THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...

246 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
Just watch people, watch their love affairs, and you will be surprised. It is always the same man or the same
woman yes, with a different face or with a different mask, different clothes, different shape and size. But these
differences are not real differences.
Unless you are new how can you fall in love with somebody new? Who is going to choose? How is one going to
choose? The same mind will like the same type of face, the same eyes, the same color, the same shape, the form,
the way the woman walks, the way she talks. Again within a few days you will be tired, just as you were tired
before. Again you will find you are trapped, imprisoned, and the woman will also find the same thing. But man
lives in such an unconscious state that you cannot expect more than that.
If man is conscious, then many things become impossible. In the first place, falling in love itself becomes
impossible. You start rising in love, not falling in love; the very quality of your love becomes totally different. It
is no more a relationship, it is more a state of your being. You are full of love, you share your love, but there
is no demand on your part. It is no longer a business, it is no longer conditional, it asks nothing. It is simply
thankful that somebody accepted, that somebody did not reject your love. You feel grateful. It is not a bondage
for the other, it does not enslave the other. It is not possessive; it is absolutely nonpossessive, unconditional,
undemanding. It gives freedom. And when love gives freedom, lovers start soaring high, they start moving
towards God. Love becomes a door to the divine.
Right now love simply drags you downwards. ’Falling in love’ is a meaningful phrase you certainly fall, you
gravitate downwards. In the beginning you feel great, but only in the beginning. That is just infatuation, because
you are hoping something new is going to happen. In the beginning you are excited, it seems a great adventure,
but soon you find it is the same old, rotten thing nothing special, nothing new. Just the partners have changed,
but the game is the same and played with the same violence, with the same ugliness.
Shraddhan, it is not only you who have fallen in love with the same woman; everybody is doing that. In the
ordinary, unconscious state of humanity more than that cannot be hoped for. You were fortunate that you got
divorced, but it is difficult to live alone unless you know the beauties of being alone.
The moment you are alone you start suffering from loneliness, you start hankering for the company of the other.
And then anybody will do, even the same woman that you had divorced; it is better than being lonely. Even if it
is miserable, people prefer misery for company rather than loneliness.
Unless you know the joys of meditation you cannot avoid falling in love. Once you start enjoying your own
being, the joy, the space, the absolute freedom, the unhindered consciousness, nobody occupying your attention,
nobody trying to catch your attention, nobody impinging on your freedom, interfering with your freedom.... When
you start enjoying your aloneness you have become a meditator. Yes, love will also be possible after that, but a
totally different kind of love.
You must have been suffering from loneliness and, finding the same woman again, you may have thought it is
better to be with her than to be lonely. And you must have forgotten all the miseries people’s memories are very
short.
And this has to be understood: the mind tends to forget the miserable part, it tends to remember the pleasurable
part. That is one of the strategies of the mind to remain in control, to remain your master. It always tends to
forget the misery; it goes on magnifying, enhancing, decorating the pleasurable part. Reality is totally different,
but the mind lives in imagination.
And your memories are not reliable at all because your memories are fictitious. You just think how beautiful it
was, you have forgotten all the misery; you have chosen only a few moments that may have been beautiful. There
must have been a few moments which were beautiful, but only a few moments, few and far between. And they
cannot be as beautiful as you were thinking; otherwise what was the need to divorce the woman? The misery
must have been much more, the pain must have been too much, unbearable. You must have suffered too much,
the woman must have suffered too much. It is not a question of the woman being at fault or you being at fault;
it is simply that two unconscious people being together are bound to create misery for each other.
If you cannot be happy alone, how can you create happiness for anybody else? You yourself are not happy, how
can you give happiness to the other? You can give only that which you have. You are miserable you can pretend
that you are not miserable, but for how long? The honeymoon cannot last forever. Within a week or at the most
two weeks it is finished, and then you know that both are miserable people. And when two miserable people live
together, misery is not only doubled, remember, it is multiplied.
But you forget all that. Later on you efface those parts which were miserable, you preserve the beautiful
moments. And not only do you preserve them, you go on decorating them, painting them, again and again.
Slowly, slowly they have no relationship with the reality. Your past is fictitious, your future is fictitious; only your
present is real. But you don’t live in the present at all; either you live in the past or you live in the future.