I Am a Stubborn Wheel

memymisty:

“People ARE befooled. I know a man: he was a colleague; while I was teaching in a university he was also a professor there. He is incapable of love, but he loves humanity. He is INCAPABLE of love, but he can-not accept that incapacity. It hurts. He cannot love any human being because his expectations are too great. He asks perfection. Now, you cannot find a perfect human being. This is a trick to pro-tect yourself from love. This is a way to avoid: ask the impossible — it will never be fulfilled and you will never come to know your impotence.

He cannot love a woman, he cannot love a man - he cannot love. He is simply cold. And natu-rally so: he is a professor of logic - very cold. His heart has stopped beating; only his head is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. He is becoming top-heavy. Any day he will topple. And he will say always that he loves humanity.

I asked him, “How do you manage to love humanity? Just give me a few instances. I would like you to be in love with humanity, but where do you find humanity? I would like to see you holding hands with humanity, embracing humanity, kissing humanity — I would like to see it.”

He said, “What are you talking about? — humanity is not a person.”

Then what is humanity? Has anybody ever seen humanity? ‘Humanity at large’ means nothing; it is just an abstraction. It is the idea of Plato. It is like you have seen one horse, another horse, another horse, and then you start thinking of the idea of ‘horseness’. Have you ever come across a person who loves horseness? That will look foolish. Either you love horses or you don’t - but horseness? What is that thing?

It is the same with ‘humanity’. You come across this woman, this man, this saint, this sinner, but you never come across humanity. Humanity is just an idea created by the philosophers. But you can become obsessed with the idea and that can function like a protection. It protects that man from falling in love with an ordinary human being. And still he can go on thinking that he is a great lover — he loves humanity at large.

I am not concerned with humanity at all. I am not concerned with abstractions. I love human beings. And I have no expectations from them. I simply love them as they are. I don’t ask for perfection. I don’t ask that they should fulfill any conditions. As they are they are beautiful.

My love is for human beings, and my message too is for human beings. I have nothing to do with abstractions like humanity. I deal with the concrete, with the real.” ~ Osho