VBT – Meditation 35.4

VBT – Meditation 35.4

Your Own Loneliness

No one is courageous enough to be alone. You need someone. Why do you need someone? You are afraid of your own loneliness. You become bored with yourself. And really, when you are lonely, nothing seems meaningful. With someone you are occupied, and you create artificial meanings around you.

You cannot live for yourself, so you start to live for someone else. And the same is the case with someone else also: he, or she, cannot live alone, so he is in search of finding someone. Two persons who are afraid of their own loneliness come together and they start a play – a play of love. But deep down they are searching for attachment, commitment, bondage.

So sooner or later, whatsoever you desire happens. This is one of the most unfortunate things in this world. Whatsoever you desire comes to happen. You will get it sooner or later and the foreplay will disappear. When its function is done, it will disappear. When you have become a wife and husband, slaves to each other, when marriage has happened, love will disappear because love was just an illusion in which two persons could become slaves to each other.

Directly you cannot ask for slavery; it is too humiliating. And directly you cannot say to someone, “Become my slave.” He will revolt. Nor can you say, “I want to become a slave to you,” so you say, “I cannot live without you.” But the meaning is there; it is the same. And when this – the real desire – is fulfilled, love disappears. Then you feel bondage, slavery, and then you start struggling to become free.

Remember this. It is one of the paradoxes of the mind: whatsoever you get you will get bored with, and whatsoever you do not get you will long for. When you are alone, you will long for some slavery, some bondage. When you are in bondage, you will begin to long for freedom. Really, only slaves long for freedom, and free people try again to be slaves. The mind goes on like a pendulum, moving from one extreme to the other.

Love doesn’t become attachment. Attachment was the need; love was just a bait. You were in search of a fish named attachment: love was just a bait to catch the fish. When the fish is caught, the bait is thrown. Remember this, and whenever you are doing something, go deep within yourself to find out the basic cause.

If there is real love, it will never become attachment. What is the mechanism for love to become attachment? The moment you say to your lover or beloved, “Love only me,” you have started possessing. And the moment you possess someone you have insulted him deeply, because you have made him into a thing.

When I possess you, you are not a person then, but just one more item amongst my furniture – a thing. Then I use you, and you are my thing, my possession, so I won’t allow anyone else to use you. It is a bargain in which I am possessed by you, and you make me a thing. It is the bargain that now no one else can use you. Both partners feel bound and enslaved. I make a slave of you, then you in return make a slave of me.

Then the struggle starts. I want to be a free person, and still I want you to be possessed by me; you want to retain your freedom and still possess me – this is the struggle. If I possess you, I will be possessed by you. If I do not want to be possessed by you, I should not possess you.