[A sannyasin, returned from the West, says she is not ready to live in the West. She has a strong desire to be loved, feels a desperation that she hasn’t been loved. Osho says that is one of the basic problems that touches everyone…. ]

 

 

… because we live in a society which is absolutely loveless, so everybody is hungry for love, desperately hungry, dying for it, starving. And the problem is that unless you love people they cannot love you – and you cannot love because you have not been loved. This is the vicious circle. To be able to love one needs to be loved, otherwise a person never becomes able to love.

 

They have been experimenting with monkeys…. If the mother hugs the monkey, the monkey becomes capable of hugging other females in later life. If the mother is not allowed to hug the child – the child is fed and taken care of but the mother is not allowed to hug the child – then the child is never able to hug any other woman for all his life. He has simply not learned the language; he cannot love because he has not been loved, so he does not know what love is all about.

 

Psychoanalysts have been surprised to discover that if the mother does not hug and kiss the child – the monkey-child – it will never be able to make sexual contact with a female… he will not know how to make love either. The mother hugging him somehow gives off a certain energy which resounds in his being, creates sexuality, creates the possibility for love. That warmth functions on some of the chakras inside.

 

If those chakras have never been revolved then you are simply at a loss. Man is the only animal who is at a loss, the only loveless animal on the earth. We are being taught everything except love, and whatsoever we are being taught goes against love. Not only that we are not taught love – we are taught ways which go against love. We are taught how to hoard money, how to become rich, we are taught how to become successful, how to be ambitious, how to become respected – we are taught everything – and these are against love.

 

A loving person cannot be ambitious; it is impossible for a loving person to be ambitious. Ambition needs a hungry person, a person who has never been loved and who cannot love. Because of that starvation, he projects his hunger and love onto something: money, power, prestige. That becomes his love affair – then he is ready to die for it!

 

There are millions of people who live only to accumulate money and they don’t know of anything else that life is for; money has become their beloved. Then there are people who are just hankering for their whole life for a higher post. They are the ladder-climbers: they go on climbing up the ladder, not knowing where they are going and for what.

 

If they are pulled down the ladder they are very angry – if they go on up they are not happy; either way their life is in vain. We are taught ambition, we are taught desire, we are taught aggression, we are taught to hate people, to doubt people. We are taught to be inimical to people, never to trust anybody. All are against you and you are competing with everybody else for your survival. That’s what they call survival of the fittest. So be more egoistic, be more ambitious, be more aggressive, have more energy so that you can force your way amongst other competitors. But if you love, all these things disappear – then who bothers?

 

Love is so fulfilling. Who needs much money? Love is so tremendously satisfying. Who wants power? It is a transfer: if you can love a man deeply you will not need anybody else’s appreciation; that one man’s appreciation is enough. That one man has looked into your eyes and seen your potentiality. That one man has looked deeply into your heart and has loved you. That one man has looked into you and seen what is great in you, what is beautiful in you, and you have looked into his eyes and seen the reflection of your being there. It is enough – you become worthy. Suddenly you have worth – you are not just useless, you have tremendous worth.

 

And the worth is not of the quality of utility – not that you are useful, that’s why that man is in love with you. He is simply in love with you! Love is unconditional. It is not that you are moral, that you are virtuous, that you are educated, that you belong to a very famous family – these things are irrelevant; he simply loves you as you are! It is not that he sees that in the future you will become very famous, it is not that in the future you will become a great intellectual, a great author, a great actress, no! He simply loves you as you are; this very moment as you are, is enough for him. That gives worth! That is missing.

 

But remember it is not only your problem – it is everybody’s problem. So don’t make much fuss about it. Just try to understand it and find a way to get out of it. If you don’t understand it, getting out will be difficult. What happens if you don’t understand? If you don’t understand you go on crying for love and you go on waiting for somebody to come. Prince charming will come and will kiss you and you will be turned into a beautiful human being and then everything will be okay; but up to then, you have to wait.

 

And meanwhile you are dying, meanwhile your energies are shrinking, meanwhile you are not growing, meanwhile you have become stagnant. Those princes only come in stories, they don’t come in reality. In reality you have to seek them: you have to move towards them, you have to invite them, you have to take the initiative.

 

Love will happen only to those people who seek it, otherwise not. So if you really want to be loved, just waiting won’t help. Start seeking. There are so many beautiful people; in, fact each person is so beautiful. Maybe he does not suit you – that’s one thing – but nobody is ugly, nobody can be ugly. They all come out of god. How can they be ugly?

 

Each person has intrinsic value, and the value is tremendous. Just seek somebody with whom your vibe falls in tune, somebody with whom you feel at-one-ment… with whom you fall en rapport. And don’t wait – waiting is wasting! The society is loveless, so nobody is going to come because they are also waiting, remember!

 

Everybody is waiting and everybody is afraid to take the first step, because the society is loveless. If somebody comes to you and proposes he is afraid you may reject him, and rejection hurts, it hurts very much. In being rejected by a person one feels, ’Again I am proved to be worthless. It was better not to ask. At least I could hope – now there is no hope.’

