Meditation has to be a Love Affair

[A mother with her child says she feels resistance and indecision.]

It is on the right track. It is how trust arises. Trust arises out of the dark night of doubt. One has to go deep into doubt to find trust. Trust is not something that you can find by dropping the doubt. If you drop the doubt forcibly your trust will always remain shaky. It will be at the most a belief, not a true faith - and belief is impotent. It appears to be like trust but it is not; deep down there is doubt. On the surface, belief; at the centre, doubt. It is better to have the doubt on the surface and trust at the centre - that is far better, and that's what your situation is. At the centre there is trust; you are not aware of it because you are not aware of your centre either. On the circumference there is doubt.

You are aware only of doubt because you are aware only of your personality, not of your essence.

But I can see: the trust is there, the seed is there. It is trying to come out. Soon it will be available to your consciousness... just a little more waiting.

That's why I am sending you back; otherwise I would have told you to stay. I say to stay only when I see that your circumference and centre have fallen in harmony, that you are one, because only then will being here be of any value; then only can you really be with me. Otherwise whether you are in England or in Poona will not make much difference.

I am sending you knowing that you will be sad, that you will be in a kind of suffering and agony. You would have liked me to tell you to stay but that will be against your own growth. One day you are going to be here and forever, but that day we have to wait for, and we cannot force it right now. A forced thing never works. A forced thing remains pseudo, creates a kind of hypocrisy. And because I can see that the possibility will soon become an actuality, I am ready to let you suffer a little bit.

This suffering is good.

If I say to you 'Stay, don't go,' then too you will suffer, and that suffering will be bad because half of you wants to go and half of you wants to be here. If you are here, the other half that wants to go will make all kinds of troubles for you, all kinds of interferences with your being here. It will find all the negatives that are possible. It will continuously argue with you: 'Look what you have done and I have always been saying to you "Go back home."' It will make you more and more shaky and wavering. It will work on you with a vengeance. If you go back, just the opposite will be the case.

This is the inner alchemy. This has to be understood: if you go back then the part that wants to be here with me will suffer and will find all the positives, will find all the negatives there, and sooner or later will be able to defeat the negative part. And the positive ultimately wins; we just have to give it a right situation, a right space to happen.

So on the surface it looks as if I am sending you; deep down this is the only way for you to be here one day. This is the only way that you will come closer and closer to me; far away there you will think more of me. Far away you will see the utter uselessness of the part that says 'Be in England.' There is nothing.... You have lived there, you have lived a certain kind of life - maybe it is convenient and comfortable, secure. Here life may not be so secure, may not be so comfortable, but here life will be growing and there you will only be dying. There you will be in a kind of stagnant stasis. You will live with the past but you will not have any future. You will live in a comfortable grave; that's how people are living.

Here my whole work is to pull you out of your comfortable grave. To come out of the grave is risky.

To come out of the grave after a long time, into the sun, in the wind, in the rains, looks insecure. But that's how life grows.

You can put a potted plant in the room: it may survive but it will lose lustre, it will lose joy, it will lose life. It may survive and comfortably - there will be no wind and no danger and no rain and no sun burning hot and showering fire, no fear of animals or anybody destroying it in a beautifully modern decorated drawing-room. The pot can be there, the plant can be there, it can survive but it will survive at the minimum.

Back in the garden, surrounded by all kinds of dangers, it is not only a survival, it is a celebration.

Then it will have the joy that happens when you accept challenges and the growth that happens when you fight with challenges, when you overcome them.

Life should be an adventure, and sannyas is nothing but an adventure into your inner world. I know your longing and I trust your longing and I will wait for the right moment when you can say with your total heart that this is the only place where you would like to be, whatsoever the cost. Then this is your home! But I will have to wait and you will have to wait for the total mind to say it. And that day is not far away, so don't be worried.

[Her child asks: What is my meditation?... I don't know what a meditation is.] That's good! Mm, but you want to know? Mm mm. Start dancing! Wild dance is your meditation.

[To the mother] Tell him to go to the music group in the night so he can start dancing there, [to the child] and when you are back home for at least twenty minutes, thirty minutes every night, dance.

Put on any music and dance, enjoy dancing, and that will be your meditation.

