Is marriage meaningful or not?

Just the other day a young man came – very sensible very sensitive – and he asked me that ”I have come to ask a very significant question – because my whole life depends on it.

My parents are forcing me to get married, and I don’t see any meaning in it so I have come to ask you: Is marriage meaningful or not?

Should I move into marriage or not?”

I told him that ”When you feel thirsty, do you ask whether drinking is meaningful or not?

Should I drink water or not?
The question of meaning doesn't arise.

It is a question of whether you are thirsty or not. Maybe there is no meaning in water and no meaning in drinking, but that is irrelevant.

The relevant thing is whether you are thirsty or not.

And I know that even if you drink again and again, you will become thirsty.

So the mind can say:What is the meaning in it, what is the purpose of it – drinking again and again, and again becoming thirsty? – it seems to be just a rut.

There seems to be no meaning in it.’ ”This is how the conscious mind has been trying to dominate your whole being, because meaning belongs to conscious mind.

The unconscious knows no meaning. It knows hunger, it knows thirst,it knows needs; it knows no meaning. In fact, life has no meaning. If you ask, you are asking for suicide.

Life has no meaning; it simply exists, and exists so beautifully without meaning that there is no need. What is the meaning of a tree existing, or the sun rising every day in the morning, or themoon in the night?

What is the meaning when a tree comes to bloom? And what is the meaning when the birds sing in the morning, and the stream goes on flowing, and the waves, tremendous waves of the ocean go on shattering on the rocks again and again and again?

What is the meaning?

Meaning is not of the whole. The whole exists so beautifully without meaning. In fact, if there was any meaning the whole would not have been so beautiful.

Because with meaning comes calculation, with meaning comes cunningness, with meaning comes reason, with meaning comes division: thisis meaningful, that is meaningless, this is more meaningful, that is less meaningful.

The whole exists without any distinctions. Everything is absolutely beautiful not because of any meaning, but just by being there. There is no purpose.

So I told to the young man that ”If you ask about meaning, you are asking a wrong question, and you will be led in a wrong way.”

That’s how priests became so powerful: you asked wrong questions,they supplied wrong answers.

I told him, ”You just watch your own being. Do you need a woman to fulfill you?
Does your whole being hanker for love? Because love is a hunger, a thirst.

When you see a beautiful woman passing by, does something suddenly happen in you? – a wave, something invisible, a change? Or happens nothing?

you go on moving the same way as you were moving as if the woman had not passed. If you move on a road and a beautiful woman passes, and you go on moving the same way as you were moving before she came, nothing has happened, no wave inyour being, not even a ripple, then there is no need for marriage.

But don’t ask about the meaning.

If something happens, you start walking a little faster, or you start humming a tune, or you start looking at the beautiful woman, or you start avoiding her... if something happens this way or that –

I Am not concerned whether you start moving in the same direction the woman is going, or you start running into the opposite direction, it is not relevant – if something happens then you have a need,and that need is to be fulfilled.

Because a need exists to be fulfilled.

There may come some day when you will pass on the road and a woman makes no difference.

That too is good, but this too is good.

Everything is holy and sacred.

There is a time to be in love and there is a time to move beyond it.

There is a time to be related and enjoy the relationship, and there is a time to be alone and to enjoy the beauty of being alone.

And everything is beautiful.”

OshO ❤️ 
CHAPTER 1. DROPPING OUT OF THE WHEEL
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 3