The fifth question:

Question 5

CAN ONE LOVE MORE THAN ONE PERSON?

One can love the whole world. One should love. Love should not be in any way possessive. It should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. Only when love is inclusive will you know what it is. When love is exclusive, exclusively to one, you are narrowing it down so much that you will kill it. You are destroying its infinity. You are trying to put the whole sky into such a small space; the small space cannot contain it.

One should be in love. Love should not be just a relationship, it should be a state of being. And whenever you love one, through the one you love the all. And if love has REALLY happened you will suddenly find that you have started loving trees and birds and the sky and people. When you have fallen in love with one man or one woman, what exactly has happened? When you fall in love with one woman you have fallen in love with all women. The one woman is just a representative, the one woman is just an example of all the women that have existed in the world, that are existing in the world and that will exist in the world. That one woman is just a door to womanhood. But the woman is not only a woman, she is a human being too. So you have fallen in love with all human beings. And the woman is not only a human being, she is a being too. So you have fallen in love with all beings. Once you fall in love you will be surprised that your love-energy is released towards all. That is true love.

Possessive love is not true love. It is so tiny, it suffocates itself and it suffocates the other too. But this has been so up to now: love has never been inclusive. You have been taught exclusive love.

Your mother says, "Love ME, I am your mother." Your father says, "Love ME, I am your father." Not only that, your father and mother sometimes -- apparently in humor, but deep down not in humor -- ask you whom you love more, "Me or your mother? Whom do you love more, me or your father?"

Now you are posing a wrong question to the child. To bring in the question of 'more' is stupid. Love is or love is not; there is no question of more or less. You are teaching a wrong arithmetic to the child. And the mother tries to be possessive. And then everybody tries to be possessive: "Love me, don't love anybody else." In fact, in the past the individual who could not be committed to a one-to-one relationship was considered neurotic. In fact, it is the individual committed to an exclusive relationship who is immature. To be in love only with one person is to be arrested at the infantile stage of parent fixation. One should be free to have many involvements, many relationships, many loves.

But that seems to be dangerous. It is dangerous only because it goes against our habits. And who created those habits? There is a subtle logic in those habits. Man has lived under an economy of scarcity: food has not been enough for all, houses have not been enough for all, clothes have not been enough for all. Man has lived down the ages under the economy of scarcity. Everything is scarce, and that has given the idea that love is also scarce. If you love two persons, naturally, both will be getting half and half. If you love three -- more division. If you love thousands, love is spread so thin that it will be almost as if you don't love anybody.

It is not true about love. Love is inexhaustible, there is no question of scarcity. And you will be surprised that even people like Sigmund Freud think that there is scarcity even about love. Freud is against loving your neighbor or strangers. He's very much against Jesus' saying, "Love your neighbor." And his argument is the simple economic one -- that if love is spread out it is spread thin. Freud wrote: "To love thy neighbor is un-psychological." He also wrote "Such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value." And in true Jewish and capitalist fashion, Freud assumed a scarcity-economy in the psyche: there was just so much libido, so much love, to go around, and one had to be careful where one invested it. This is utter nonsense. This is ABSOLUTELY wrong.

You don't have only so much libido, you have INFINITE libido. And because this idea has been put into your heads, you are suffering. That's why no lover seems to be satisfied, it is not possible -- because love is so much that giving it to only one person will never satisfy you. You will feel unsatisfied. You could have given to the whole world. Now that which is not given remains there, and any energy that remains inside you, unexpressed, becomes destructive, turns into an enemy.

Let love flow. You are a well of love. Let people draw as much love as they can draw from you, and fresh waters will be coming in. You are joined with the infinite ocean.

Once man becomes aware of this phenomenon, that love is inexhaustible, that there is no scarcity, jealousy will disappear. Jealousy is part of the economy of scarcity.

Your wife becomes afraid if she sees you laughing with some other woman; now she knows you will not be laughing with her -- so much laughter gone. There is only so much libido, so much laughter. You have been smiling, so much smile wasted -- now with her you will not be smiling. This is utter foolishness. In fact, if your husband has been smiling with other people, it is more possible that he will smile with you, because he has been practising smiling. If he remains closed to every other person that he comes across except you, he is practising closedness, so when he comes to you he is closed. It becomes habit, non-smiling becomes habit. If he cannot love anybody else other than you, then the whole day he is trying to be non-loving, remember it. He goes to the office, he is non-loving to his office colleagues. He goes with his friends, he is non-loving to his friends. He goes to the club, he is non-loving to the club people. He's practising non-love. Then he comes home full of his practise, that cultivated non-love, and he looks at you. How can he love you? He has forgotten what love means, he remains in his habit. By and by, the habit becomes a second nature.

