It is difficult to love real people ....

Yesterday at 19:27
When I am by myself I feel I can let go in some ways and love people, but as soon as I come into their presence, the shutters go up.


It is difficult to love real people because a real person is not going to fulfill your expectations. He is not here to fulfill anybody else's expectations, he has to live his own life. And whenever he moves somewhere that goes against you or is not in tune with your feelings, emotions, your being, it becomes difficult.
It is very easy to think about love. It is very difficult to love. It is very easy to love the whole world. The real difficulty is to love the a single human being. It is very easy to love God or humanity. The real problem arises when you come across a real person and you encounter him. To encounter him is to go through a great change and a great challenge.
He is not going to be your slave and neither are you going to be a slave to him. That's where the real problem arises. If you are going to be a slave or if he is going to be a slave, then there is no problem. The problem arises because nobody is here to play a slave--and nobody can be a slave. Everybody is a free agent... the whole being consists of freedom. Man is freedom.
So remember, the problem is real, it has nothing to do with the whole phenomenon of love. Don't make it a personal problem, otherwise you will be in difficulty.
Everybody has to face the same problem, more or less. I have never come across a person who has no difficulty in love. It has nothing to do with love, the very world of love.
The very relationship brings you to such situations where problems arise, and it is good to pass through them. In the East people have escaped, just seeing the difficulty in it. They started denying their love, rejecting their love. They became deadened. Love almost disappeared from the East and only meditation remained.
Meditation means that you are feeling good in your loneliness. Meditation means that you are related only to yourself. Your circle is complete with yourself; you don't go out of it. Of course ninety-nine percent of your problems are solved--but at a very great cost. You will be less troubled now. The eastern man is less anxious, less tense, almost lives in his own inner cave, protected, with eyes closed. He does not allow his energy to move. He makes a short circuit, a small energy movement inside his being, and he is happy. But his happiness is just a little dead. His happiness is not a jubilation, it is not a joy.
At the most you can say that it is not unhappiness. At the most you can say something of the negative about it, as if you say that you are healthy because you don't have any illness. But that is not much of a health. Health should have something positive, a glow of its own--not just absence of disease. In that way even a dead body is healthy because it has no illness.
So in the East we have tried to live without love, to renounce the world--that means to renounce love--to renounce the woman, the man, and all possibilities where love can flower. Jain monks, Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, are not allowed to talk to a woman when they are alone, not allowed to touch a woman, not really allowed to even see face to face. When a woman comes to ask something they have to keep their eyes down. They have to look at the tip of their nose so they don't see the woman even by mistake.Because who kows, something might click... and one is almost helpless in the hands of love.
They don't stay in people's homes and they don't stay long in one place because attachment, love, become possible. So they go on moving, wandering, and avoiding--avoiding all relationships. They have attained a certain quality of stillness. They are undisturbed people, undistracted by the world, but not happy, not celebrating.
In the West just the opposite has happened. People have tried to find happiness through love, and they have created much trouble. They have lost all contact with themselves. They have moved so far away from themselves that they don't know how to come back. They don't know where the path is, where their home is. So they feel meaningless, homeless, and they go on making more and more love efforts with this woman, with that man--heterosexual, homosexual, autosexual. They go on trying every way and again they feel empty, because love alone can give you happiness but there will not be any silence in it. And when there is happiness and no silence, again something is missing.
When you are happy without silence your happiness will be like a fever, excitement... much ado about nothing. That feverish state will create much tension in you and nothing will come out of it, just running, chasing. And one day one comes to realize that the whole effort has been baseless because you have been trying to find the other, and you have not yet found yourself.
Both these ways have failed. The East has failed because it tried meditation without love. The West has failed because it tried love without meditation. My whole effort is to give you a synthesis, the whole--which means meditation plus love. One should be able to be happy alone and one should also be able to be happy with people. One should be happy inside and one should also be happy in relationships. One should make a beautiful house inside and and outside too. You should have a beautiful garden surrounding your house and a beautiful bedroom too. The garden is not against the bedroom; the bedroom is not against the garden.
So meditation should be an inner shelter, an inner shrine. Whenever you feel that the world is too much for you, you can move into your shrine. You can have a bath in your inner being. You can rejuvenate yourself. You can come out resurrected; again alive, fresh, young, renewed... to live, to be. But you should also be capable of loving people and facing problems, because a silence that is impotent and cannot face problems is not much of a silence, is not worth much. Only a silence that can face problems and remain silent is something to be longed for, to be desired.
So these two things I would like to tell you: first start doing meditation, because it is always good to start from the nearest center of your being, and that is meditation. But never get stuck in it. Meditation should move, flower, unfold and become love.
And don't be worried, don't make it a problem--it is not. It is simply human; it's natural. Everybody is afraid--has to be. Life is such that one has to be. And people who become fearless, become fearless not by becoming brave--because a brave man has only repressed his fear; he's not really fearless. A man becomes fearless by accepting his fears. It is not a question of bravery. It is simply seeing into the facts of life and realizing that these fears are natural. One accepts them!
The problem arises because you want to reject them. You have been taught very egotistical ideals : "Be brave." What nonsense! Foolish! How can an intelligent man avoid fears? If you are stupid you will not have any fears. Then the bus driver goes on honking and you stand in the middle of the road, unafraid. Or a bull comes charging at you and you stand there, unafraid. But you are stupid! An intelligent man has to jump out of the way.
If you become an addict and start looking everywhere for the snake in the bushes, then there is a problem. If there is nobody on the road and then too you are afraid and start running, there is a problem; otherwise, fear is natural.
So when I say that you will get rid of your fear, I don't mean that there will be no fears in life. You will come to know that ninety percent of your fears are just imagination. Ten percent are real so one has to accept them. I don't make people brave. I make them more responsive, sensitive, alert, and their alertness is enough. They become aware that they can use their fears also as stepping stones. So don't be worried, mm?

(Osho)