The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. MEANS AND ENDS
What happened? Fallen in love with sarees? You CAN fall in love with things. It is difficult to fall
in love with persons, it is very easy to fall in love with things because things are dead, you can
manipulate them. Sarees will never say, ”Wear us! We would like to go out and have a look around.”
The car will never say, ”Drive me, I am getting bored.”
With persons it is difficult. They will demand, they will ask, they would like to go out, they have their
own desires to be fulfilled. When you fall in love with a person there is always conflict, so those who
are clever never fall in love with persons, they always fall in love with things: a house, a car, clothes.
They are always easy, manageable, and you always remain the master and the other never creates
trouble. Or, if you fall in love with a person, you immediately try to convert him into a thing, a dead
thing. A wife is a dead thing, a husband is a dead thing, and they torture each other. Why do they
torture each other? What is the point of it? Through torture they make the other dead so the other
becomes a thing, manipulatable. Then they are not worried.
Two matrons were looking at a bookshop window. One said to the other, ”Look, there is a book
entitled How to Torture Your Husband.”
But the other was not interested. She didn’t even look at the book – she said, ”I don’t need it, I have
a system of my own.”
Everybody has his own system of torturing the other, because only through torture and destruction
can a person be changed into a thing.
It happened once that Mulla Nasruddin walked into the coffee house looking very angry, very
aggressive and dangerous, and he said, ”I hear that someone has called my wife an ugly old hag.
Who is this guy?”
A man stood up, a very tall, strong, giantlike man. He said, ”I said that about your wife, and what
about it?”
Looking at the person, Nasruddin immediately calmed down; he was dangerous. He went up to him
and said, ”Thank you, this is my feeling too, but I couldn’t gather the courage to say so. You have
done it, you are a brave man.”
What happens in a relationship? Why does it always turn ugly? Why is it so impossible to love?
Why does everything become poisoned? ...Because the mind is always happy to manipulate things,
because things never rebel: they are always obedient, they never disobey. A person is alive, you
cannot predict what he is going to do. And you cannot manipulate...the other’s freedom becomes
the problem.
Love is such a problem because you cannot allow the other the freedom to be. And remember this:
if you really love, real love is possible only when you allow the other total freedom to be himself or
herself. But then you cannot possess, then you cannot predict, then you cannot be secure, then
everything has to move moment to moment. And mind wants to plan, to be secure and safe.
Mind wants life to run along a track because mind is the most dead thing in you. It is as if you are
a river and a part of the river is an iceberg. Your mind is just like the iceberg, it is the frozen part of
The Empty Boat 163 Osho