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Osho, Is the concept of soul mates more useful than marriage? One of the most significant things in mans life has been the love affair. Birth is not in your hands, death is not in your hands; and these are the only three great things in life: birth, love, and death. Only love is in your hands, only love gives you the freedom and dignity of being a human being; otherwise, birth and death happen just like any other animal, or any tree. Love should be kept as pure and unpolluted as possible. You are asking, Is the concept of soul mates more useful than marriage? Concepts dont matter. What matters is your understanding. You can change the word marriage to the word soul mates, but you are the same. You will make the same hell out of soul mates as you have been making out of marriage nothing has changed, only the word, the label. Dont believe in labels too much. Why has marriage failed? In the first place, we raised it to unnatural standards. We tried to make it something permanent, something sacred, without knowing even the abc of sacredness, without knowing anything about the eternal. Our intentions were good but our understanding was very small, almost negligible. So instead of marriage becoming something of a heaven, it has become a hell. Instead of becoming sacred, it has fallen even below profanity. And this has been mans stupidity a very ancient one: whenever he gets into difficulty, he changes the word. Change the word marriage intosoul mates, but dont change yourself. And you are the problem, not the word; any word will do. A rose is a rose is a roseyou can call it by any name. You are asking to change the concept, you are not asking to change yourself. Marriage has failed because you could not rise to the standard that you were expecting of marriage, of the concept of marriage. You were brutal, you were barbarous, you were full of jealousies, you were full of lust; you had never known really what love is. In the name of love, you tried everything which is just the opposite of love: possessiveness, domination, power. Marriage has become a battlefield where two persons are fighting for supremacy. Of course, the man has his own way: rough and more primitive. The woman has her own way: feminine, softer, a little more civilized, more subdued. But the situation is the same. Now psychologists

are talking about marriage as an intimate enmity. And thats what it has proved to be. Two enemies are living together pretending to be in love, expecting the other to give love; and the same is being expected by the other. Nobody is ready to give nobody has it. How can you give love if you dont have it? Now, let me be honest. I did not completely enjoy reading Oshos thoughts on marriage At times; his thoughts were too stunning and at times too abstract and theoretical to comprehend. Probably, he had an explanation for my reaction within his book that is because your mind is conditioned about how a women should be and what marriage should be There were some parts of the book which made sense and there were some parts where I felt it is all rhetorical ! Osho quotes that human beings are polygamous by nature and the institution of marriage forces them against that and supports monogamy. While men invented arranged marriage to bring a framework, they also understood that men need a vent and hence they invented the system of devadasis. Now comes the question - IS WOMEN NOT A HUMAN BEING? She indeed is!! So, why was there no system for women? But men planned in such a way that women were reduced to a thingWomen were denied education, they were made to be dependent on men financially we made a society where women were dependent on men for financial security and also for knowledge (women were denied education, in general) It is true that the Indian system of marriage gives stability. So, West invented a different solution to this polygamous nature they went with serial monogamy, so there were lot of marriages and lot of divorces they fall in love, marry and then they get out of love and divorce So, marriage puts a constraint and hence it kills love. Osho reinforces that love is important. While it all made logical sense, I could not stop thinking in the following lines If marriage is not the right institution and if it kills love, what is his idea about giving a secure home to the children, who are the future generation? Many marriages may lack love. When two individuals, who were tied together by marriage and not by, love wanting to lead a peaceful life with integrity...over a period of time will definitely develop AFFECTION, UNDERSTANDING, ADJUSTMENT all the good things required for a successful partnership. Marriage (with the basic affection and a conscious will to be a better parent) indeed gives an environment where there is higher probability of achieving a physically, mentally and emotionally stable life. And ofcourse, this brings in an environment for the children to grow up so that they become stable individuals. Somehow the way we human beings are designed, we need both parents - mom and dad!

Probably, marriage is an artificial way of enforcing men and women to establish units that form a cultured society. For humanity to survive and reach further heights we need certain basic rules and framework in place and what is a better alternate to the institution of marriage? If we can come up with a better alternate framework than marriage - which is going to achieve love and affection and also provide a stability in life - who is going to complain??!!! Today, marriage works and there is no alternate which is better

Osho Quotes on Marriage 1. Only fools think in terms of legality; otherwise, love is enough. And I am not against marriage I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but dont hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage. 2. Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment. 3. Marriage has made love disappear badly, marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other considerations marriage is arranged money, finance, family, prestige, astrology all absurd. They have nothing to do with the heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so but they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way. Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is exactly the same as the others, that you vibrate in the same way as the other. There is no other way to find it out. 4. Be a little aware before you are trapped! Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever. 5. The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years, in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries, and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is

settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high. 6. I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you dont know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you dont know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is. 7. Your marriage is a subtle politics of domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics. 8. Love marriage came into existence but is not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes, happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife, you should love your husband. It was a `should. And you could not even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is concerned. The old marriage failed. The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt `love marriage. 9. One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle. 10. I am all for love, because love fails. You will be surprised I have my own logic. I am all for love, because love fails. I am not for marriage, because marriage succeeds; it gives you a permanent settlement. And that is the danger: you become satisfied with a toy, you become satisfied with something plastic, artificial, manmade. 11. But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas. 12. I am basically against marriage; obviously the question of divorce does not arise. I am against