You find people so unloving: the reason is they have all decided that love is scarce; you can't go on giving to each and everybody. But I say it to you from experience: I have been giving love to millions of people, and the more you give the more you have it.

Remember this too: that love need not always mean sexual, love need not always mean sensuous. Love has many dimensions to it. It is a multi-faceted phenomenon. You can love music, you can love poetry. But have you seen it happening that if your wife finds that you are too much in love with music, she even becomes jealous of music? She may destroy your guitar, she may throw it out; the guitar seems to be a competitor. When you take your guitar, you touch your guitar as if the guitar is your beloved. And naturally when you love music and you love your guitar, the guitar is not just an instrument. It is not mechanical, it has a personality, it has a being. You look, you touch, with eyes full of love, with hands full of love. You hold your guitar close to your heart. It is alive! Love makes everything alive; whatsoever it touches it makes alive. Non-love makes everything dead; whatsoever it touches it makes it dead.

If you live in non-love you live in a dead world. If you live in love you live in an alive world.

But the wife will feel jealous. You never caress your wife -- she will think -- so lovingly as you caress your guitar. You never play on the body of your wife so lovingly as you play on your guitar; she is also carrying a music in her. Now she becomes jealous. She thinks, "This guitar is a competitor. This guitar has to go."

If you are reading a beautiful book and. you are engrossed in it and the wife is clamoring for attention around you, she will throw your book. She will say, "This is too much! I am here, and you are reading?" Even love for a book can create jealousy. If the wife is a painter the husband feels jealous; he comes home and he sees the wife is painting.

But the whole phenomenon depends on one idea -- very wrong-rooted, deep-rooted though it is, but absolutely wrong -- that love is scarce. Save it, save it only for those you love, because you have only so much of it.

You don't have only so much of it. You have only as much of it as you give. By giving it you have it. You cannot hoard love. The hoarder will not have anything. The hoarder will find he has no love. By hoarding, it dies. It lives only in sharing, it lives in communion. When it moves from one person to another person, it lives, and it gathers more and more energy. And the more flows out of you, the more capable you become of flowing it. You become a bigger and bigger channel for God to flow into the world.

You ask, "CAN ONE LOVE MORE THAN ONE PERSON?"

Now remember, if you love only one person you are not very far away from becoming a monk -- just one person you have to drop. The step, a single step, and the householder becomes a monk. And when you have only so much love, why give it even to one person? Why not keep it for yourself? The logic is the same. If you go to the logical conclusion, then the monk seems to be the right person. Why bother even with a wife or a friend or a husband? Why? Why not go to Mount Athos, to a Catholic monastery or to a Hindu monastery, and disappear behind the mountain and keep it for yourself? But do you think the monk has any love?

Why has this idea arisen in the religions? -- that you have to disappear from the world? -- the same concept of scarcity: that if you give love to the world, to people, how will you give to God? The same idea: if you give it to your wife, then how will you give it to your God? So disappear from the world. Don't give it to your wife, don't give it to your child, otherwise you have only so much of it. Collect all your love and escape into a monastery and give it all to God.

It is stupid. You will not be able to give, because to give to God, the only way is to give to the world. God is hidden here. God does not live hidden there in some monastery. He is spread all over existence, in the rocks, in the rivers, in the mountains. You give! Learn to give, and you will have so many new sources opening up.

I agree with Anatole France who said, "Of all the perversions, chastity is the strangest." Chastity is a kind of miserliness: don't give love to anybody. And when you contain all, people think you are chaste; you are not. You are simply poisoned.

Chastity arises out of love, giving of love. The chaste person is one who goes on flowing in love unconditionally. The chaste person is one whose love is no more a relationship but a state of his being. Even while asleep he vibrates in love. All his life, the whole of his life is love-filled. He overflows in love. That person is chaste. Infinity of love brings chastity.

But the old concept is that if you prevent all love moving from your heart you will be chaste. You will not be chaste, you will be simply dead. You will become simply neurotic, you will be perverted.