The Other is never Responsible -- good to Read
[A sannyasin mother says she is having problems in her relationship: I find myself being very *****y and nagging sometimes. I feel I'm just asking for a fight all the time.]
Mm mm, love always brings trouble -- and it has to be faced. Love cannot be always smooth, and it is good that it is not always smooth, otherwise you would not grow.
Whenever there is a change, any sort of change, things will come into focus more clearly. When change disturbs you, all your inner disturbances are stirred. You are both feeling disturbed and both trying to throw the responsibility on the other. Just try to see it inside yourself. The other is never responsible. Remember that as a mantra: The other is never responsible....
Just watch it ... just watch it. If you become wise in the moment, there will be no problem. This is wisdom that you get later on. Everybody becomes wise when the moment is gone. Retrospective wisdom is worthless. When you are picking on something, at that very moment become aware, and let awareness function. Immediately you will drop it. But when you have done everything and fought and nagged and *****ed and then you become wise and see that there was no point in it, it is too late. It is meaningless -- you have done the harm. This wisdom is just pseudo-wisdom. It gives you a feeling as if you have understood. That is a trick of the ego.
This wisdom is not going to help. When you were doing the thing, at that very moment, simultaneously, the awareness should arise, and you should see that it is useless.
If you can see it when it is there, then you cannot do it. One can never go against one's awareness, and if one goes against it, that awareness is not awareness. Something else is being mistaken for it.
So remember, the other is never responsible for anything. It is something boiling within you. And of course the one you love is closest to you. You cannot throw it on some stranger passing on the road, so the closest person becomes the place where you go on throwing and pouring your nonsense. But that has to be avoided, because love is very fragile. If you do it too much, if you overdo it, love can disappear.
The other is never responsible. Try to make this such a permanent state of awareness in you that whenever you start finding something wrong with the other, remember it. Catch yourself redhanded, and drop it then and there. And ask to be forgiven. And the second thing. Don't think that love is eternal. It is very fragile. It is as fragile as a rose flower. In the morning it is there -- by the evening it is gone. Any small thing can destroy it. In fact the higher a thing, the more fragile it is. It has to be protected. A rock will remain there but the flower will be gone. If you throw a rock against the flower, the rock is not going to be hurt, but the flower will be destroyed.
Love is very fragile and very delicate. One has to be very very careful and cautious about it. You can do such harm that the other becomes closed, becomes defensive. That's how one becomes closed. If you are fighting too much he will start escaping you; he will start becoming more and more cold, more and more closed, so he is no more vulnerable to your attack. Then you will attack him more because you will resist that coldness. This can become a vicious circle. And that's how lovers fall apart by and by. They drift away from each other, and they think that the other was responsible, that the other betrayed them. In fact as I see it, no lover has ever betrayed anybody. It is only ignorance that kills love -- nobody betrays it. Both wanted to be together, but somehow both were ignorant. Their ignorance played tricks upon them and became multiplied. By and by they drifted. Then they think that love is dangerous.
Love is not dangerous. Only unawareness is dangerous.
There are many people who avoid love just to be on safe ground. There are people who don't want to get committed in any relationship because they know that once you are committed and you come close, fighting starts, resistance starts, and ugly things bubble up, so what is the point? At the most they are interested in sexual relationships, but not in intimacy. And unless a relationship is intimate and deep, you will never know what relationship is.
Just a sexual relationship is a peripheral thing, and you will never be contented by it.
These things are natural. One has to accept them and by and by transcend them. If you feel too much anger, move into your room, beat the pillow, cry, weep, scream, but do it alone. Why show your ugly face to the other? What is the point? Just cathart.
A wise person moves through his unhappiness alone, and whenever he is happy, comes and shares it with people. A fool shares his unhappiness with people, and when he is happy he sits alone.
[Another sannyasin said she too was having difficulties in her relationship. Her boyfriend felt less and less like making love and this made her upset and frustrated, and she then became aggressive towards him. She said they were also at variance over how they used their money, as she wanted to be thrifty so they could stay in Poona longer, while he spent money easily and seemingly with no thought for the future.]
First thing: a moment always comes in life when one of the partners will not feel like having sex. It happens to every couple more or less. When the other person does not want to have sex, the other clings to it more than ever. The other starts feeling that if there is no sex, the relationship will disappear.
The more you ask for it, the more afraid he will feel. The relationship will disappear -- not because sex has disappeared, but because you go on demanding and he feels nagged continuously and he does not feel like making love.
He can either force himself and then he will feel bad, or if he goes his own way, he feels bad that he is making you unhappy; he feels guilty.
One thing has to be understood -- that sex has nothing to do with love. At the most it is a beginning. Love is greater than sex, higher than sex. Love can flower without sex.
