Osho – It is the challenge and a challenge worth accepting because only through that challenge does one grow. Growth is an uphill task and this is the greatest challenge, this is the Everest, the highest climb — dangerous, hazardous, but the more dangerous it is the more enchanting, the more intriguing, the more interesting it is. The more dangerous it is, the more adventure it contains.
It is easy to love without meditation because then love is very ordinary, it is biological. Nothing is required from you as a conscious being — just the chemistry of your body works and you follow the chemistry of the body. It is a chemical phenomenon, it is hormonal. All animals love and man can also love in the same way. Millions of people do love in the same way — they reproduce. When one man falls in love with a woman it is nothing much. People think something great is happening — it is all chemicals, nothing much. Just give him an injection of a few other hormones and the love will disappear. Just take away a few hormones from the woman and the whole story is finished!
But man does not want to see the truth so rather than seeing the truth he fabricates great poetry around it. He says this is something great, something from the beyond; I have not done it, it has happened. But it has happened because of chemistry, not because some god is behind it. God cannot be so foolish as to manage so many stupid love affairs and marriages and divorces; I can’t think of such a stupid god. But chemistry is stupid, chemistry has no intelligence in it.
Ordinary love is a chemical phenomenon. It is easy, very easy. And meditation alone is also very easy, in fact very safe, far safer than love, because in love the other gets involved and there is always trouble. Two persons, however attractive they are to each other, are bound to clash. In fact they are attracted to each other because they are opposite poles, just like negative and positive poles of electricity.
Their very attraction is based on opposition. The farther away they are, the more they feel attracted. But to meet a woman, or a man once in a while, on the beach, in the mountains, in a movie house, is one thing; to live with the same man or woman for twenty — four hours a day, year in, year out, is a totally different phenomenon.
Then the opposition erupts every moment. It starts even before breakfast, it doesn’t even wait for breakfast; in fact breakfast is the right time for it to start. And then it continues to the very end. When you fall asleep, then too it lingers in your dreams: the wife goes on chasing you, the husband goes on chasing you… So people become fed up with such love sooner or later and they start thinking of enjoying their own space.
I receive letters here every day from people who want to enjoy their own space and then within a few days they say that they are fed up with being alone and they want some relationship.’ There is a ripple of laughter through the group. It is like a wheel, it goes on and on. And people are so unconscious, they can’t see that one day they want their own space, another day they feel empty and they want somebody else to share their space, and after a day, again the same game: they want their own space. And this goes on and on!
It is good that Christianity, Judaism and Mohammedanism believe in only one life. Just think of the Buddhists and the Jainas — they believe in eighty — four million lives! It needs some guts… even to think of eighty-four million lives. Then how many million love affairs…? And it is certainly a miracle that we have survived and still the wheel is moving. People go on calling it a merry — go-round, I call it a sorry-go-round!
Both are easy: you become fed up with love, you start meditating; you become fed up with meditation you start moving with somebody — both arc easy. But the real thing is to have a synthesis, to be capable of being alone and at the same time to be capable of sharing your joy, your energies, with somebody.
This synthesis transforms the quality of both love and meditation: meditation becomes more alive, love becomes more conscious. Love becomes more and more free from chemistry, and meditation becomes more and more free from loneliness. Meditation becomes more and more aloneness, solitude — a beautiful space, not negative, not empty, but very full, so full that you really don’t need any love affair, so full that you can live alone for millions of lives — no problem. And love becomes so conscious, so alert, that it can drop all the stupid things which make it miserable.
And this is my vision for my sannyasins: a meditative loving quality, a loving meditative quality. Be great lovers and be great meditators simultaneously. Don’t choose between the two. Choose both and you will attain to a great enriched integrated being.
Source: Osho Book “The Miracle”