Anand means bliss, mandir means a temple - a temple of bliss. Man is born to be blissful. To miss it is our own responsibility. You cannot blame anybody else if you miss bliss in life. People go on blaming others. That is just an effort to save their own face, but it is foolish. And the more you blame others, the less is the possibility of your becoming blissful. To blame others means that your bliss depends on others; you have taken a very wrong standpoint from the very beginning.

Bliss does not depend on anybody else; it is independent. It is your self-nature: it is already there, just to be recognized, welcomed. It has to be accepted, not produced, because it is already the case. To blame others means you have moved in a wrong direction. Now you will always think that others are preventing you from being blissful, and you can always find a thousand and one causes for not being blissful. Not a single cause is valid.

Misery comes from outside, misery has causes outside; bliss does not come from outside. It is you, your very being. It is uncaused; it is not an effect of some cause. Once this is understood the blaming mind stops. And to stop the blaming mind is to take a tremendously significant turn. Then you start looking in a different direction. If you are not feeling blissful that means you are not being harmonious with your being, that's all; that you are not in tune with your being, that's all; that your mind is moving in a different way from your real nature; that there has come a disparity between you and your mind; that the mind is dragging you towards the south and your being is going towards the north - hence the problem. When the mind follows like a shadow, when you are the master and the mind is the slave and when it is always in tune with you, there is always bliss.

Respect the body because it is the temple. It is the most beautiful thing that has happened in nature. But people condemn the body too; those condemnors will find something or other. They will condemn the society, they will condemn the economic structure, they will condemn this and that - education, parents, family. And when they cannot find anybody else to condemn, when they have moved alone into the forest, they will condemn their own body; the old habit persists. They will say 'It is because of the body, this wretched body, this enemy. It is driving me crazy and because of it I cannot feel peace and blissful. Sol have to get rid of the body.' Then they start trying to get rid of the body, and in the name of spirituality many schools of suicide continue in the world; they are just suicidal. Then they start torturing the body, fasting, beating the body, making everything as uncomfortable, as inconvenient as possible. They devise new methods and means of masochism.

But this is not the way to be blissful. And when you destroy the temple, you are hurting the deity within.

The temple is a beautiful shelter for the deity. Use it, love it, and try to find out what is hidden in it.

God is hidden in it.

Deva means god, paro means transcendental. God is another name of the beyond; god is not a person. God is the unknowableness of existence... the mysteriousness of existence, the unfathomableness of existence. To reduce god to a person is to destroy the whole beauty of the idea. Then people start worshipping, because god becomes a person. What else is there to do? - worship, praise, pray. This is how religion goes on the wrong track.

The moment god becomes the mysteriousness of life there is no question of worship but of enquiry, of adventure, of exploration. When god becomes the unknowableness of life then religion need not become worship. Then religion has to become wonder, awe... and then it is tremendously alive.

Worship is dead, wonder is alive. So I say wonder is real worship. To be in awe is to be in prayer.

Whenever you are in awe your mind stops of its own accord.

Seeing a beautiful sunset the mind stops, maybe only for a few seconds or just for a second, but in that very second there is prayer. In that vibrant, alive moment you are transported into another world. The beauty of the sunset has taken you into the mystery of mysteries, into the holy of holies.

For a moment you are not a mind but an expanded consciousness, unbounded. You are no more confined in the body - you are as vast as the sky itself. For a moment the observer becomes the observed: you are not there separate from the sunset looking at it, you are it... and that is the moment of prayer. Not a single word is uttered and the prayer is complete. You have not even bowed down and you are surrendered. You have not quoted the Bible or the Koran or the Geeta, but in that moment is contained all the Bibles and all the Korans and all the Geetas.

This is the meaning of the transcendental; and once you start thinking of the transcendental, you will find god, any moment, anywhere. A bud is becoming a flower and you will see the transcendental beauty of it. Suddenly in the silence of the night a bird starts calling and the silence becomes deepened... and there is the transcendental! Somebody looks towards you with great love and in those eyes, in that moment, in that contact, is the transcendental.

