LOVE / FREEDOM

One remains in need of the other up to that point, up to that expe-
rience, when one enters into one's own innermost core. Unless one
knows oneself one remains in the need of the other. But the need of
the other is very paradoxical; its nature is paradoxical. When you
are alone you feel lonely, you feel the other is missed; your life
seems to be only half. It loses joy, it loses flow, flowering; it remains
undernourished. If you are with the other, then a new problem
arises because the other starts encroaching on your space. He starts
imposing conditions upon you, he starts demanding things from
you, he starts destroying your freedom, and that hurts.
    So when you are with somebody, only for a few days when the
honeymoon is still there, and the more intelligent you are, the
shorter will be the honeymoon, remember. Only for utterly dull
people it can be a long affair; for insensitive people it can be a life-
long thing. But if you are intelligent, sensitive, soon you will real-
ize what you have done. The other is destroying your freedom,
and suddenly you become aware that you need your freedom
because freedom is of immense value. And you decide never again
to bother with the other.
    Again when you are alone you are free, but something is miss-
ing, because your aloneness is not true aloneness; it is only loneli-
ness, it is a negative state. You forget all about freedom. Free you
are, but what to do with this freedom? Love is not there, and both
are essential needs.
    And up to now humanity has lived in such an insane way that
you can fulfill only one need: either you can be free, but then you
have to drop the idea of love. That's what monks and nuns of all
the religions have been doing: drop the idea of love, you are free;
there is nobody to hinder you, there is nobody to interfere with
you, nobody to make any demands, nobody to possess you. But
then their life becomes cold, almost dead.
    You can go to any monastery and look at the monks and the
nuns: their life is ugly. It stinks of death; it is not fragrant with
life. There is no dance, no joy, no song. All songs have disappeared,
all joy is dead. They are paralyzed--how can they dance? They are
crippled--how can they dance? There is nothing to dance about.
Their energies are stuck, they are no longer flowing. For the flow
the other is needed; without the other there is no flow.
    So the majority of humanity has decided for love and dropped
the idea of freedom. But then people are living like slaves. Man
has reduced the woman into a thing, a commodity, and of course
the woman has done the same in her own subtle way: she has
made all the husbands henpecked.
    I have heard:

          In New York a few henpecked husbands joined hands
      together. They made a club to protest, to fight--Men's
      Liberation Movement, or something like that! And of course
      they chose one of the most henpecked husbands the president
      of the club.
          The first meeting happened, but the president never turned
      up. They were all worried. They rushed to his home and they
      asked him, "What is the matter? Have you forgotten?"
          He said, "No, but my wife won't allow me. She says, 'You
      go out, and I will never allow you back m!' And that much
      risk I cannot take."

    The man has reduced the woman to a slave and the woman has
reduced the man to a slave. And of course both hate the slavery,
both resist it. They are constantly righting; any small excuse and
the fight starts.
    But the real fight is somewhere else deep down; the real fight
is that they are asking for freedom. They cannot say it so clearly,
they may have forgotten completely. For thousands of years this is
the way people have lived. They have seen their fathers and moth-
ers living in the same way, they have seen their grandparents liv-
ing in the same way. This is the way people live; they have
accepted it, and their freedom is destroyed.
    It is as if we are trying to fly in the sky with one wing. A few
people have the wing of love and a few people have the wing of free-
dom, but both are incapable of flying. Both the wings are needed.
    You are asking, "Why is it I feel fully alive only when I am in
love?" It is perfectly natural; there is nothing wrong in it. It is
how it should be. Love is a natural need; it is like food. If you are
hungry, of course you will feel a deep unease. Without love your
soul is hungry; love is a soul nourishment. Just as the body needs
food, water, air, the soul needs love. But the soul also needs free-
dom, and it is one of the strangest things that we have not accepted
this fact yet.
    If you love there is no need to destroy your freedom. They both
can exist together; there is no antagonism between them. It is
because of our foolishness that we have created the antagonism.
Hence, the monks think the worldly people are fools, and the
worldly people deep down know that the monks are fools; they are
missing all the joys of life.
    A great priest was asked, "What is love?"
   The priest said, "A word made up of two vowels, two conso-
nants, and two fools!"
    That is their condemnation of love. Because all the religions
have condemned love, they have praised freedom very much. In
India we call the ultimate experience moksha; moksha means
absolute freedom.
    You say: "I tell myself that I should be able to spark myself
without the other, but so far no luck." It will remain so, it will not
change. You should rather change your conditioning about love
and freedom. Love the person, but give the person total freedom.
Love the person, but from the very beginning make it clear that
you are not selling your freedom.
    And if you cannot make it happen in this community, here with
me, you cannot make it happen anywhere else. Here we are experi-
menting with many things, and one of the dimensions of our exper-
iment is to make love and freedom possible together, to support
their coexistence together. Love a person but don't possess, and
don't be possessed. Insist for freedom, and don't lose love! There is
no need. There is no natural enmity between freedom and love; it is
a created enmity. Of course for centuries it has been so, so you have
become accustomed to it; it has become a conditioned thing.

          An old farmer down South could barely speak above a
       whisper. Leaning on a fence by the side of a country road he
       was watching a dozen razorbacks in a patch of woodland.
       Every few minutes the hogs would scramble through a hole in
       the fence, tear across the road to another patch of woodland,
       and immediately afterward scurry back again.
           "What's the matter with them hogs anyway?" a passing
      stranger asked.
          "There ain't nothing the matter with them," the old
      farmer whispered hoarsely. "Them hogs belongs to me and
      before I lost my voice I used to call them to their feed. After
       I lost my voice I used to tap on this fence rail with my stick
       at feeding time."
           He paused and shook his head gravely. "And now," he
       added, "them cussed woodpeckers up in them trees has got
       them poor hogs plumb crazy!"

    Just conditioning! That's what is happening to humanity.
    One of the disciples of Pavlov, the pioneer and developer of the
theory of the conditioned reflex, was trying an experiment along
the same lines. He bought a puppy and decided to condition him
to stand up and bark for his food. He held the pup's food just out
of reach, barked a few times, then set it on the floor before him.
The idea was that the pup would associate standing up and bark-
ing with getting his food and learn to do so when hungry.
    This went on for about a week, but the little dog failed to
learn. After another week the man gave up the experiment and
simply put the food down in front of the dog, but the pup refused
to eat it. He was waiting for his master to stand and bark! Now he
had become conditioned.
    It is only a conditioning, it can be dropped. You just need a
little meditativeness. Meditation simply means the process of
unconditioning the mind. Whatever the society has done to you
has to be undone. When you are unconditioned you will be able to
see the beauty of love and freedom together; they are two aspects
of the same coin. If you really love the person you will give him or
her absolute freedom--that's a gift of love. And when there is
freedom, love responds tremendously. When you give freedom to
somebody you have given the greatest gift, and love comes rush-
ing towards you.
    You ask me: "Is this some stupid Waiting for Godot game I am
playing with myself?" No.
    "When the last love affair ended, I swore to myself I was not
going to let the same old deadening process happen, but here I am
again feeling half alive, waiting for 'him' to come." But just by
making a vow, just by deciding, you cannot change yourself. You
have to understand. Love is a basic need, as basic as freedom, so
both have to be fulfilled. And a person who is full of love and free
is the most beautiful phenomenon in the world. And when two
persons of such beauty meet, their relationship is not a relation-
ship at all. It is a relating. It is a constant, riverlike flow. It is con-
tinuously growing towards greater heights.
    The ultimate height of love and freedom is the experience of
the divine. In it you will find both tremendous love, absolute love,
and absolute freedom.


				*LOVE / FREEDOM*