Between love and hate your ego balances itself
Question : IN THE FIRST TECHNIQUE TAKEN LAST NIGHT IT IS SAID THAT TO ABIDE IN LONELINESS IS TO MINIMIZE RELATIONSHIP. BUT ON PREVIOUS OCCASIONS YOU SAID THAT ONE SHOULD MAXIMIZE THE RELATIONSHIP WITH LIMITLESS EXPANSION.
Do either. Either expand yourself so much that nothing remains unrelated to you, then you will disappear; or be so totally alone that nothing remains related to you, then too you will disappear.
You are in the middle, where something is related and something is not related, where someone is a friend and someone is an enemy, where someone belongs to you and someone doesn’t belong to you, where there is a choice. You are in the middle. Move to either extreme. Become related to everyone, to everything that exists and you will disappear. It is so tremendous a phenomenon to be related to everything that you cannot exist, you will be flooded. Your ego is so narrow, it can exist with only a few relationships – and that in those too it is against something, otherwise it could not exist. If you are friendly to everything that is in the world, you disappear. If you want to exist as an ego you can be friendly; but you must also be inimical to someone. You must love someone and you must hate. Then you can exist between these two contradictions – the ego can exist. Either love everything that is and you will disappear, or hate it and you will disappear. They look contradictory. They are not. The technique is the same. The technique is the same whether you love all or whether you hate all. The hatred of everything is known in the East as VAIRAGYA, as renunciation. This is hatred of everything, withdrawing your love completely, feeling that everything is useless, not worth anything.
If you can hate so totally you will become total – then you cannot exist. You can exist only when two contradictions are there: love and hate. Between these two you balance. It is just like a man walking on a rope. He has to balance between right and left. If he moves to the left completely he will fall; if he moves completely to the right he will fall. So whether you move to the right or to the left makes no difference. Choose one. You will fall down from the rope.
If you want to be a man on a rope, you have to balance, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. And really the balance is a science. Whenever you lean to the left you will immediately have to lean to the right because the left will create the possibility of falling. To counter-balance it you will have to lean to the right, and when you lean to the right the possibility comes that you can fall. So you will have to lean to the left. That is why you go on moving between love and hate, between friend and enemy, between this and that, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion. You are moving on a rope, continuously. If you don’t understand this your life will be a total misunderstanding.
I have been studying many, many people and this is one of the basic problems of all. They love, then they hate, and they cannot understand why they hate when they love also. This is how they balance – and this balancing gives you the ego, your personality. If you really want to be without the ego, choose either extreme. Move to the left, love, and don’t balance it by the right – you will fall from the rope. Or move to the right, hate, and hate totally, and don’t move to the left. You will fall from the rope.
Mahavir says be detached from everything – that is hate. And Krishna says love. That is why Jains can never understand the message of Krishna. Impossible. And Hindus have not taken any note of Mahavir. They have not even mentioned his name in their scriptures. Not a single mention. They have not even taken note because he says be so unattached from everything that it becomes hatred. Krishna says love, and love so deeply that hate falls completely from the mind. Both are the same. They look contradictory to you. They are not.
Either you lean to the left or to the right – it makes no difference, you will fall to the ground, you will not be on the rope. That is certain. That rope is the ego or the world, the SANSAR, and you are balancing yourself. Many people love me but I know that sooner or later they will balance and they will hate. And when they hate they get disturbed. They should not get disturbed because that is how they can be on the rope. But the cannot hate long. Again they will have to balance.
In the morning you love, in the evening you hate, in the morning you love again. Unless you are ready
to leave the ego the balancing will continue. It can continue infinitely – infinitely it can continue. The
rope is endless. But once you get fed up with the whole game, once you feel that this is nonsense
– balancing each time with hate and love and each time moving to the opposite direction again and
again; this is nonsense – then you can move to one, either love or hate, and drop from the rope.
And once you drop from the rope, you are enlightened. The balance is SANSAR, the world.
[Osho - 'Vigyan Bahairava Tantra']