16 Jan That it how marriage invented… (OSHO)
Marriage is an invented institution, it is not natural; hence nature has not provided a mind that can adjust to marriage.
But man found it necessary that there should be some kind of legal contract between lovers, because love itself is dream-stuff, it is not reliable… it is there this moment and the next moment it is gone.
You want to be secure for the coming moment, for your whole future.
Right now you are young; soon you will be old and you would like your wife, your husband, to be with you in your old age, in your sickness. But for that, a few compromises have to be made, and whenever there is compromise there is always trouble. This is the compromise that human beings have made: to be secure about the future, to be certain about the tomorrows, to have a guarantee that the woman who loves you is going to love you forever, that it is not a temporary affair….
That’s why religious people say that marriages are “made in heaven”…a strange kind of heaven, because if these marriages are made in heaven, then what can you make in hell?
They don’t show the signs, the fragrance, the freshness, the beauty of heaven. They are certainly disgusting, ugly…they show something of hell certainly.
But man settled for marriage because that was the only way to have private property.
Animals don’t have private property — they are all communists, and far better communists than have appeared in human history. They don’t have any dictatorship of the proletariat and they have not lost their freedom, but they don’t have any private property.
Man also lived for thousands of years without marriage, but those were the days when there was no private property. Those were the days of hunting; man was a hunter. And those people thousands of years ago had no cold-storage system, no technology — whatever food they got they had to finish as quickly as possible. They could only hope that tomorrow they will get some food again.
Because there was nothing to accumulate, there was no question of marriage.
People lived in communes, tribes; people loved, people reproduced, but in the beginning there was no word for father. The word mother is far more ancient and far more natural.
Men and women were mixing joyously — without any compulsion, without any legal bondage, out of their free will. If they wanted to meet and be together there was no question of domination. Private property came into existence with cultivation .
With hunting, man could not survive long. The search for animals did not allow man to develop any of his other talents, his genius.
But cultivation changed the whole life of man.
The home, the village, the city and the whole civilization are because of the woman, because she was free from hunting and she had different values of the heart and of the mind — she was more aesthetic, more graceful, more earthly, not at all interested in hell and heaven and God and the devil and all that crap!
No woman has written a single religious scripture. No woman has been a philosopher thinking about abstract, faraway things.
Woman’s consciousness is interested only in the intimate surroundings — she would like a beautiful house, she would like a beautiful garden. She wants to create a small world of her own — cozy, comfortable.
She imparts a certain quality to a dead house and it becomes a living home. It is a magical transformation.
She discovered cultivation because she saw wild fruits growing, she saw many other things growing and she also saw that every year the crop dies, the seeds fall back into the earth and when the rains come, again those seeds sprout in thousands of plants.
She started experimenting to find what was edible and what was not edible.
Soon, as hunting was becoming more and more difficult, men had to agree with women: “We have to shift our whole economic focus.
We have to go for cultivation, for fruits, for vegetables. And these are in our hands — we can produce as much as we want, as we need it, and there is tremendous variety.” The people who were physically powerful managed to claim much ground as their property.
They earned much…slowly, slowly the barter system started, because when you have too much of one crop, what are you going to do with it? You have to exchange it.
Then you can have many more things. Life became more complex, with more excitement.
But a problem was felt: after a person dies, who is going to inherit his property? Nobody wanted their property to be inherited by any XYZ.
They wanted their property to belong to their own blood.
It is out of economics, not out of the understanding of love that marriage came into existence.
The hunter’s nomadic life became a peaceful life in a village but man’s concern about his property… he wanted a contract with a woman to be certain that the son she was giving birth to was not somebody else’s, but his own. For this simple reason all the woman’s freedom has to be destroyed.
But it is against nature.
Even if you want to do it nature is not supporting you.
Nature is for freedom not for any kind of bondage.
Jealousy
OSHO
