IF LOVE BECOMES DESTROYED IN MARRIAGE, HOW ARE WE TO LIVE IF WE WISH TO SHARE LOVE... - OSHO

BELOVED OSHO 
IF LOVE BECOMES DESTROYED IN MARRIAGE, HOW ARE WE TO LIVE IF WE WISH TO SHARE LOVE AND THOUGHTS ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS,AND ALSO RAISE CHILDREN WITH BOTH A MOTHER AND A FATHER?

I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. 
How can marriage destroy love? 

Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage.

It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? 
It is you who destroy it, because you don't know what love is. 

You simply pretend to know,you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don't know what love is. 

Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.If people are dancing and somebody asks you, 'Come and dance,' you say, 'Idon't know.' You don't just jump up and start dancing and have everybody think that you are a great dancer. 

You will just prove yourself to be a buffoon. You will not prove yourself to be a dancer. It has to be learned -- the grace of it, the movement of it. 

You have to train the body for it.You don't just go and start painting just because the canvas is available and thebrush is there and the colour is there. You don't start painting. 

You say, 'all requirements are here, so I can paint. You can paint -- but you will not be apainter that way.You meet a woman -- the canvas is there. You immediately become a lover -- you start painting. And she starts painting on you. 

Of course you both prove to befoolish -- painted fools -- and sooner or later you understand what is happening.

But you never thought that love is an art. You are not born with the art, it is nothing to do with your birth. You have to learn it. It is the most subtle art.

You are born only with a capacity. Of course, you are born with a body; you can be a dancer because you have the body. You can move your body and you can bea dancer -- but dancing has to be learned. Much effort is needed to learn dancing.And dancing is not so difficult because you alone are involved in it.

Love is much more difficult. 
It is dancing with somebody else. The other is also needed to know what dancing is. 

To fit with somebody, it is a great art. 

To createa harmony between two persons... two persons mean two different worlds.

When two worlds come close, clash is bound to be there if you don't know how to harmonise. Love is harmony. And happiness, health, harmony, all happen outof love. 

Learn to love. 
Don't be in a hurry for marriage, learn to love. First become a great lover.And what is the requirement? 

The requirement is that a great lover is always ready to give love and is not bothered whether it is returned or not. 

It is alwaysreturned, it is in the very nature of things. It is just as if you go to the mountainsand you sing a song, and the valleys respond. 

Have you seen an echo point in the mountains, in the hills? 
You shout and the valleys shout, or you sing and thevalleys sing. Each heart is a valley. If you pour love into it, it will respond.

The first lesson of love is not to ask for love, but just to give. Become a giver. And people are doing just the opposite. Even when they give, they give only with the idea that love should come back. It is a bargain. 

They don't share, they don't share freely. They share with a condition. They go on watching out of the corner of their eye whether it is coming back or not. 

Very poor people... they don't knowthe natural functioning of love. You simply pour, it will come.

And if it is not coming, nothing to be worried about -- because a lover knows thatto love is to be happy. If it comes, good; then the happiness is multiplied. 

But even if it never comes back, in the very act of loving you become so happy, so ecstatic, who bothers whether it comes or not?

Love has its own intrinsic happiness. It happens when you love. There is no need to wait for the result. Just start loving. By and by you will see much more love iscoming back to you. 

One loves and comes to know what love is only by loving.
As one learns swimming by swimming, by loving one loves.

And people are very miserly. 
They are waiting for some great beloved to happen,then they will love. They remain closed, they remain withdrawn. 
They just wait.From somewhere some Cleopatra will come and then they will open their heart,but by that time they have completely forgotten how to open it.

You have been trained in a very wrong way. First, everybody lives under awrong impression that everybody is already a lover. 

Just being born, you think you are a lover. It's not so easy. 

Yes, there is a potentiality, but the potentialityhas to be trained, disciplined. A 

seed exists, but it has to come to flower.You can go on carrying your seed; no bee will be coming. Have you ever seen bees coming to the seeds? 

Don't they know that seeds can become flowers? But they come when they become flowers. Become a flower, don't remain a seed.

Two people, separately unhappy, create more unhappiness for each other whenthey come together. That's mathematical. You were unhappy, your wife was unhappy and you both are hoping that being together you both will becomehappy? 

This is... this is such ordinary arithmetic -- like two plus two makes four.It is that simple. 

It is not part of any higher mathematics; it is very ordinary, you can count it on your fingers. You both will become unhappy.

Two persons should be allowed to live together long enough to become aquainted, familiar with each other. 

And even if they want to get married, they should not be allowed. Then divorces will disappear from the world. 

The divorces exist because marriages are wrong and forced. The divorces exist because marriages are done in a romantic mood.

A romantic mood is good if you are a poet -- and poets are not known to be good husbands or good wives. In fact poets are almost always bachelors. 

They fool around but they never get caught, and hence their romance remains alive. They go on writing poetry, beautiful poetry.

One should not get married to a woman or to a man in a poetic mood. Let the prose mood come, then settle. Because the day-to-day life is more like prose than like poetry. 

One should become mature enough.

Maturity means that one is no more a romantic fool. 

One understands life, one understands the responsibility of life, one understands the problems of being together with a person. 

One accepts all those difficulties and yet decides to live with the person. 

One is not hoping that there is only going to be heaven,roses. 

One is not hoping nonsense; one knows reality is tough. It is rough. There are roses, but far and few in between; there are many thorns.

When you have become alert to all of these problems and still you decide that itis worthwhile to risk and be with a person rather than to be alone, then get married. 

Then marriages will never kill love, because this love is realistic.

Marriage can kill only romantic love. And romantic love is what people call'puppy love'. One should not depend on it. 

One should not think about it as nourishment. It may be just like ice-cream. You can eat it sometimes, but don'tdepend on it. 

Life has to be more realistic, more prose.And marriage itself never destroys anything. 

Marriage simply brings out whatsoever is hidden in you -- it brings it out. 

If love is hidden behind you,inside you, marriage brings it out. 

If love was just a pretension, just a bait, the sooner or later it has to disappear. And then your reality, your ugly personality comes up. 

Marriage simply is an opportunity, so whatsoever you had to bring out will come out.

I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. 

Love is destroyed by people who don't know how to love. 

Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. 

You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. 

OshO 💕
The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1Chapter #2Chapter title: The greatest miracle22 August 1976 am in Buddha Hall