Once god is not a person you will come across him here and there and everywhere. Jesus says 'Cut the wood and you will find me there. Turn the stone, and look - I am there!' Then each leaf has a beauty, each stone has a divineness and each moment becomes suffused, luminous, with the unknown and the unknowable.

To live in this utter grandeur of life is to be a sannyasin.

Deva means divine, hanso means a swan - it is a metaphor for the soul: the divine swan. In India the swans live deep in the Himalayas. They come only to the plains when it is too cold there; and when the season is over, the winter is over, they go back. When they are on the plains they suffer very much... nostalgia for the Himalayas, the virgin beauty of the Himalayas, the silence. And the lake Mansarovar where they live in the Himalayas has the purest water in the world. Man has not yet reached there to pollute it. I think it will be the last place in the world to be polluted. Rarely, once in a while, a traveller, a pilgrim, reaches there... very rarely.

Naturally the swans suffer very much because here they have to live in dirty ponds - muddy, polluted, poisoned, and the noise, the people, the ugliness - so they continuously dream of Mansarovar, of the lake in the Himalayas. They continuously think about how to go back. Even to wait for the few months of winter is too difficult; they feel homesick.

Because of this the metaphor arose that the human soul is a swan, a white swan. Its home is in god, hence on the earth, in the world, it suffers and it longs to go back to god. Religion is nothing but a return journey. It is a search for the home, a search for the source, a search for the original face.

Remember: man is an outsider in the world; hence the feeling of alienation. One cannot feel at home here. We do everything to make ourselves at home but still something deep down goes on saying 'This is not the place. Sooner or later we will have to leave; it is not more than a caravanserai, just an overnight's stay and in the morning we will have to go.' Deep down someone goes on saying 'Remain detached. Don't get too entangled because soon you will have to leave and all those entanglements will become a very deep misery. Remain unattached, aloof. Just be a passer-by, a pilgrim who passes through many places but never makes any place his home.'

This world is a pilgrimage - don't get lost in it. Even while you are in it, go on remembering god.

[Osho speaks in Hindi to an Indian sannyasin and then in English:] No, nobody can succeed by trying. Trying to forget means that you are again remembering. Trying to forget means remembering and remembering. The very effort to forget will not allow you to forget.

That is not the way. Just the opposite will be the result if you try to forget something. Nobody can try to forget.

Have you not heard the famous story...? A politician was continuously going to see a saint and he was asking again and again 'Give me a mantra so that I can become the Prime Minister of the country. You are an enlightened one and you know all the secrets of life. Why not give me a little key? This is my only ambition.'

Tired of the politician, to be finished with him, the saint said one day 'Okay, now I will give you one - this is the mantra, just a small mantra. Five minutes chanting of the mantra will do, but remember only one thing: while you are chanting it, don't think of the monkey.'

The politician said 'This is so simple. I have never been thinking of the monkey. For my whole life I have never thought about the monkey. Why should I think about the monkey? What kind of condition is this?'

The saint said 'Then you can go. Just take a good bath, sit silently, repeat the mantra for five minutes, but remember: don't remember the monkey, that's all. That is the only condition to be fulfilled.'

The politician was awake the whole night. He would take a bath again, would sit for five minutes and would try, but the moment he tried, monkeys and monkeys - not one but many! He tried and tried to forget the monkeys and the more he tried to forget, the more they were there mocking him and shouting at him and making faces at him. By the morning he was almost mad!

He rushed to the saint and said 'What have you done? If you had not told me about this monkey I would have succeeded, but now it seems impossible - in this life. This mantra won't be of any use, because that monkey I cannot forget. It is impossible and I have tried all that I can do to forget it.'

Now, this is a simple psychological process: if you want to forget you will never forget. That is not the right way. One thing - this has to be understood: never try to forget anything, otherwise you will never forget.

The second thing: people think that because they have loved so much, that's why they cannot forget.

That is wrong, utterly wrong. You may feel hurt when I say that. People cannot forget because they have not loved enough; hence there is a guilt feeling. If you have really loved the woman then there is no problem. But the problem is that nobody loves enough. It is not only a question of you: nobody loves enough. And when the woman is there, who bothers? Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow - we will love tomorrow. Today let us fight then tomorrow we will love. And today there are small things, just small things and quarrels, and everything... jealousies and possessiveness and domination. We hope that tomorrow everything will settle. We will become wiser and she will become wiser and then there will be great love.

