Osho – Man and woman are intimate enemies – enemies and yet intimate. If your woman is with you then you start feeling: how to be alone? When you are alone, after a few days you start a great thirst and hunger for your woman – how to be with her? If you are alone, appetite arises for love; if you are with somebody, the appetite disappears and you start thinking,
’Why not go to the Himalayas and sit silently in a cave? Why go on bothering with this nonsense?’ Just a few days ago Ramananda wrote a letter to me. First he used to live alone, then he got tired of aloneness – naturally. Everybody gets tired of aloneness, gets fed up with oneself. Nothing else to do, nowhere to go, nobody to look at, nobody to be with, nobody to hug, nobody to care for you or to care about.
He got tired and started looking for a woman – and when you look for trouble it comes! So then came Vani from faraway Germany, and they were both happy – as stories go. They were both happy. Then things started getting entangled, and there was conflict and fight and nagging – all natural things. Then for two days Vani was ill and Ramananda was alone again.
He enjoyed those two days like anything! He wrote me a letter: ’Osho, to be alone is so incredible, so beautiful, I have never known that aloneness is so beautiful.’ I told him, ’Wait, Ramananda! Just a few more days and you will start hankering.’
And this goes on and on, again and again. One has to understand. One has to understand how one functions, man or woman, and how the other functions. And don’t be too personal about it. It has nothing to do with you. It is just the man’s mind and the woman’s mind, it has nothing to do with Ramananda and Vani. It is basically biological. You have to understand it very impersonally, only then can you go beyond it, only then can you transcend it.
Watch every move that you make and watch every move that the woman makes. Listen to the deepest instinct, to what is happening. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other and don’t start feeling guilty that you are doing something wrong. Nobody is doing wrong. It is simply natural. But one can go beyond nature because there is a super-nature too. I am not saying that you are condemned to be natural, that you will remain always natural, no.
With understanding one becomes wiser, wiser than nature. One becomes more meditative than nature allows. And through that understanding there comes a liberation. But that liberation is so alchemical that it transforms you totally, radically. Then you are no more a man and your woman is no more a woman. Then you both become more like two spirits – man, woman, seem irrelevant.
And when a man is no more a man and a woman is no more a woman that means they are no more confined to their biologies, no more confined to their bodies – because the difference is only in the body. Beyond the body there is no difference. Hidden behind, you are the same. It is just the body, the medium, that makes the difference.
Once you have started learning how to go beyond the medium, how to transcend biology, physiology, then you have become only two spirits. And only two spirits can live in communion forever. Then there arises a new kind of love which I call friendship. Friendship is higher than your so-called love. Your so-called love is full of hate; friendship is pure love. All hate has disappeared. All conflict, nagging, fighting has disappeared.
All desire to dominate, possess, be jealous, has disappeared. Friendship is pure love. All that was not needed is no more there. All that was non-essential has, been left behind. Only the essential fragrance. Friendship is the fragrance of love. And remember that unless you and your wife become friends, you will never be at peace.