The Left & Right

People come to me and they ask how to go deep in a relationship, I tell them, 'First you go deep in meditation. Unless you are resolved within yourself you will create more problems than you already have. If you move in relationship, all your problems will be multiplied. Just watch. The greatest and the most beautiful thing in the world is love but can you find anything more ugly, more hell-creating?'

Mulla Nasruddin once told me, 'Well, I have been putting off the evil day for months but I have got to go this time.' 

'Dentist or doctor?' I inquired. 

'Neither,' he said, 'I am getting married.'

People go on avoiding marriage, people go on putting it off. When some day they find it impossible to get out of it only then they relax. Where is the problem? Why are people so afraid of getting deeply involved? Involvement immediately creates fear; commitment immediately creates fear -- and the modern man wants to have sex but no love.

A woman told me that she wants sex only with strangers. Traveling in a train, meeting with a stranger -- that's okay -- but not even with someone who is friendly or familiar. I asked, 'Why?' She said that once you make love to someone who is known to you, some involvement starts. In a train, on a journey, you meet, make love, you don't know even what the other person's name is, who he is, from where he comes. You get down when your station comes and he moves away, forgotten forever; he leaves no scratch, you remain completely clean. You come out of it completely clean and unscratched.

I can understand. This is the difficulty of the whole modern mind. All relationships are becoming by and by casual. People are afraid of any sort of commitment,, because they have come to know at least one thing out of bitter experience -- whenever you become related too much, the reality erupts, and your inner conflict starts being reflected by the other and then life becomes ugly, horrible, intolerable.

It happened once that I was sitting with a few friends in a university campus ground. One of the professors said, 'On the day my wedding occurred....' But the other professor stopped him immediately and said 'Pardon the correction, but affairs such as marriages, receptions, dinners, and things of that nature, take place. It is only calamities which occur. You see the distinction? Please don't say, "The day my marriage occurred, or the day my wedding occurred."'

The other was a professor of language and of course he was right. But the first man said, 'Yes, many, many things...' and again started, 'And as I was saying, the day my wedding occurred....It is a calamity.'

If you are outside of it, it may look like a beautiful oasis in the desert but as you come close the oasis starts drying and disappearing. Once you are caught in it, it is an imprisonment, but remember, the imprisonment doesn't come from the other, it comes from within you. If the left-hemisphere brain goes on dominating you, you will live a very successful life -- so successful that by the time you are forty you will have ulcers; by the time you are forty-five you will have had at least one or two heart-attacks; by the time you are fifty you will be almost dead -- but successfully dead. You may become a great scientist, but you will never become a great being. You may accumulate enough of wealth, but you will lose all that is of worth. You may conquer the whole world like an Alexander, but your own inner territory will remain unconquered.

There are many attractions to follow the left-hemisphere brain -- that is the worldly brain. It is more concerned with things: cars, money, houses, power, prestige. That is the orientation of the man who in India we call a GRUHASTHA, a householder. 

The right-hemisphere brain is the orientation of the SANNYASIN. one who is more interested in his own inner being, his inner peace, his blissfulness, and is less concerned about things. If they come easily, good; if they don't come that is also good. He is more concerned with the moment, less concerned with the future; more concerned with the poetry of life, less concerned with the arithmetic of it.

Ancient Music of The Pines

Osho