Now, the problem is that tomorrow will never come. The woman is dead, so you are feeling guilty.

It is not because of love. Love can forgive and forget. Love has that capacity to forgive and forget.

Love is immensely powerful.

The question is guilt. You are feeling guilty: you didn't love the woman as you should have and now there is no opportunity left. Now you will not see her again, never meet her again; now that unfulfilled love haunts you. You would like to cry and weep and ask forgiveness of her and say 'While you were here I couldn't do anything for you. Now you are gone and I cannot do anything because I don't know where you are, or whether you are or not.'

This creates the problem, so this is the second thing to understand. If you go on thinking that you are remembering her because of your love, then you will never forget, because that gives you a great joy - that it is because of love. You are not like others: their woman dies and the next day they are ready to marry again, you are not like those people. You are taking a great ego interest in it, that you loved so much you cannot forget. Now the very idea of love will be an ego gratification. These are the tricks of the mind that have to be understood. It is nothing to do with love.

If you loved the woman, it is over. She is gone and you loved her as much as you could. What more could you have done? Even if she was alive your love would have been just a repetition, and all repetitions are boring, they are tedious. What else was there to do? All that you could do you have done. It is not because of love. But the mind is very cunning: it hides things behind beautiful names.

Guilt is there; the mind will label it love, and then it can protect it. Once you see it is guilt you will not protect it, you will not feel any ego satisfaction in it. The guilt has to be dropped.

The third thing to be understood is: our commitment is not towards persons, our commitment is towards love itself. If you are really ready to understand, that woman was only a personification of womanhood, one form of womanhood, and there are millions of women in the world, all forms of the same womanhood. Start loving again! My own understanding is this, that if you have enjoyed a woman's love, you owe it to her to start loving somebody else. If love has been such a deep satisfaction then you will be committed to love.

The people who never get married again because the woman died or the man died go on bragging that because they loved so much they cannot get he married. All nonsense! In fact their love has been such a failure that they are afraid to go into it again. If love has really been a success, they will immediately be ready to go into another love experience, with another form of womanhood, with another form of manhood.

The commitment is to be towards love - and there is no betrayal in it; you are not betraying anybody.

Those ideas have to be dropped. In the Indian mind particularly those ideas are very deep - that if you get married, if you love another woman, you are betraying. That is nonsense! If you don't go into love again, that is betrayal - betraying love, betraying the woman. It is an insult to the woman who died, because she could not make you so satisfied with love that you would like to have the experience again with somebody else. She made you so nauseated with love that you have become afraid of moving into another relationship again.

My approach is totally different: if you really loved that woman, love again; love again and again and again. And you will be surprised that when you are again in love with another woman you will feel tremendously grateful to the woman who has died. She has made you so in tune with love. She has given you the taste of love so that now you can love again, so that you can love somebody else too.

And if you love the other woman you will find the same energy again, because it is the same energy; only forms are different. Man and woman - there are only two lovers in the whole world. All else is just non-essential.

So become available to love again. Otherwise your love energy will remain stuck, and with nowhere to flow it will start moving in a vicious circle, remembering the woman again and again and making a wound inside. It will become ill. It will be like a psychological cancer. And the woman who has left you will not be happy; she will suffer because you will be suffering. Wherever she is she will suffer.

If she really loved you, she will be happy when you are again flowing, loving, enjoying. In those moments of enjoyment you will feel grateful to the woman, and that will be true love.

So my suggestion is: find another woman, and this time don't get married. This time, fall in love and then get married. Let love be first and marriage second; this will be the right approach. Otherwise you will become pathological, unnecessarily ill and suffering. And there is no point in it. We all have to go; sooner or later you will die. Before you die, let your love flow; let somebody become happy through your love. Share it!

You have come to the right person! If you go anywhere else in this country you will find wrong suggestions given to you. This country carries a very very morbid mind. And they will help you - they will say 'You are great!' They will say 'This is how one should be. You are a true Indian; you represent the true image of India.' You simply represent a kind of pathological tradition.

Drop all that nonsense!