the accidental birth of people, because that is the basic cause for the earth being burdened with the retarded. I am in absolute agreement that love should be just play; the moment you start producing children it becomes business. And I cannot agree to produce this kind of humanity. I was teaching that whenever a couple of course unmarried, because the law has nothing to do with your love. Love should be a freedom between two persons, and if from even one person love disappears they have to separate, as friends, with gratitude for all the beautiful moments they lived together. Loving affairs ending in the courts are absolutely ugly. 13. You have not looked at the poor woman for years, for the simple reason that marriage makes things so certain. Marriage makes things so dead and dull. Marriage takes all surprise and wonder away. Marriage makes you take your wife for granted, your husband for granted. What is the need to look at your wife? She will be there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and forever. You look at people when you know you may not be able to look at them again. Marriage kills; it makes something tremendously beautiful very ugly. 14. I have never heard about any perfect marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes! 15. Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single. 16. Marriage itself never destroys anything. Marriage simply brings out whatsoever is hidden in you it brings it out. If love is hidden behind you, inside you, marriage brings it out. If love was just a pretension, just a bait, then sooner or later it has to disappear. And then your reality, your ugly personality comes up. Marriage simply is an opportunity, so whatsoever you had to bring out will come out.I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. Love is destroyed by people who dont know how to love. Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. Otherwise love is something eternal, part of eternity. If you grow, if you know the art, and you accept the realities of lovelife, then it goes on growing every day. Marriage becomes a tremendous opportunity to grow into love. 17. Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?

18. Marriage almost always never happens, because marriage means the celebration of togetherness. It is not a license. No registry office can give you marriage; no priest can give it to you as a gift. It is a tremendous revolution in the being, it is a great transformation in your very style of life, and it can happen only when you celebrate togetherness, when the other is no longer felt as the other, when you no longer feel yourself as I. When the two are not really two, a bridge has happened, they have become one in a certain sense. Physically they remain two, but as far as the innermost being is concerned, they have become one. They may be two poles of one existence but they are not two. A bridge exists. That bridge gives you glimpses of togetherness. It is one of the rarest things to come across a marriage. People live together because they cannot live alone. Remember this: because they cannot live alone, that is why they live together. To live alone is uncomfortable, to live alone is uneconomical, to live alone is difficult, that is why they live together. The reasons are negative. 19. Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate in friendship, because you have given each other so much. 20. As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only born out of license, law, will be called bastard. 21. Bring more understanding to it. You will not be able to separate easily because love is involved. Without love marriage is easy, divorce is easy. It does not matter either way; it is a simple, utilitarian arrangement. If things-are going well, good; otherwise, say goodbye. But when you are involved in each other it is not easy, it is difficult. A part of your being has become incorporated in his being, a part of his being has become incorporated in your being. You really dont exist as two individuals any more you exist as a couple. A couple does not

mean two persons living together. A couple means: two persons plugged into each other no more really two trying to be separate and yet trying to be together. That is the difficulty: one wants to remain dependent and one wants to remain independent. One is asking for two polar opposites. 22. What do marriage vows show? They show that you may want to separate sometime in the future. If there is love between two people, the thought of taking vows never arises. This is only an indication of the absence of love. People do not marry out of love; they marry out of fear. If there is love on this earth, marriage will become redundant. When love is not, marriage is a must. We make arrangements for that which we cannot do. We make rules for that which we are not sure of. Only fools think in terms of legality; otherwise, love is enough. And I am not against marriage I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but dont hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage.

One more thing .. narinder is NOT into the Blame Game it is woman to be blamed .. or it is Man, who is to be blamed . Both are blameworthy both are weak caricatures of the Divine Principle the male and the Female !

Meditate and watch your beloved children grow into the sacred Discipline of Life .. wise, strong, Kind, humble, compassionate and loving . instead of the traumatic orphans of broken marriages , depressed and lonely for Love True .

I JUST WANT TO SAY THAT ALL THE INSTITUTIONS AND STRUCTURES WERE CREATED AFTER THE LONG EXPERIMENTS OF MAN ON THIS EARTH AND WERE NOT CREATED IN A DAY OR TWO. IN THIS INFINITE JOURNEY OF MANKIND ON THIS PLANET ALL THE ALTERNATIVES AND OPTIONS HAVE BEEN TESTED AND CONCLUSIONS DRAWN. AND WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF LOVE IS SUBJECT STILL TO BE DEBATED ACCORDING TO MY PERSONAL OPINION LOVE SETTLES AND MATURES ONLY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TOGETHER AND HAVE FINISHED WITH ALL THE PASSIONS AND EXCITEMENTS AND EMOTIONAL UPSURGES WHICH IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED TO BE LOVE. AND I BELEIVE THAT A FEW SOCIAL BONDAGES AND UTILATARIAN IDEAS ARE A

CEMENTING FORCE FOR LOVE TO BE,THAT IS WHY I THINK THAT MARRIAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL INSTITUTION. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT MARRIAGE IS FOR EVERYONE.