you see the same bird in a cage, it is no longer the same. The bird on the wing in the sky has a beauty of its own. It is alive. It is free. The whole sky is his. The same bird in a cage is ugly. The freedom is gone, the sky is gone. Those wings are just meaningless now, a kind of burden. They remain from the past and they
create misery. Now this is not the same bird.
When you fell in love with the woman, she was free; you fell in love with freedom. When you bring her home you destroy all possibilities of being free, but in that very destruction you are destroying the beauty. Then one day suddenly you find that you don’t love the woman at all – because she is beautiful no more. This happens every time. Then you start searching for another woman and you don’t see what has happened; you don’t look at the mechanism, at how you destroyed the beauty of the woman.
This is the first kind of love love one. Beware of it. It is not of much value, it is not very significant, it has no value. And if you are not aware you will remain trapped in love one. Love two is: the object is not important, your subjectivity is. You are loving so you bestow your love on somebody. But love is your quality, it is not object-oriented. The subject is overflowing with the quality of love, the very being is loving. Even if you are alone you are loving. Love is a kind of flavor to your being.
When you fall in love, the second kind of love, there is going to be greater joy than the first. And you will know – because this love will know – how to keep the other free. Love means to give all that is beautiful to the beloved. Freedom is the most beautiful, the most cherished goal of human consciousness, how can you take it away? If you love a woman really, or a man, the first present, the first gift, will be the gift of freedom. How can you take it away? You are not the enemy, you are the friend.
This the second kind of love will not be against freedom, it will not be possessive. And you will not be worried very much that somebody else also appreciates your woman or your man. In fact, you will be happy that you have a woman whom others also appreciate, that you have chosen a woman whom others also desire. Their desire simply proves that you have chosen a diamond, a valuable being, who has intrinsic value. You will not be jealous. Each time you see someone looking at your woman with loving eyes you will be thrilled again. You will fall in love with your woman again through those eyes.
This second kind of love will be more a friendship than a lust and it will be more enriching to your soul.
And this second kind of love will have one more difference. In the first kind of love, the object oriented, there will be many lovers surrounding the object, and there will be fear. In the second kind of love there will be no fear and you will be free not to bestow your love only on your beloved, you will be free to bestow your love on others too.
In the first, the object will be one and many will be the lovers. In the second, the subject will be one and it will be flowing in many directions, bestowing its love in many ways on many people – because the more you love, the more love grows. If you love one person then naturally your love is not very rich; if you love two, it is doubly rich; if you love many, or if you can Love the whole humanity, or you can love even the animal kingdom, or you can love even trees, the vegetable kingdom – then your love goes on growing. And as your love grows, you grow, you expand. This is real expansion of consciousness. Drugs only give you a false idea of expansion; love is the basic ultimate drug that gives you the real idea of expansion.
And there is a possibility.... Albert Schweitzer has said ’reverence for life’ all that lives has to be loved. Mahavira in India has said the same thing. His philosophy of AHIMSA, non-violence, says love all that lives. But one man, one contemporary in America, Buber, has gone even one step further than Mahavira and Schweitzer. He says, ’Have reverence for things too.’ That is the ultimate in love. You don’t only love that which lives, you love even that which is. You love the chair, you love the pillars, you love things too because they are also there. They also have a kind of being. When one has come to this point – that you love the whole existence irrespective of what it is, that love becomes unconditional it is turning into prayer, it is becoming a meditation.
The first love is good in the sense that if you have lived a loveless life it is better than no love. But the second love is far better than the first and will have less anxiety, less anguish, less turmoil, conflict, aggression, violence.
The second kind of love will be more of a love than the first kind, it will be more pure. In the first, the lust is too much and spoils the whole game – but even the second love is not the last. There is love three – when subject and object disappear. In the first the object is important, in the second the subject is important, in the third there is transcendence one is neither a subject nor an object and one is not dividing reality in any way: subject, object, know-er, known, lover, loved. All division has disappeared. One is simply love.
Up to the second you are a lover. When you are a lover something will hang around you like a boundary, like a definition. With the third, all definition disappears. There is only love; you are not. This is what Jesus means when he says. ’God is love’ – love three. If you misunderstand the first, you will never be able to interpret rightly what Jesus’ meaning is. It is not even the second, it is the third. God is love.
One is simply Love. It is not that one loves, it is not an act, it is one’s very quality. It is not that in the morning you are loving and in the afternoon you are not loving – you are love, it is your state. It is not a HAL, it is a magma. You have arrived home. You have become love. Now there is no division. All duality has disappeared.
The first kind of love is ’I-it’; the other is taken as a thing. That’s what Martin Buber says ’I-it’.
The other is like a thing. You have to possess. My wife, my husband, my child... and in that very possession you kill the spirit of the other.
The second kind of love Martin Buber calls ’I-thou’. The other is a person. You have respect for the other. How can you possess somebody you respect? But Martin Buber stops at the second; he has no understanding about the third love. Martin Buber cannot understand Jesus. He remains a Jew.
He goes up to ’I-thou’. It is a great step from ’I-it’ to ’I-thou’ but it is nothing compared to the step that happens from ’I-thou’ to no dualism, to Advaita, to oneness, where only love remains. Even ’I-thou’ is a bit of a tension-creating phenomenon – you are separate and the beloved is separate. And all separation brings misery. Unless one becomes totally one with the beloved, with the loved one, some kind of misery is bound to remain lurking by the side. In the first the misery is very clear, in the second the misery is not so clear; in the first it is very close, in the second it is not so close, it is far away – but it is there. In the third it is no more.
So Priya, I would like you to learn more of love. Move from the first to the second and keep it in your consciousness that the third is the goal. And don’t be worried about losing yourself. Lose yourself because that is the only way to find yourself
Sufis: The People of the path
Osho
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