The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 7. THREE FRIENDS
Nasruddin said, ”Are you crazy? Do you know how much they are paid for doing such things?”
People go on living with each other without any love because you love only when it pays. And how
can you love if you love only when it pays? Then love has also become a commodity in the market:
then it is not a relationship, it is not a togetherness, it is not a celebration. You are not happy being
with the other, at the most you just tolerate the other.
Mulla Nasruddin’s wife was on her deathbed and the doctor said, ”Nasruddin, I must be frank with
you; in such moments it is better to be truthful. Your wife cannot be saved. The disease has gone
beyond us, and you must prepare yourself. Don’t allow yourself to suffer, accept it, it is your fate.
Your wife is going to die.”
Nasruddin said, ”Don’t worry. If I could suffer with her for so many years, I can suffer for a few hours
more!”
At the most we tolerate. And whenever you think in terms of toleration, you are suffering, your
togetherness is suffering. That is why Jean-Paul Sartre says, ”The other is hell”...because with the
other you simply suffer, the other becomes the bondage, the other becomes the domination. The
other starts creating trouble, and your freedom is lost, your happiness is lost. Then it becomes a
routine, a tolerance. If you are tolerating the other how can you know the beauty of togetherness?
Really, it has never happened.
Marriage almost always never happens, because marriage means the celebration of togetherness.
It is not a license. No registry office can give you marriage; no priest can give it to you as a gift.
It is a tremendous revolution in the being, it is a great transformation in your very style of life, and
it can happen only when you celebrate togetherness, when the other is no longer felt as the other,
when you no longer feel yourself as I. When the two are not really two, a bridge has happened, they
have become one in a certain sense. Physically they remain two, but as far as the innermost being
is concerned, they have become one. They may be two poles of one existence but they are not two.
A bridge exists. That bridge gives you glimpses of togetherness.
It is one of the rarest things to come across a marriage. People live together because they cannot
live alone. Remember this: because they cannot live alone, that is why they live together. To live
alone is uncomfortable, to live alone is uneconomical, to live alone is difficult, that is why they live
together. The reasons are negative.
A man was going to get married and somebody asked him, ”You have always been against marriage,
why have you suddenly changed your mind?”
He said, ”Winter is coming on and people say that it is going to be very cold. Central heating is
beyond me and a wife is cheaper!”
This is the logic. You live with someone because it is comfortable, convenient, economical, cheaper.
To live alone is really difficult: a wife is so many things, the housekeeper, the cook, the servant, the
nurse – so many things. She is the cheapest labor in the world, doing so many things without being
paid at all. It is an exploitation.
The Empty Boat 125 Osho