The Food Of Love
As life is... I divide it in three parts: breakfast, lunch, supper. The childhood is the breakfast-time. And as it happens if you have not been given your breakfast today, you will feel very, very hungry, out of all proportion, at lunchtime. And if you have missed lunch also, then of course at supper you will be almost mad. Love is food – that’s why I divide life in three: breakfast, lunch, supper.
Love is food: food for the soul. When a child sucks at his mother’s breast for the first time, he is sucking two things, not only milk. Milk is going into his body and love is going into his soul. Love is invisible, just as soul is invisible; milk is visible just as body is visible. If you have eyes to see, you can see two things together dripping into the child’s being from the mother’s breast. Milk is just the visible part of love; love is the invisible part of milk – the warmth, the love, the compassion, the blessing.
If the child has missed at his breakfast, then when he is young he will be too needy for love – and that creates trouble. Then he will be too impatient for love – that creates trouble. Then he will be in such a hurry for love – that creates trouble because love grows very slowly, it needs patience. And the more in a hurry you are, the greater is the possibility that you will miss.
Have you watched it in yourself and in others? The people who are too much in need of love always suffer, because they always feel that nobody is going to fulfill them. In fact, nobody is going to be their mother again. In a mother-child relationship, nothing was expected from the child. What can a child do? He is helpless. He cannot return anything. At the most he can smile, that’s all, or follow with his eyes where the mother is going, that’s all. Small, beautiful gestures, but nothing else can he do. The mother has to give, the child has to receive.
If at breakfast-time you have missed this, then you will be looking for a woman who can be your mother. Now, a woman is looking for a lover, not for a son; trouble is bound to be there. Unless by chance, by accident, you can find some woman who is looking for a son. Then things will settle; then two illnesses will fit together.
It always happens: a pessimist always finds an optimist to fit; a sadist always finds a masochist to fit; a dominating person always finds one who is in need of being dominated, then they fit. You cannot find two masochists living together, never. I have watched thousands of couples: up to now I have not been able to come to a single couple in which both the partners are sadists or both the partners are masochists. It is impossible to live together; they have to fit. Only opposites fit, and people always fall in love with the opposite.
If you can meet a woman who is in search of a son – that too is ugly, that too is ill, because a woman naturally should be seeking a lover, not a child. And this is the problem, and the problem becomes more complicated: even if she is looking for a son, she is unaware of it; and even if you are looking for a mother, you are unaware of it. In fact, if a woman tries to mother you, you will feel hurt. You will say, “What are you doing? Am I a child?” And you are looking for a mother. Thousands, millions of people are looking for a mother.
That’s why man seems so much interested in women’s breasts – otherwise there is no need to be so interested in women’s breasts. The interest simply shows that in your childhood, at your breakfast-time, you have missed something. It continues, it hovers on your mind, it haunts you. Breasts are for breakfast time. Now why do you go on thinking and painting.
Watch deep down, because it is not your responsibility, it is nothing to do with you. You cannot change your mother now. It happened as it happened, but you can become conscious – you can become conscious of all these things inside. And by becoming conscious a miracle happens. If you become conscious of these things, they start dropping. They can cling to you only in deep unconsciousness. A profound consciousness begins to be a transforming force.
So just become conscious! If you have some childish attitudes towards love, become conscious, find out, search deep. And just by becoming conscious, they drop. So nothing else is needed. Not that first you have to become conscious and then you have to ask “What to do now?” The moment you become conscious they disappear, because by becoming conscious you are becoming adult.
A child is not conscious. A child lives in a deep unconsciousness. By becoming conscious you are becoming adult, mature, so all that was clinging in your unconsciousness will disappear. Just as you bring light in a room and the darkness disappears; bring consciousness deep in your heart.
Then there are people who miss their lunch also. Then in their old age they become what you call “dirty old people.” Then in their old age they continuously think of sex and nothing else. They may not talk about sex in a direct way – they may start talking against sex – but they will talk about sex. Their being against makes no difference.
You go and listen to the so-called saints in India, and you will always find them continuously talking against sex and praising brahmacharya. These people have even missed their lunch. Now suppertime has come – and they are mad. Now they know that death is coming any moment. And when death is approaching near, and time is disappearing from their hands, if they become neurotic it seems natural.
These neurotic people have stories in the old scriptures that when they meditate, apsaras – beautiful women from heaven – descend. Naked they dance around them. Why should they do such a thing? Who is bothered about an old man sitting in the Himalayas meditating. Who is bothered? He is almost dead – who is bothered? Those apsaras from heaven, they can find better people. In fact, so many people are chasing apsaras, how can they find time to chase rishis, these so-called saints? No, it has nothing to do with apsaras or with heaven or anything.
It is just that these people have missed breakfast and lunch both. And by suppertime their imagination is playing tremendous games with them. It is their imagination, starved imagination.
Do one thing: you just go on a fast for three weeks, and then everywhere you will start seeing food – everywhere! Even you may see a full moon rushing into the sky and you will say it looks like bread, a chapati. That’s how it will happen. You will start projecting, your imagination will be playing games with you.
If this happens, then compassion never arises. Move slowly, alert, watching, be loving. If you are sexual I don’t say: Drop sex. I say make it more alert, make it more prayerful, make it more profound, so that it can become love. If you are loving, then make it even more grateful; bring deeper gratitude, joy, celebration, prayer to it, meditation to it, so that it can become compassion.
Unless compassion has happened to you, don’t think that you have lived rightly or that you have lived at all. Compassion is the flowering. And when compassion happens to one person, millions are healed. Whosoever comes around him is healed. Compassion is therapeutic.
'A Sudden Clash of Thunder' - Osho