[She answers: But he'll never say he loves me.]
No, you are making him afraid, because if he says that he loves you, you are ready there asking for sex. In your mind, love is almost synonymous with sex, that I can see. That's why he has become even afraid to touch and hug you. If he hugs you, touches you, you are ready.
You are making him afraid and you are not seeing the point. You are pushing him away unknowingly. He will become afraid to even talk to you because he talks and again the situation comes up and argument and this and that. You cannot argue about love. You cannot convince anybody about love. If he doesn't feel it, he doesn't.
He loves you, otherwise he would leave you. And you love him but you have a wrong understanding about sex. My understanding is this, that love starts growing for the first time when the hectic feverish sex has gone, has by and by slowed down. Then love becomes more and more settled, finer, superior. Something delicate starts happening. But you are not allowing it to happen.
He is ready to love you but you are clinging to sex. You go on pulling him down. That pulling him down may destroy the whole relationship.
I can understand, because the feminine mind always clings to sex only when the man is not interested. If the man is interested, the woman is completely uninterested. I see this every day. If the man is after you, you play the game that you are uninterested. When the man is not interested, you become afraid, and then the whole role changes. Then you start playing the game that you need it, that without it you will go crazy; that you cannot live without it. All that is just nonsense! Nobody has ever gone mad without it!
If you love the person, your energy will be transformed. If you don't love the person, then drop out. If you love the person, the energy has a chance now to transform to a higher reality. Use that opportunity. And nagging is not going to help. It will make everything more ugly and it will do just the opposite of what you want. Money is not important... and it may be just a trick to control.
[Osho said that they could either be here for longer, both in conflict, unhappy, or stay a shorter time more happily.]
Just see the point. It is a question of quality, not of quantity. How many days you are here is irrelevant. You may be here for only one day, but if you are really with me and happy and celebrat-ing, that's enough.
That will change your whole life.
And this is how things go. If you are too miserly, he will spend too much because that will become just an act of being free. He will show you that you cannot control him. If you don't control him, he himself may understand that he is unnecessarily wasting money. But let him see!
Women are very money-minded; more interested in the material part of life, and they miss many things. That's why you don't see great women poets, great women painters, great women saints. They are more interested in ordinary things. Anything that has a qualitative dimension seems meaningless to them. Money will be more meaningful than music. They miss much. They think that they are very practical; they are not. This is the most absurd practicality there is -- to lose quality for quantity.
Tell him that whatsoever he feels like, to do, and that you can be here for as many days as possible, but let these days be beautiful. Sometimes even a single moment can be such a transformation. There are many people who choose quantity, who would like to live a hundred years, never thinking whether their life has anything to live for, whether anything is coming out of their life, flowering. Just living for a hundred years is meaningless....
[Osho recounted an incident in Emerson's life when, at the age of sixty, he was asked his age by one of his peers.
Emerson replied that he was three hundred and sixty; The man repeated his question, thinking Emerson must have misheard him. Emerson said that, like the questioner, he was sixty, but he had lived three hundred and sixty years in those sixty years. He was saying that he had lived a qualitative life.]
It is possible to live three hundred years in three seconds, because when you move in the qualitative dimension, the dimension of quality, intensity is the only value.
Be here for one month -- but be fully here. And always remember, I am not talking philosophy. I am very pragmatic.
Whatsoever I am saying are very practical things. Mm? Just try to see it. Good !
[Another sannyasin says: Very often when I am going to sleep, just before I become unconscious, my body jerks and my heart seems to beat very fast, and there is a feeling of fear.]
Is there any disturbance in sleep? You feel perfectly well when you get up?
[The sannyasin answers: Yes, sleep is good.]
Then don't be worried. It has something to do with your meditations. Allow it and don't hold it. If a jerk comes, allow it.
It is just a change of gear inside the energy. It happens to everybody when you move from wakefulness into sleep, but you have become aware of it, that's all. It is a good sign, a good sign of awareness of something very subtle.
It is just like changing gears in a car.
Whenever you go from wakefulness to sleep, or from sleep to wakefulness, that change happens. Whenever you go from dreaming to a non-dreaming sleep, again the gear changes. By and by, if you become really perceptive and aware, you will feel that whenever a mood changes, a subtle gear inside you changes. There is a small click -- it can almost be heard.
You are angry and then anger goes. Your whole mechanism has to change because for anger the whole mechanism goes into a different type of working. It gets ready for being angry. The mechanism prepares either for fight or fight. When the anger goes, again the mechanism relaxes to the normal state of affairs and the gear changes. It changes with every emotion. From waking to sleep, one becomes aware more easily. Then you become aware of the second -- moving from sleep into waking.
