From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY
In Omar Khayyam’s book – it is an illustrated book – naturally Fitzgerald saw the most beautiful
pictures of women pouring wine. He thought that this was really a woman. And he looked at the
poetry; it talks about the woman. Sufis are very angry: Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world
famous, while their real poets of Persia are unknown to the world. This man was not thought to be
a poet at all. Once you understand that this woman is not a real woman but God looked at through
the eyes of a celibate Sufi... it is an hallucination.
Religions understood it: that if you stop sexual energy moving in its natural way, then the man can
manage to see God, to meet Jesus, to talk to Krishna; anything is possible. The sexual energy is a
kind of drug, the most powerful drug that nature has invented. That’s why, when you fall in love with
a woman, you start seeing in that woman things that nobody sees. It is your projection, it is your
drug, your chemicals, your hormones which are creating the hallucination around the woman. The
woman is just an object, a screen, on which you are projecting your picture.
And once your sex is satisfied with the woman, you are going to be very disappointed. You will find
that this is not the same woman: you had fallen in love with somebody else. This is not the woman...
but you know that this is the woman. So there is some deception, this woman deceived you. You
are being deceived by biology, not by this woman.
This woman was also projecting on you. And once the honeymoon is over, the projection is over.
Now she looks at you and finds just an ordinary man, nothing special about you. Everything was
special before: the way you walked, talked, everything had something unique. Now you are just an
Oregonian, nothing more. There is great frustration on both sides. Now you are standing face to
face, seeing each other without any projection; hence the continuous fight. It is bound to be so.
In India, where even today ninety percent of marriages, or even more, are arranged marriages,
this kind of frustration never happens. In an arranged marriage you are not given the chance of
hallucinating. From the very beginning you are just standing on the earth, and there is no romance.
You cannot even see the woman before you get married to her.
The very cultured families now allow the picture of the woman to be seen. Now a picture of the
woman, and with all the photographic tricks – and that too only if you ask.... You are going against
the heritage, the culture, you are not supposed to ask. And particularly the girl cannot even see the
picture of the man she is going to be married to. And even after marriage, they are not going to
see each other in sunlight. They will meet each other in the darkness of the night. Of course, they
remain to each other mysterious.
The mystery lingers longer in India than anywhere else. In the day they cannot talk to each other
because in India there are joint families. They cannot talk in front of the children because that is
a bad example, they cannot talk in front of the elders because that is disrespectful. And there are
so many elders in the house, and there are so many dozens of children in the house... there is no
possibility.
You will be surprised that the father of a child cannot take the child in his hands in front of others: that
is disrespectful. I was told by my father, ”I took you in my hands only when you were five years old.”
The grandfather can, that’s why I became friendly with my grandfather. Naturally, he was acquainted
with me, and me with him, from the very beginning. The father came after five years; he remained a
stranger for five years. He never talked to me for five years.
From Ignorance to Innocence 380 Osho