 

If one is rejected too many times, by and by one starts sinking within oneself, becomes dead, closes. There is always fear of being rejected, so nobody approaches anybody, nobody takes the initiative; everybody is waiting for the other to take the initiative, and the other is in the same plight. So in the future only those people are able to love and be loved who will take great initiative. Take the initiative! I don’t think there is any problem. You just have to get out of your self-imposed imprisonment.

 

Nothing is there and there is nobody blocking you. In fact there is no guard on the prison door: the door is open. You are there just out of old habit and you are afraid that if you go and take the initiative, if you are rejected, then? Nothing to be worried about!

 

Rejection is not really rejection of you. Maybe the man himself is afraid; he is rejecting just to protect himself. There can be a thousand and one reasons: he is cold, he does not know what love is, he cannot vibrate with love energy or wherever he has ever tried, he has failed. Now the failure has become sealed and he does not want to come across failure again. Maybe he has loved women and they have frustrated him… a thousand and one reasons.

 

So there is no reason to think that when someone rejects you he is rejecting you. His rejection will have some reasons within himself, it is his problem. Feel compassion when somebody rejects, don’t feel rejected: that is the whole art of moving into love. And it is good to be rejected ninety-nine times if at the hundredth time you are accepted; it is worth it, that risk was worth it.

 

Nobody rejects you because you never take any initiative and nobody ever accepts you – that is hell! Just the other day I was reading a diary of a poet, and I loved his definition of hell. He says, ’Hell is the place where people are waiting to be loved and nobody ever turns up.’ I liked it… that’s right! All are waiting… and the waiting becomes long – hell is said to be eternal.

 

Bertrand Russell has written a book against christianity – ’Why I am not a Christian’ – and one of the main reasons that he has given against Christianity is that Jesus says that hell is eternal, and Russell says that this is not possible and this is not fair either… and the logic is correct.

 

Russell says ’If I expose to a court all the sins that I have committed in this life’ – and Christians believe in only one life, so there is no problem about it – ’the hardest judge cannot sentence me to more than four years’ gaol’. Even if those sins have to be included which he had thought of but never committed, then too, not more than eight years. And for these small sins – small, mediocre, mundane – he will be thrown into eternal hell? That looks unfair!

 

And anybody who has a little reasoning will see the point – that Russell is right and Jesus is wrong. But I say to you that Jesus is right and Russell is wrong, because the reason is something very different…. Hell is not eternal but it appears to be eternal. Have you watched sometimes? – in deep misery time passes so slowly, as if it is not passing at all.

 

Your mother is dying and you are sitting by the side of the bed. It is the middle of the night and you know she is dying, you know that she may not be able to see the morning again. It is only a few hours but they look so long – as if years are passing – and the clock seems to have stopped, it is not moving. Pain lengthens time.

 

Your beloved has come and you are sitting by the side of him, silent or singing or talking, and time flies so fast. Hours pass like minutes, days pass like hours, and you always feel that it was not enough. It is already the middle of the night and you have not even finished your talk – nothing has ever started.

 

Time passes fast when you are in a blissful mood, time stops when you are in a painful mood; that is the whole meaning. Jesus saying that hell is eternal is simply proposing Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing else – that it depends on your mood, it is relative. Maybe hell is only for one minute but it will look eternal. And heaven – maybe it is eternal – will look like one minute. So come out of this hell….

 

And I am creating here people whose whole religion is love, my whole message is that of love. I don’t call any love sin, I don’t call any love good or bad – love is good! Even the lowest kind of love is good because it is at least the lowest rung of the ladder. So don’t be disheartened; take courage, find a friend! And remember always not to think about love in romantic terms, mm? otherwise much frustration happens out of it. That too is a misery. Society is loveless and people have very wrong notions about love. First they don’t get love and if sometimes they do, they are not satisfied by it because they have great perfectionistic ideals, inhuman ideals.

 

If you love a man, he will perspire and his perspiration stinks. If you love a man you will not like a thousand and one things in him… sometimes very small things. You cannot get a perfect man. Not are you perfect nobody is perfect: there are limitations, frailities. The first difficulty is that people are loveless, so nobody knows how to love. The second difficulty is that people have been brought up on romantic ideas of love – fairy love, airy fairy, abstract, dreamy – not real, not authentic, not actual.

 

If you have that idea, then even if you find a lover you will be frustrated sooner or later. So drop all romantic ideas – they are barriers in love. Romantic ideas are very poisonous; they are part of the same neurotic society. A loveless society creates romantic ideas about love. That is part

 

of the same game, it comes in the same package. First, make people loveless, and then give them such ideals that they cannot fulfil them so they remain always hung up, just in limbo. Without love, they suffer; with love, they suffer – suffering is certain.

 

A man of understanding, without love, enjoys his aloneness – in love, enjoys relationships; he enjoys all the time! A foolish person alone feels lonely, is frustrated – together, is never happy because the other is imperfect. So don’t be foolish – just be intelligent! Your problem will be solved only by creating a little intelligence… and it is there! So from tomorrow morning you start taking initiative, mm? Good!

 

-Osho, “This Is It, #6”