Love And Freedom

Below are some excerpts from Osho, Book of Wisdom, Volume II.

Freedom is the very essential core of human consciousness: Love is its circumference and freedom is its center.

Continuing on with my exploration of Love and Freedom...My question to Kelly Bryson, after he offered us this quote during his workshop was, "If love is the circumference and freedom the center, what would freedom as the circumference and love at the center be?"

This question, along with his answer seemed to be taking me no where so I gave it up. I understand both love and freedom as two essential things that seem to exist at my core and although this quote sounded appealing to me, I didn't really get the core and circumference thing. My initial try at reversing love and freedom in my question and Kelly's answer (that it was a co-dependent relationship) wasn't working for me so I gave it up. But now that I've let it go, I think I'm getting what he meant by saying that.

"Man's greatest longing is for freedom. Man is a longing for freedom. Freedom is the very essential core of human consciousness: Love is its circumference and freedom is its center. These two fulfilled, life has no regret. And they both are fulfilled together, never separately."

Exactly. When we try to experience love without freedom, the love vanishes. The two exist simultaneously. I've been a control freak my entire life. Trying to control others to have my needs met. I was always confusing my strategies for having my needs met, with the actuality of my needs themselves. My love relationships always failed because freedom was never at the core. My focus was always on love...no not on love itself but rather on my strategy for how to have love, both giving and receiving it. Of course I tried controlling others as I believed only in the power of my strategy, not in love itself.

"People have tried to fulfill love without freedom. Then love brings more and more misery, more and more bondage. Then love is not what one has expected it to be; it turns out just the opposite. It shatters all hopes, it destroys all expectations, and life becomes a wasteland, a groping in darkness and never finding the door."

This has been my exact experience in life. I always tired to fulfill love without freedom and all I got was misery and bondage. Love was never what I expected it to be and I always ended up shattered. I was trapped by my strategies for love. I so clearly get how love cannot exist without freedom. The first time I was exposed to polyamory I understood this. That was twenty two years ago and I knew that that was the way for me to experience real love. My heart sang and I was comforted but I had no idea how to actually go about allowing love to flourish in my life. I had no idea how to actually be free or allow others to be free either. I was filled with fear and ignorance. I had only my strategies and I wasn't ready to give them up. I continued living by my strategies of control and manipulation, thinking I was a loving person--if people would only do things my way!

"Love without freedom naturally tends to be possessive. And the moment possessiveness enters in, you start creating bondage for others and bondage for yourself, because you cannot possess somebody without being possessed by him. You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself. Whatsoever you do to others is done to you."

I was a slave to my strategies, convincing myself that they were the ways to experience love. I remember back to my love relationship with my youngest son's father and how he used to say that I had trapped him and he would complain how I controlled his life. I was always dumbfounded by his claim because (well he was an utter control freak himself) he never surrendered and gave me the love (control) I wanted. I certainly didn't have things my way. My perception was that he ran the show his way and his way made my life miserable. But the truth of it was that there was no freedom in that relationship for either of us. Love was strangled and it suffocated. He always resisted telling me he loved me or marrying me and now I say, good for him. He was fighting for his freedom. It's not like he was a saint and I the sinner. He wanted to control me too. We both had huge strategies for fulfilling our need for love and our strategies were diametrically opposed. Wow.

"This is the basic principal to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment."

The sad thing that this quote reminds me of is number of people that seem to find a partner with incredible potential for sharing love and their strategies for love are completly in sync. They fall in love, into relationship and then become slaves to the roles of their strategies. They bind each other by the ropes of love (strategies that disallow freedom) and perhaps stay together for years, sometimes for life, blissfully ignorant that they have fulfilled their strategies by sacrificing their autonomy. They settle into a comfortable complacency, losing touch with their essential core of freedom and the opportunity to experience real love. Attachment holds them together and they have chosen peace over passion.

And we've all witnessed (perhaps been one of those) couples whose strategies don't mesh and yet they choose to stay together tenaciously fighting for their freedom, fighting for their strategies that they are convinced will secure them the love they desire. Resentments build as they struggle to convince, cajole, control and manipulate the other into giving them what they want. In either case, both freedom and love are lost. Again, attachment is what holds them together but this couple has chosen passion over peace.

