25 Jan And one starts feeling a great wonder: why have poets been writing so many beautiful things about love… (OSHO)
If you really love a person, you have to face it yourself. If you don’t face it, that is cowardice.
And to hide it, you make so much of a tantrum of jealousy that you completely forget that it is only your cowardice
What was needed was to be very clear whether it is an idea that you love the man, or it is a reality.
Love’s basic requirement is: “I accept the other person as he is.” And love never tries to change the person according to one’s own idea of them.
You do not try to cut the person here and there and bring him to size — which is being done everywhere all over the world.
And one starts feeling a great wonder: why have poets been writing so many beautiful things about love? — because nothing seems to happen!
It is only in the poetries.
The reality is that most of the poets have never loved.
They are in love with the idea of love, so they make beautiful poems, beautiful novels. Or perhaps they have loved, but failed so utterly that just to console themselves they create the polar opposite in their poetry.
For example, Leo Tolstoy was tortured by his wife for his whole life, even to the very end.
The last day, she harassed him so much that he left the house at night and went to the station and died there on a bench.
He was a count, and he had immense property and immense land and everything — but he lived like a poor man.
The wife had control of everything.
She would not allow him even to have a friend, a male friend. She was so jealous that she would not allow him to read or write in front of her. He had to go out in the garden or in the fields to write; all his writing was done outside. Her jealousy was such that…, “When I am present you are more interested in your novel. This is an insult to me!”
And this man has written such beautiful books and such beautiful things about love, that if you didn’t know his life, you could not believe how it is possible. It is a compensation. In life he is missing it; he is putting it in the novels: in the novels he is creating the fantasy he would have liked his life to be, just to forget his life, its ugliness.
So either the poets have never loved and known, have never known the agony of it; or, if they have loved, they have known the agony of it and they wanted to know the ecstasy.
So in their poetry you will find the ecstasy of love. But the truth is that the whole world is tortured unnecessarily.
Yes, it is cowardice that keeps you in torture. Just face the facts, whether you love a man or not.
If you love, then there are no conditions to be put. If you don’t love, then who are you to put conditions?
Either way it is clear.
If you love then there is no question of conditions: you love him as he is.
If you don’t love, then too there is no problem: he is nobody to you; there is no question of putting conditions.
He can do whatsoever he wants to do.
But one has to face one’s feelings in a very sincere and honest way. And that straightforward encounter of one’s feelings immediately shows you the path.
Life is not difficult — we are making it so because we are cowards: we don’t see a thing which we know is there.
Jealousy
OSHO
Image: Blood of a Poet (film, 1932) | http://www.tasteofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Blood-of-a-Poet-1932.jpg
