LOVE / HATE

You are caught in a misunderstanding. If hate destroys love and
anger destroys compassion then there is no possibility for love or
compassion to exist. Then you are caught, then you cannot get out
of it. You have lived with hate for millions of lives, so it must have
destroyed love already. You have lived with anger for millions of
lives, so it must have murdered compassion already.
    But look, love is still there. Hate comes and goes, and love sur-
vives. Anger comes and goes, and compassion survives. Hate has
not been able to destroy love; night has not been able to destroy
the day, and darkness has not been able to murder the light. No,
they survive.
    So the first thing to understand is that love and compassion
have not been destroyed. The second thing, to understand the har-
mony of opposites, will be possible only later on, when you really
love.
    You have not really loved, that is the trouble. Not hate; hate is
not the trouble, the trouble is that you have not really loved.
Darkness is not the trouble, the trouble is that you don't have
light. If light is there, darkness disappears. You have not loved.
You fantasize, you imagine, you dream, but you have not loved.
    Love! And I'm not saying that just by loving, the hate will
immediately disappear--no. Hate will fight against you, because
everybody wants to survive. Hate will struggle. The more you love,
the stronger hate will come back with its struggle. But you will be
surprised to discover that the hate comes and goes. It doesn't kill
your love; rather, it makes love stronger. Love can absorb hate also.
If you love a person, in some moments you can hate the same per-
son. But that doesn't destroy love, it brings a richness to love.
    What is hate in fact? It is a tendency to go away. What is love?
A tendency to come closer. Hate is a tendency to separate, a ten-
dency to divorce. Love is a tendency to marry, to come near, to
become closer, to become one. Hate is to become two, indepen-
dent. Love is to become one, interdependent. Whenever you hate,
you go away from your lover, from your beloved. But in ordinary
life going away is needed to come back again.
    It is just like when you eat: You are hungry, so you eat; then
hunger goes because you have eaten. When you love a person it is
like food. Love is food--very subtle, spiritual, but it is food and it
nourishes you. When you love a person the hunger subsides; you
feel satiated, then suddenly the impulse to go away arises and you
separate. But then you will feel hungry again; you would like to
come nearer, closer, to love, to fall into each other. You eat, then
for a few hours you forget about food; you don't go on sitting in
the kitchen, you don't go .on sitting in the restaurant. You go
away; then after a few hours suddenly you start coming back.
Hunger is arising.
    Love has two faces, one of hunger and one of satiety. You mis-
understand love as only hunger. Once you understand that there
is no hate, but only a situation to create hunger, then hate becomes
part of love. Then it enriches love. Then anger becomes part of
compassion, it enriches compassion. A compassion without any
possibility of anger will be impotent, it will have no energy in it. A
compassion with the possibility of anger has strength, stamina. A
love without the possibility of hate will become stale. Then the
partnership will look like an imprisonment, you cannot get away.
A love with hate has a freedom in it; it never becomes stale.
    In the mathematics of life, divorces happen because every day
you go on postponing them. Then divorce goes on accumulating
and one day the marriage is completely killed by it, destroyed by
it. If you understand me, I would suggest to you not to wait: every
day divorce and remarry. It should be a rhythm just like day and
night, hunger and satiety, summer and winter, life and death. It
should be like that. In the morning you love, in the afternoon you
hate. When you love you really love, you totally love; when you
hate you really hate, you totally hate. And suddenly you will find
the beauty of it: the beauty is in the totality.
    A total hate is also beautiful, as beautiful as total love; a total
anger is also beautiful, as beautiful as total compassion. The
beauty is in totality. Anger alone becomes ugly, hate alone becomes
ugly--it is just the valley without the hill, without the peak. But
with the peak the valley becomes a beautiful scene. From the peak
the valley becomes lovely, from the valley the peak becomes lovely.
     You move; your life river moves between these two banks.
