In The Book of Women, Osho challenges readers to reclaim and assert the feminine qualities of love, joy, and celebration to bring a reunion of the intellect and the heart, that is so desperately needed now.
Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it
Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.
Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole concept changes. Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal.
Everyone is running away from loneliness
It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness.
But nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to ignore–but you cannot forge it; it will assert again and again. And the problem becomes more complex because you have never seen it as it is; you have taken it for granted that you are born lonely.
Any relationship that is created because of the fear, because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be satisfying
Its very root is poisoned. You don’t love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you not to be left alone.
Naturally, in the name of love anything may happen–except love. Fights may happen, arguments may happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: At least somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your loneliness. But love is not possible, because there is no basic foundation for love.
Love never grows out of fear.
Love needs great courage
Love needs great courage for the simple reason that the basic requirement of love is to drop the ego. And man is very afraid of dropping the ego. It seems like almost committing suicide. It only seems so because we don’t know anything other than the ego.
Ego has become our only identity, and to drop it certainly means you are dropping your individuality. It is not true–in fact just the opposite is the truth: Unless you drop the ego you cannot know your real individuality. The ego is a pretender–something false, pseudo, invented. The moment is dropped, only then you can see the real. Otherwise the unreal hides the real. The unreal hides the real like clouds hiding the sun.
Love requires a dropping of the ego.