"And there have been people who have tried the other extreme, freedom without love. These are the monks, the escapists, the people who renounce the world. Afraid of love, afraid of love because it brings bondage, they renounce all the situations where love can flow, grow, can happen, is possible. They escape into loneliness. Their loneliness never becomes aloneness, it remains loneliness. And loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad.

Renunciation is repression and nothing else. And the more you repress a
thing, the more you need to repress it. And the more you go on repressing it, the more powerful it becomes. It will erupt in your dreams, it will erupt in your hallucinations.

On the one hand is the person, the worldly person, who has tried to find love without freedom and has failed. His life is nothing but a long, long slavery of many, many people, of many, many things. He is not free to have even a slight movement. That is one failure; the majority of humanity is caught in that extreme.

Both these extreme efforts have failed. Hence humanity stands
on a crossroads: where to go? The past has utterly failed. All the efforts that we have done in the past proved wrong, led to cul-de-sacs. Now where to go? What to do?

Atisha has an important message to deliver to you. And that message is the message of all the Buddhas, of all the enlightened people of the
world. They say: Love and freedom are not separate things, you cannot choose. Either you will have to have both, or you will have to have dropped both. But you cannot choose, you cannot have one.

Love is the circumference, freedom is the center.

One has to grow in such delicate balance where love and freedom can bloom together. And they can, because it few rare individuals it has happened. And if it has happened to only a single individual in the whole history, it can happen to every human being. It is your potential, your birthright."

It seems to me that in the beginning of my and Jerry's relationship that our strategies for love meshed together perfectly. We met, fell in love, fell into relationship and it was easy being together. My need for love was intertwined with my need for safety and these were in the forefront I believe for Jerry also. We became the quintessential pair bonded couple. We were there for each other in every way, mostly ya know, within reason. Jerry bought into my life, with all it's baggage lock, stock and barrel. He was loyal and eager to please. He gave me the attention I craved. And I adored him and his attention. I accepted him and was pleased by his ways. We took good care of each other.

From the beginning we knew that the love we shared had the potential to take us on a wild adventure. We vowed to stretch our limits and tell the truth and above all else, allow love to have it's way with us. We certainly did not know what that may mean but we knew it was big nevertheless. Once my safety needs were satiated, my freedom needs came to the forefront. I started fighting fairly early on for my autonomy. The essential core of my freedom started expressing itself through my sexuality. I started resisting the social construct of my husband owning my sexuality. When had the switch happened I wondered, from me being in my power and offering myself to him sexually as a gift to be shared in sacred communion, to him taking partial ownership and having a say in what I did with another? Of course I was afraid to say these things to him at first because hey, I wanted to possess him too. We talked though, communicating the difficult things little by little the best we could. We made lots and lots of agreements, opening up in little increments, allowing ourselves little bits of freedom with big safety measures in place.

My advent into polyamory was a fight for both love and freedom. It wasn't so easy for me at first because I had been tricked into believing some odd things about love. And freedom? I don't think I had a clue about what freedom was. But I was learning fast and furious what it was not. And something inside of me knew what I was doing and understood the potential of what could happen when love and freedom are given nurtured simultaneously. I understand now that we can't have one without the other.

And, I get that the path of polyamory is a strategy for me. It is a way for me to meet my needs for both love and freedom. And although it seems like a very good strategy, I think it would behoove me to take caution and keep clarity here. Polyamory is not a need, it's a strategy for meeting my needs. Strategies are not bad or good. They just are what they are and some work well, some don't. Confusing a strategy with a need creates an attachment to something that isn't even real, isn't true. I have this idea that polyamory is probably a fairly basic characteristic of most humans--the ability to love more than one simultaneously. When we add the sexual element which is the fairly common understanding of the term--the ability to have more than one sexually loving relationship simultaneously, I suspect that this is also a fairly basic characteristic of most humans. Of course, just because we have this ability doesn't mean that everyone will have the tendency to actually practice polyamory--especially considering the uptight monogamously minded construct of our culture. But I suppose that are even some sexually uninhibited souls that are honoring their own and other's freedom that still choose to practice monogamy by free will and personal choice.

But for me, the path of polyamory just makes good sense as a strategy for honoring my own and other's freedom needs as well as our needs to love and be loved. Polyamory allows for both freedom and love to flourish uninhibited.