Feel happy and start moving again. One should not be finished by so small a thing. Love is greater than persons. Persons come and go - love continues. And you are alive, you can breathe. Don't feel any betrayal.

This country has even done that! In the past this country created the idea in women's minds that if their husband is dead they don't have the right to breathe, because that is betrayal. So they should jump in the funeral pyre with him, become a 'sati', bury themselves alive. What ugliness - supporting suicide! And poor women have been killing themselves because the idea was planted in their minds 'When your husband is dead, how can you live? To live means you are betraying. Even in living you are betraying!' Now we know that was nonsense.

In the same way sooner or later the country will have to understand that when you are alive you have to love too. Love is a function of life just as breathing is. If you can breathe, if you can eat, if you can take a bath, if you can sleep, then why not love? To destroy your love means to live half-heartedly, and then naturally you will think of the past. You will remain past-oriented because there is no future. You know now you are not going to love anybody, so all that you can do is to go again into those memories and make them more and more painted and colourful. They may not have been as beautiful as you are thinking, but a hungry mind will paint them very colourful and very beautiful.

Never get too attached to the past, because the past is gone and gone forever. Remain available to the present and to the future. That is the meaning of being alive: if you are alive you have to breathe, you have to love, you have to share. This has to be the change that you have to bring...

and with this sannyas, let the whole past disappear.

[A sannyasin says: I've been feeling, especially for the last week, that I've had tastes and experiences of bliss, ecstasy and the divine. In the last week I've been experiencing a lot of pain as I experience all my blocks and how asleep I am and how much my mind distracts. It's very uncomfortable.] I can feel everything. Mm mm.... It is something very meaningful - even this pain. It happens only when your energy starts moving into new spaces where it has never moved before. It is the beginning of something tremendously important, but because it is new the body will have to go through a few pains, because new paths have to be created for the energy.

And you need not be worried: the energy will create the paths itself because you have enough energy. The problem is when the energy is not enough and the path has to be created. When the river has enough water, no need to worry; the very amount of water creates its way. And so is the case with energy: you have more than you need, so it is going to break all those blocks in you. They are not to be removed, there is no need to remove them. They have to be removed when the energy is not enough to remove them; then outer processes have to be used.

For example, Rolfing can be helpful but only when the energy is not enough. Postural Integration is helpful but only when the energy is not enough. But when the energy is like a flood, no Rolfing, no Postural Integration is needed. The energy will come and take all the rocks away; it will make its own path. And you are fortunate to have more than you need. But it is clashing with the rocks so there will be pain, but accept this pain as a growth pain.

Don't think of it as a disease. Feel joyous about it, that your energy is moving and creating new paths. And with those new paths you will start finding new places of being. These days that you have been here have been really significant. Something of immense value has started moving. Just do two things....

One is: continue to meditate every day - one meditation. But choose one and then insist on the same; don't change it. You can choose any one that you like, but let it be something very active - Dynamic, Kundalini, Nataraj - anything dynamic that will help the energy to move faster.

And the second thing that you have to do is: before you go to sleep in the night, just lie down, turn the lights off, lie down under your blanket, and feel your body is dying. Start from the toes and feel that they are dying and move slowly upwards: the legs are dying, the thighs are dying; go on moving upwards and let the whole body die. It will take at least five to seven minutes; slowly slowly you come to the head and all is dead. When you feel that all is dead, finished, that the body is a corpse, then do a small meditation which will be of immense help.

Start feeling that great light is entering from the head, golden light - as if suddenly a sun has risen and it is pouring all its gold into you. It is going in, going in, going in... the whole body has become a hollow bamboo and the light is falling in and passing through like a flood, and it goes out from the toes. For five minutes let this happen, then after five minutes - just approximately, you need not look at the watch, just approximately - after five minutes change the whole process. Now start thinking of a dark energy, negative - like a dark night with not a single star in it, a dark energy flow entering from the toes, moving upwards, filling the whole bamboo, the hollow body, and going out from the head. Five minutes of that, and then go to sleep.

This will synchronize the positive and negative energy inside your body. It will synchronize your man and woman inside the body, your yin and yang, your day and night, your life and death. First life, the golden light, then death, the darkness... and enjoy both, because both are beautiful. This for five and the first part for five minutes, and seven minutes first to have the body absolutely dead so it creates no hindrance.

