People have tried to fulfill love without freedom. Then love brings more and more misery, more and more bondage. Then love is not what one has expected it to be; it turns out just the opposite. It shatters all hopes, it destroys all expectations, and life becomes a wasteland, a groping in darkness and never finding the door.
Love without freedom naturally tends to be possessive. And the moment possessiveness enters in, you start creating bondage for others and bondage for yourself, because you cannot possess somebody without being possed by him. You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself. Whatsoever you do to others is done to you.
This is the basic principle to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment.
And there have been people who have tried the other extreme, freedom without love. These are the monks, the escapists, the people who renounce the world. Afraid of love, afraid of love because it brings bondage, they renounce all the situations where love can flow, grow, can happen, is possible. They escape into loneliness. Their loneliness never becomes aloneness, it remains loneliness. And loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad.
One can be a solitary, but that does not bring solitude. Solitariness is just physical aloneness, solitude is spiritual aloneness. If you are just lonely. . . and you will be if you have renounced the world. If you have escaped from the world out of fear, you will be lonely, the world will haunt you and all kinds of desires will surround you. You will suffer millions of nightmares, because whatsoever you have renounced cannot be dropped so easily.
Renunciation is repression and nothing else. And the more you repress a thing, the more you need to repress it. And the more you go on repressing it, the more powerful it becomes. It will erupt in your dreams, it will erupt in your hallucinations. People living in the monasteries start hallucinating, people going to the Himalayan caves sooner or later are no more in contact with reality. They start creating a reality of their own, a private reality, a fictitious reality. . . . .
On the one hand is the person, the worldly person, who has tried to find love without freedom and has failed. His life is nothing but a long, long slavery of many, many people, of many, many things. He is not free to have even a slight movement. That is one failure; the majority of humanity is caught in that extreme.
A few escape from the world: seeing the misery, they start searching the other extreme; freedom, moksha, nirvana. But they become neurotic, psychotic, they start living in their own dreams. Loneliness is so much that one has to create something to be with.
Both these extreme efforts have failed. Hence humanity stands on a crossroads: where to go? The past has utterly failed. All the efforts that we have done in the past proved wrong, led to cul-de-sacs. Now where to go? What to do?
Love and freedom are not separate things, you cannot choose. Either you will have to have both, or you will have to have dropped both. But you cannot choose, you cannot have one.
Love is the circumference, freedom is the center.
One has to grow in such delicate balance where love and freedom can bloom together. And they can, because if it hs hapnd 2 few rare individuals . And evn if it has happened to only a single individual in the whole history, it can happen to every human being. It is your potential, your birthright.....grab it!.
thts al folks!!njoy!
