[A sannyasin says: I wrote you a letter about having recently finished a relationship with somebody, and since then I’ve been feeling very negative towards him. I don’t understand why I feel so antagonistic to someone I once cared about. My understanding is that perhaps I didn’t express enough negativity during the relationship, but I don’t know if that’s true.]
Osho – It can be many things. It can be that you didn’t express your negativity – that happens. When people are in love they avoid many things which look ugly. They go on being collected inside. When the love continues it is okay; you can go on repressing them. But when the love is finished and the person is gone, then there is no point in repressing them. They all explode and one feels very negative.
So if in a relationship you allow both feelings, good and bad, this will never happen. Your insight may be true. This is ninety percent the possibility; there is more possibility of it being this than anything else. But life is never simple. It is very complicated.
Sometimes it happens that when you love a person, your whole energies are involved. When suddenly the love is broken, you don’t know what to do. Suddenly you are stuck – as if somebody was running and suddenly he is paralysed. Now he wants to run but the paralysis won’t allow him. Then everything becomes negative. The same energy that was helping you to run will create restlessness when you cannot run. So maybe you loved the person too much.
Your energies were active, flowing, dynamic. Now suddenly everything is broken and you don’t know what to do. Those energies are there, throbbing, but there is nobody to shower them upon, nobody to receive them. So those throbbing energies can turn into negativity, because positive and negative are both poles of the same energy. If the positive pole is missing, the energy will go on accumulating on the negative pole.
If the positive pole is available, that energy will flow and become creative, otherwise it will become destructive. So if this is the case, find another lover. Why wait? Don’t wait, because that waiting will be negative. Either find some lover or find something that you love so deeply that your energy starts flowing again. Then that negativity will disappear immediately.
So ninety percent is the first possibility, nine percent the second, and there is one percent possibility that you never loved the person very much; you were pretending. Maybe it was a play, a game that you were enjoying. Now you are feeling negative – not against the person; that may be a projection – you are feeling guilty about why you did it in the first place. That guilt can be projected on the person, so that person looks like the culprit.
It always happens – if you are guilty you will find a scapegoat somewhere on whom to throw your guilt, to put your guilt. Now he seems to be the most vulnerable. The love is broken – there is nothing to protect him. These are the possibilities, but don’t be too worried about them.