This passing of the golden light and the darkness will help tremendously. Every day you will feel those blocks are disappearing for no other work is needed on them. And one meditation every day.

[The previous year a sannyasin, when he took sannyas, told Osho he felt negative about it. Now he says he will stay "as long as I can stand it".] Good. Mm mm. (pause) Then it will not be very long! If it is a question of standing it, it is not going to be very long. But try - as long as you can stand. I was thinking that you would be a little less negative this time, but I don't think....

This is up to you.... But if it is too much torture, why bother? If it is like something that you have to stand, why bother at all? Unless it is a joy there is no need to be in it. So decide about it: if it is a joy to be here, be here! I am the last person in the world to make somebody miserable, and misery is written so large on your face. But only you are responsible for it, because I am not in favour of misery. If you create it that is your responsibility....

So if you can do [groups], do. But if it becomes too much, unbearable, and you feel it difficult, then please forget all about it! Either be here in a joyous way.... Then only can you gain something, because it is only in joy that one gains; it is only in joy that one receives. My energy is not such that you can receive it when you are sad and serious and negative; you will not receive it at all. And it is not that I am not giving it to you - I may go on giving, but you will not be able to receive it.

Unless you are positive, welcoming and cooperating, nothing can be done. I am utterly helpless with people like you. And you will think that I have not been doing something. I am ready to do everything but if the other person remains completely closed - not only closed but having some investment in remaining closed - then it will be an infringement on your freedom if I force myself upon you. That will be a kind of rape.

I am available. Think for a few days: if you feel like being here playfully, joyously, then be here; otherwise be joyous anywhere else wherever you are! My work here is to help you to be happy.

If you can be happy somewhere else, more happy than here, then with all my blessings, be there; don't be here. And this time make a decision. Otherwise this is a sheer wasting of your energy - coming and going. Last time you missed and this time if you remain in that state - the very words that you utter are 'If I can stand it...' - it makes things impossible.

[Osho suggests he do the Vipassana group.] ... If after Vipassana you can feel happy, then you can feel happy here, mm? because Vipassana is one of the most difficult processes...

... Mm, it is a difficult process, and I have given it knowingly to you: if you can stand it, then you can stand everything else! If you cannot stand it then it is not worth bothering about. It is very deep-going and very penetrating, but the first few days - five, seven days - it is difficult. Not that it has difficult processes to be done, but just sitting silently, doing nothing is the most difficult thing in the world. If there is something to do, one can do it; that is not difficult. But if nothing is to be done - just sitting silently - then minutes appear as if they are hours, and hours appear as if they are weeks, and days appear as if they are years and it becomes so long. But I have deliberately given it to you...

... I am determined - something has to be done for you, but if you are determined not to let me, then it is your decision...

... You just have an old negative pattern... maybe from your upbringing in the childhood. Maybe you are still against your father, against your mother. Maybe you are seeing your father in me, maybe you have projected me as a father figure; something is there. So you want to say 'no' - that which you have not said to your own father you want to say to me. Once you understand it, it will relax.

Once you see the point, that whatsoever you are thinking about me has nothing to do with me but has something to do with your childhood... I am completely out of it - I have not yet been a part of your life. You don't allow me!

But this happens to a few people if their childhood has been such that they have been repressed deep down. They wanted to say 'no' to the parents, they wanted to shout at the parents, they wanted to find fault with the parents. They weren't allowed. They were helpless and they had to say yes when they wanted to say no. They had to hug when they wanted to say no! with their whole heart.

Those wounds have remained; they have become engrained in your personality. You are throwing all those projections on me, and I have nothing to do with them.

If you watch a little more, if you become a little more alert about what you are doing, you will see the point. Then you will relax and this whole commune can then be of immense value to you. By just passing through a few groups things will start becoming more and more clear.

