Osho – Just as you need a mirror to see your face so you need the mirror of relationship to see your being. Love functions as a mirror, it shows you where you are. what you are, who you are. Hence many people become afraid of relationship. They are cowards. They escape to the Himalayas or to Tibet or to the monasteries or to the caves. Why are they escaping and from what? They are escaping from mirrors.
I have heard about an ugly woman who would never look in a mirror because she used to think that mirrors were against her. While she thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, they showed her ugliness. If somebody presented her with a mirror she would simply throw it away or break it immediately. She would never go into a room where there was a mirror because she felt that mirrors had always been against her.
These are your mahatmas. They escape from relationship because relationship shows their ugliness, relationship shows where they are, who they are. Sitting in their caves in the Himalayas they feel perfectly beautiful because there is no mirror.
Never escape from relationship. That’s why I have introduced sannyas with relationship, not without it. There is great meaning in it. Never on the earth has sannyas existed with relationship, that’s why I say that sannyas has not really existed. or, the sannyas that has previously existed was anaemic, bloodless. People thought they were beautiful without the mirror they thought they were beautiful. It is very easy to befool yourself when the mirror is not there.
When you are in relationship with people, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Again and again you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness all moods come and go, you are constantly in a turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are.
Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.
Love is the mirror. Let your meditation be mirrored in love. If you find that something is missing, meditate more – but never escape from love; let it be mirrored in love again and again, because that will be the only criterion of whether you are growing or not. If you are really growing in love soon you will see that love has remained and jealousy has disappeared; love has remained and possessiveness has disappeared: love has remained and hatred has disappeared. A great purity arises. a great innocence. A fragrance is released into your soul. Go on meditating and go on loving. Let love and meditation be two wings. Let them help each other.
I am showing you a path which is arduous, which is really arduous. Love alone is good because there is nothing to reflect, meditation alone is simple because there is no mirror to reflect, but meditation and love together…. I am throwing you into the very eye of the storm. But that is the only way one comes home. And when things become silent after the storm, the silence is alive, it is not the dead silence of a cemetery.
Source – Osho Book “Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 2”