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- Love marriage' came into existence but is
not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes,
happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to
bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage
failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife,
you should love your husband. It was a `should'. And you could not
even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you
could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You
cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is
concerned. The old marriage failed.
The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a
reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but
only out of reaction, revolt -- `love marriage.' You don't know what
love is. You simply see some beautiful face, you see some beautiful
body and you think, "My God, I am in love!" This love is not going
to last, because after two days, seeing the same face for
twenty-four hours a day, you will get bored. The same body... you
have explored the whole topography; now there is nothing to explore.
Exploring the same geography again and again, you feel like an
idiot. What is the point? This love affair, this love marriage is
failing, it has already failed. The reason is that you don't know
how to wait so that love can happen.
- Your marriage is a subtle politics of
domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics.
- Marriage has made love disappear badly,
marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other
considerations marriage is arranged — money, finance, family,
prestige, astrology — all absurd. They have nothing to do with the
heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is
almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so — but
they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is
always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can
become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way.
Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is
exactly the same as the other’s, that you vibrate in the same way as
the other. There is no other way to find it out.
- One should marry only when one is wise
enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to
fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many
ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and
are now ready to settle.
- I am not against marriage -- I am for
love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don't hope that
marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a
marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love
into a marriage. Ordinarily, people destroy their love. They do
EVERYTHING to destroy it and then they suffer. And they go on
saying, "What went wrong?" They destroy -- they do everything to
destroy it.
There is a tremendous desire and longing for love, but love needs
great awareness. Only then can it reach its highest climax -- and
that highest climax IS marriage. It has nothing to do with law. It
is a merging of two hearts into totality. It is the functioning of
two persons in synchronicity -- that is marriage.
But people try love and because they are unconscious...their longing
is good, but their love is full of jealousy, full of possessiveness,
full of anger, full of nastiness. Soon they destroy it. Hence for
centuries they have depended on marriage. Better to start by
marriage so that the law can protect you from destroying it. The
society, the government, the court, the policeman, the priest, they
will all force you to live in the institution of marriage, and you
will be just a slave. If marriage is an institution, you are going
to be a slave in it. Only slaves want to live in institutions.
Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of
love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage -- I am for the
REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But
it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety,
occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no
enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.
- I have never said that love is destroyed
by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in
marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is
destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you
who destroy it, because you don’t know what love is. You simply
pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you
know, but you don’t know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is
the greatest art there is.
- India missed with arranged marriage; the
West is missing with free love.
India missed love because parents were too calculating and cunning.
They would not allow falling in love: that is dangerous, nobody
knows where it will lead. They were too clever, and through
cleverness India missed all possibility of love.
In the West they are too rebellious, too young; not clever -- too
young, too childish. They have made sex a free thing, available
everywhere: no need to go so deep to discover love, enjoy sex and be
finished.
Through sex, the West is missing: through marriage, the East has
missed. But if you are alert you need not be Eastern, you need not
be Western. Love is neither Eastern nor Western. Go on discovering
love within you. And if you love, sooner or later the person will
happen to you, because a loving heart, sooner or later, comes to a
loving heart -- it always happens. You will find the right person.
But if you are jealous you will not find, if you are simply for sex
you will not find, if you live only for security you will not find.
- Be a little aware before you are trapped!
Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman
will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you
are allowed to torture each other forever.
- Love, and love as deeply as possible. And
if love itself becomes the marriage, that is another thing,
altogether different. If love itself becomes such an intimacy that
it is unbreakable, that is another thing, that is not a legal
sanction.
Legal sanctions are needed only because you are afraid. You know
that your love is not enough; you need the legal support for it. You
know perfectly well that you can escape or the woman can escape,
hence you need the policeman to keep you together. But this is ugly,
to need a policeman to keep you together. That's what marriage is!
- Marriage exists as an institution of
exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes
out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of
exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
- I have never heard about any perfect
marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody
comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage
will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there
will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never
collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each
other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes!
- Marriage is an institution that teaches a
man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other
splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.
- As I see it, out of a hundred marriages
ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not
marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of
love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters
is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love
does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together
cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart,
then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they
create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each
other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent,
oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a
better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the
child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only
born out of license, law, will be called bastard.
- Love affairs have been failing, and
parents feel very happy. People come to me and they say, "Look, in
the West love affairs have been failing. Then why are you against
marriage?" they ask me. Love affairs are failing because first the
marriage was arranged by the astrologer, then it was arranged by the
parents, and now it is being arranged by biology, by instinct. You
suddenly feel that you like a woman, but you don't know how long
this is going to last and you are not even aware why you like her.
You are not even alert to what it is in you that likes her. Maybe it
is just her hairstyle. Now, are you going to get married to a
hairstyle? You can get married, but tomorrow morning when you see
her hair disheveled you will be at a loss: "Is this the same woman I
fell in love with?" How long can you be interested in the hairstyle?
Soon you will get fed up. The same hairstyle again and again -- the
whole day, twenty-four hours a day...!
People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type
of nose. People are falling in love with fragments! Nobody is
bothered about the totality of the person -- and it is a vast thing.
The nose does not count for much -- after two days you won't look at
it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body
-- all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total
functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you
live together.
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Osho Parents
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