It is more difficult than the first because you are asleep. You cannot feel the jerk so easily unless you become a little aware in your sleep. Then you will feel the third gear that changes in moving between dreams and no-dreams, and then the fourth which changes when moving from no-dream to dream. And so on and so forth.
You will become aware that anger, love, hatred, jealousy, all have a small mechanism inside you, and that whenever one of them functions, the body manages in a different way.
An angry person is a totally different person.
It is as if the country is at war. The whole shape of the country changes. The army becomes more important. Democratic freedom becomes meaningless and the country goes dictatorial. Luxuries are no more important. Life is geared for war.
When the war goes, the military subsides into the background. Things bubble up and come to the surface -- life again starts singing and enjoying. Now life is geared to peace.
The same happens in the body continuously. And that's why people who move from one emotion to another too much, have too much wear and tear. Their inner mechanism is almost always in bad shape. A person who remains silently in one climate has a different harmony.
But it is good that you have become aware.
[Another sannyasin says: I feel like I've been ripped open with a knife. I have a sensitivity for everything around me and my world just seems blown apart.]
Mm mm... the more one makes a world, the more one creates problems around it. Then there is always the fear of its getting blown. So don't make a world. One should start living without a world. One moment is enough. Live it, and then the next moment comes. But we dream, project, and create an illusory world, then again and again it comes up against reality. Reality is not going to be shattered by your dreams.
The dreams will shatter.
So learn a lesson -- don't project worlds. They create frustrations and misery and anguish. Just live this moment, that's all. Then wait, and when the next moment comes we will see. One has to learn how to live in danger and insecurity -- then it never comes, because there is no world to be blown. Otherwise the balloon is going to burst. The mind has a tendency to go on giving more and more air to the balloon so it goes on getting bigger and bigger and bigger; until one day it bursts.
One has to come to understand that life is insecure and there is no way to make it .secure, no way at all. If you ask for the impossible, you ask for trouble. Some people get into love and then they start thinking of marriage and children, and they create the whole problem. If I say to them not to get married, not to have children, they think 'Why are you saying this? We want to!' You want to -- and then you get into trouble.
[Osho went on to say that the relationship between this sannyasin and her husband had not been going well for some time but they had avoided facing up to that. He suggested they sit down together and sort things out; should find out whether they still loved each other or not. If love was not there then nothing could be solved. Once love was there everything could be solved. Otherwise, [your husband] could solve one problem and she would create another and the basic problem would remain untouched.]
And don't be worried -- I am here. If you don't bring problems, what am I going to do? When you bring problems you make me very happy (laughter).
[A sannyasin who is a theoretical physicist, says: My mind feels very slow and dull, and my thoughts feel as if they 're moving through treacle. It feels rather strange.]
It is strange but it is very good. Everything has to slow down, and there comes a moment when everything stops, even time stops. Suddenly you are in an eternal now... nothing moves.
It is very strange. Even a slowing down of the process is very strange. One becomes afraid because one has always lived in such a hurry; so many thoughts and desires and ambitions, running and chasing this and that. It is as if somebody is mad and suddenly becomes sane. Everything will slow down because a madman is moving fast. His mind goes on at jet speed. He is almost a whirl-wind.
But this is good. That is the whole taoist attitude about life -- to slow down, to become a dullard.
[The sannyasin adds: At night I've been dreaming a lot, and in my dreams I'm very fast.]
Let it be so. That may just be a catharsis. You have slowed down a little in the day, so somewhere the mind has to take revenge. Somewhere it will; it is good. Dreams will also disappear. And it may not be exactly as you are reporting.
It may just be that you have become a little alert in your sleep so you remember more about dreams.
Everybody dreams. There are almost eight cycles of dreaming in one night. One goes on revolving in a wheel. There is almost twenty minutes of dreaming, then a twenty-minute or forty-minute gap, and then again twenty minutes of dreaming. Many people will say in the morning that they have not dreamt at all. They all dream. The only thing is that they are not at all alert, not even slightly alert, and they cannot remember.
When they do remember, they remember the last dream that they had just before waking -- and that too, they never remember rightly. You remember only the tail part because that is what is there when you wake. The whole elephant is gone, and only the tail remains. You have to go backwards if you want to find the elephant.
Even then many things are missed and the mind starts adding things, and interpreting whatsoever was in your dreams. You add many things because the mind is such that it cannot allow any gaps.
[Osho concluded by talking about how the different interpretations of dreams change according to the influences in one's life. For example, freudian patients, people undergoing freudian analysis, will have freudian dreams, while jungian patients will have jungian dreams.
Because the mind is coloured by the different schools of thought, it interprets the dreams accordingly.
Hence, if one dreams of a large, rounded, pillar-shaped object, a freudian will interpret it as a phallus, while the jung-oriented mind will interpret it as a shivalinga and give it religious connotations.
THE END.
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