The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 7. THREE FRIENDS
In friendship the other is significant, the other has intrinsic value, the other is an end in himself, you
are not trying to convert him. How can you convert a person? What foolishness! The very effort to
convert a person is foolish. A person is not a thing. A person is so big and so vast that no theory
can be more important than a person. No Bible is more important than a person, no Gita is more
important than a person. A person means the very glory of life. You can love a person but you can
never convert a person. If you try to convert, you are trying to manipulate. Then the person has
become a means and you are exploiting.
Dialogue is possible when your I says thou, when the other is loved, when there is no ideology
behind it. The other is simply loved, and whether he is a Christian or Hindu doesn’t matter. This is
what friendship means – and friends can discuss life because dialogue is possible.
ONE SAID:
”CAN MEN LIVE TOGETHER AND KNOW NOTHING OF IT,
WORK TOGETHER AND PRODUCE NOTHING?
CAN THEY FLY AROUND IN SPACE
AND FORGET TO EXIST, WORLD WITHOUT END?”
He is not proposing a theory, he is simply raising a question. And remember, you can raise a
question in two ways. Sometimes you raise a question only because you have to supply an answer
and the answer is already there – you raise the question just to answer it. Then the question is not
real, it is false. The answer is already there. The question is just a trick, rhetorical; it is not real,
authentic.
The question is authentic when there is no answer in you, when you question but you don’t question
from an answer, when you question simply to look; the question leaves you empty, just open, inviting,
inquiring.
ONE SAID:
”CAN MEN LIVE TOGETHER AND KNOW NOTHING OF IT...?”
We live together and we never know anything of what togetherness is. You can live together for
years without knowing what togetherness is. Look all over the world – people are living together,
nobody lives alone: husbands with wives, wives with husbands, children with parents, parents with
friends; everybody is living together. Life exists in togetherness, but do you know what togetherness
is?
Living with a wife for forty years, you may not have lived with her for a single moment. Even while
making love to her you may have been thinking of other things. Then you were not there, the
lovemaking was just mechanical.
I have heard that once Mulla Nasruddin went to a film with his wife. They had been married for at
least twenty years. The film was one of those torrid foreign films! As they were leaving the cinema
his wife said, ”Nasruddin, you never love me like those actors were doing in the film. Why?”
The Empty Boat 124 Osho