[A sannyasin who has just completed the primal group asks about his homosexuality. The primal therapist says that he is very young emotionally; like a little boy.] The first thing: don't make it a problem. If you really want to solve it, don't make it a problem. Once you make it a problem then there is no solution to it. It will look paradoxical but what I am saying is:

accept it - nothing is wrong in it. It is just a social idea that something is wrong in it, but nothing is wrong in it. It is good at least that you feel attracted to somebody. So the first thing is to accept it; don't reject it, otherwise you will never be able to solve it. Through acceptance there is a possibility of its disappearance. The more you reject it, the more you will become attracted to boys, because whatsoever is rejected creates attraction. Live it out and it will disappear.

Homosexuality is a necessary phase in the growth of a man or a woman.

[Osho went on to explain the four states of sexual growth, from auto-sexuality in a child, to homosexuality which naturally precedes heterosexuality, and then the last phase of going beyond sex - brahmacharya.] Divya [the primal therapist] seems to be right: you got stuck in the second phase. Nothing is wrong in it. You can go beyond it but you can go only through it. So drop any attitudes about homosexuality; that is nothing but the propaganda of the ages. Nothing is wrong in it; it is not a sin. And if you can accept it, then naturally you will grow out of it and you will start being interested in women, but you have to pass through it.

It is possible that your mother was more dominating, as mothers are always. It is very rare to find a man who is not a henpecked husband - very rare. In fact, it doesn't happen, and if sometimes you find one then the exception proves the rule and nothing else. There are reasons, psychological reasons for it.

The man continuously fights in the world so his male energy is exhausted. By the time he comes home, he wants to become feminine. He wants to rest from his male aggression. In the office, in the factory, in the marketplace, in the politics - everywhere he has been fighting and fighting. At home he does not want to fight; he wants to rest, because tomorrow again the world will start. So the moment he enters the house he becomes feminine. The whole day the woman has been feminine, not fighting at all; there was nobody to fight with. She is tired of being a woman... and the kitchen and everything and the children. She wants to enjoy a little bit of aggression and fight and nagging, and the poor husband is available. So she becomes male and the husband becomes female; that is the whole foundation of henpeckedness.

But children get into trouble: they see that the mother is dominating; they feel sorry for the father, and out of their feeling sympathy for the father they want to love him: But they cannot - they cannot go against the mother. Even the father cannot go against the mother; how can they? Deep down they resist the mother; the dominating mother becomes repulsive, and that is their first experience of womanhood. Later on, whenever they are with women they will be afraid; she is going to prove a mother again. She will dominate, she will nag, she will be powerful.

That is your fear, and you are still in sympathy with your father. The poor old man never had a say.

Because of that sympathy with the father you are more attracted to boys. But this thing is nothing to be thought of as a problem. You can go through it. Start enjoying it and don't feel guilty about it. Soon you will be surprised - a great desire for women will arise in you. Because being attracted to a man is one thing, but to be fulfilled by a man is not possible. Fulfillment needs the opposite, because the opposite complements. You may feel good with a man but to feel good is one thing and to be in deep, intimate love is another. You may feel happy, but to feel happy is one thing and to be ecstatic is totally another.

Ecstasy is possible only when male and female energy meet, but ecstasy always brings in its shadow, agony. That's the fear: you have seen the agony too much and you are afraid. But the ecstasy is so beautiful that it is worth all the agony - the fight, the conflict. Men are better friends, remember; man and woman are never friends. Lovers are enemies but never friends; in fact lovers and enemies, never friends. Men are very good friends; women don't know how to be friendly. It is very difficult for women to love other women; they know each other too well - in fact they know too much about each other. But men are very friendly and homosexuals are really gay people, because there is no agony... but there is no ecstasy either. One has to risk and pay.

My suggestion is: accept this and soon you will pass beyond it. Then you will start exploring the opposite polarity: the woman. It has to be explored; it is part of growth. The man has to explore the woman, the woman has to explore the man. And the deeper you go into that exploration, the more ecstasy will arise, and the more possibility of agony will be there too. They go together, they balance each other.

A man-to-man relationship is more comfortable, convenient; more understanding is there. A man- woman relationship is always a turmoil, less understanding because they are such worlds apart.

How can they understand each other? No man understands the woman, no woman understands the man, and that is the beauty of their being together. That creates mystery... misunderstanding too.

But first accept it. Drop your resistance, and soon you will be able to go beyond it.