And, by and by, the more and more you understand the mathe-
matics of life, you won't think that hate is against love. It is com-
plementary. You won't think that anger is against compassion; it
is complementary. Then you don't think that rest is against work,
it is complementary; or that night is against day; it is complemen-
tary. They make a perfect whole.
     Because you have not loved, you are afraid of hate. You are
afraid because your love is not strong enough. Hate could destroy
it. You are not certain, really, whether you love or not; that's why
you are afraid of hate and anger. You know that it may completely
shatter the whole house. You are not certain whether the house
really exists or is just imagination, an imaginary house. If it is
imagination the hate will destroy it; if it is real the hate will
make it stronger. After the storm a silence descends. After hate,
lovers are again fresh to fall into each other completely fresh, as
if they are meeting for the first time again. Again and again they
meet, again and again for the first time.
    Lovers are always meeting for the first time. If you meet a sec-
ond time, then love is already getting old, stale. It is getting bor-
ing. Lovers always fall in love every day, fresh, young. You look at
your woman and you cannot even recognize that you have seen
her before--so new! You look at your man and he seems to be a
stranger; you fall in love again.
    Hate does not destroy love, it only destroys the staleness of it.
It is a cleaning, and if you understand it you will be grateful to it.
And if you can be grateful to hate also, you have understood; now
nothing can destroy your love. Now you are for the first time
really rooted; now you can absorb the storm and can be strength-
ened through it, can be enriched through it.
    Don't look at life as a duality, don't look at life as a conflict--
it is not. I have known--it is not. I have experienced--it is not.
It is one whole, one piece, and everything fits in it. You have just
to find out how to let them fit, how to allow them to fit. Allow
them to fit into each other. It is a beautiful whole.
    And if you ask me, if there were a possibility of a world with-
out hate I would not choose it; it would be absolutely dead and
boring. It might be sweet, but too sweet; you would hanker for salt.
If a world were possible without anger I would not choose it,
because just compassion without anger would have no life in it.
The opposite gives the tension, the opposite gives the temper.
When ordinary iron passes through fire it becomes steel; without
fire it cannot become steel. And the higher the degree of tempera-
ture, the greater will be the temper, the strength, of the steel. If
your compassion can pass through anger, the higher the tempera-
ture of the anger the greater will be the temper and the strength of
the compassion.
     Buddha is compassionate. He is a warrior. He comes from the
kshatriya race, a samurai. He must have led a very angry life--and
then suddenly, compassion. The Jain master Mahavir comes from a
kshatriya clan. On the face of it this looks absurd, but it has a cer-
tain consistency to it: all the great teachers of nonviolence have
come from the warrior races. They talk about nonviolence, compas-
sion; they have lived violence, they know what violence is, they
have passed through it. Only a kshatriya, a warrior, who has lived
through fire, has such a strong compassion or the possibility for it.
    So remember, if inside your heart these extremes are fighting,
don't choose. Allow them both to be there. Be a big house, have
enough room inside. Don't say, "I will have only compassion, not
anger; I will have only love, not hate." You will be impoverished.
    Have a big heart, let them both be there. There is no need to
create a fight between them; there is no fight. The fight comes
from your mind, from your teachings, upbringing, conditioning.
The whole world goes on saying to you, "Love, don't hate." How
can you love without hate? Jesus says, "Love your enemies." And I
tell you, "Hate your lovers also." Then it becomes a complete
whole. Otherwise Jesus' saying is incomplete. He says, "Love your
enemies." You only hate your enemies, and he says you should
love them also. But the other part is missing. I tell you, hate your
friends also; hate your lovers also, and don't be afraid. Then by
and by you will see there is no difference between the enemy and
the friend, because you hate and love the enemy and you love and
hate the friend. It will be only a question of the coin upside down
or downside up. Then the friend is the enemy and the enemy is
the friend. Then distinctions simply disappear.
     Don't create a fight inside, allow them both to be there. They
both will be needed. Both will give you two wings; only then can
you fly.


				*LOVE / HATE*