You cannot say that it is a conscious decision on your part. Perhaps the woman’s hair is just like your mother’s hair. Every male child loves his mother, that is his first love object. The baby girl loves her father, that is her first love object. And slowly slowly, the father and mother become imprints — the mother becomes imprinted on the boy, the father becomes imprinted on the girl. And when the boy falls in love with a woman, his unconscious mind signals him, “Here comes your mother.” You don’t hear it. And nobody can be exactly like your mother, so there can only be some similarity — the way the woman walks, the face of the woman, the eyes of the woman, the way she talks. Anything can trigger in you the old figure waiting in your unconscious, deep in the well inside you.
The same happens to the girl — the way the man walks, just the sound of his boots, may remind her of her father. Any small thing can trigger it, and suddenly you feel a great love arising in you. But because it is only fragmentary, it cannot be very lasting. It can be lasting if you don’t ever meet — then you will never come to know about the other fragments. So the most successful lovers in the world are those who never meet. They make the most romantic, beautiful stories — no quarrel, no nagging, no fighting. And they never come to find out that “This is not the woman made for me and I am not the man made for this woman” — they never come close enough to know this.
But unfortunately, most lovers get married. That is the most unfortunate accident in life. That destroys the whole beauty; otherwise, they would have been Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad, Soni and Mahival — great lovers of history. But all those great lovers never met, never lived in a one-room apartment in Bombay. Once two persons are together, then other fragments of their lives are bound to surface. You have to become acquainted with the whole woman you have got; the woman has to become acquainted with the whole man she has got — and there is the trouble, because then slowly you find that the fragment you love is very small in comparison to the fragments you hate. Now just the color of the hair does not help, nor the face nor the eyes nor the nose — nothing helps.
In the West, women have been asking me — -because their love lives are not going well… Nobody’s love life is going well, it simply does not happen. So those poor women were asking if they should get their nose fixed by a plastic surgeon — because the husband is continuously talking about her nose, that it looks Jewish. And he is so much against Jews — the moment he sees the nose, all love disappears. The poor woman is ready to fix her nose. I said, “Don’t unnecessarily torture your nose. He will find something else, this is just an excuse. Right now he may become accustomed to this nose, but if you fix it then every time he sees you he will see that this woman has a fixed nose, she is really a Jew behind the nose. It will be very difficult for him to forget this. And the money is going from his pocket to fix your nose. You just leave it as it is.”
In fact, for centuries a wrong concept has been prevalent: that lovers should like each other in every possible way. That is absurd. Lovers should make it clear — “These are the things I don’t like.” Both should make it clear, that “These are the things I don’t like, and these are the things I love.” And there is no need to quarrel about it every day because that quarrel is not going to change anything. They have to learn to accept that which they don’t like — a kind of co-existence, a tolerance. This is for the lovers who are not awake.
Conscious love is a totally different thing. It has nothing to do with love as such, it has something to do with meditation, which makes you conscious. And as you become more and more conscious, you become aware of many things. One: that it is not the object of love that is important. It is your loving quality, your lovingness that is important because you are so full of love you would like to share it. And the sharing has to be unconditional. You cannot say, “I will not share if your nose is Jewish” — what has sharing to do with noses?
Conscious love changes the whole situation. Unconscious love is centered on the object of love. Conscious love is centered on oneself, it is your lovingness. Unconscious love is always addressed to one person; hence there is always jealousy — because the other person also knows that unconscious love is always centered on one person, that it cannot be shared. If you start loving somebody else, that means you have stopped loving the first person. That’s the jealousy, the continuous fear that your lover may start loving somebody else — as if love is a quantity. Conscious love is a quality, not quantity. It is more like friendliness — deeper, higher, with more fragrance, but similar to friendliness. You can be friendly to many people, there is no question of jealousy. It does not matter that you are friendly to five persons or ten persons or ten thousand persons; nobody will feel deprived because you love so many people and his share is going to be less and less. On the contrary, as you are able to love more people, your quality of love becomes mountainous. So whoever you love gets more love if your love is shared by many people. It dies if it is narrowed. It becomes livelier if it is spread over a vast area — the bigger the area, the deeper is its roots.
Consciousness gives everything a transformation. Your love is no more addressed to anybody in particular. It does not mean that you stop loving. It simply means you become love, you are love, your very being is love, your breathing is love, your heartbeats are love. Awake you are love, asleep you are love. And true about everything else — your understanding, your intelligence, everything goes through the same change. You become the center of the whole existence, the center of the cyclone, and everything radiates from you and reaches anybody who is able to receive it.
It is not a question of loving someone for certain reasons; it is love simply out of abundance — you have so much that you have to share it, you have to radiate it. And whoever receives it, you are grateful to the person.
Conscious love makes you a doer, a being, a soul. In unconscious love, you are just an emptiness — dark and dismal, hungry and thirsty. In unconscious love, you are a beggar. You are begging for love because love is nourishment. And this is hilarious: You are begging for love, the other person, whom you are in love with is also begging for love — two beggars holding their begging bowls before each other, and both begging bowls are empty. Conscious love makes you an emperor. You don’t beg; you simply give. And you give because now you see that the more you give the more you have. So whoever accepts your love, you are grateful to the person. The whole earth can become full of love, an ocean of love, but only with conscious people.
With unconscious people, it is just a disgusting place, nauseating… everybody pretending to be loving, and nobody is loving. Everybody is trying to exploit the other, and the other is doing the same to him. And because both are empty, sooner or later they are going to start quarreling: that “You deceived me,” that “You cheated me,” that “You betrayed me,” that “You are not the woman you pretended to be,” that “You are not the man you were showing yourself to be.” But with beggars, this is going to be the problem. – osho
