by Krishna Prem, also known as Mister Right I

I was not brought up to be alone. My purpose here on Planet Earth, according to my family (meaning Mom), was to meet my soulmate (as long as she was Jewish), get married, and have babies in order to carry on the family name – and then naturally health, wealth, and happiness would follow. I could go on for lifetimes explaining how this scenario has a tragic ending, but I imagine you can fill in the blanks out of your own experience. No matter whether you are Mr. Right or Miss Take, love is chock full of tragic endings. Allow me to go deep for a moment… Love that seeks another is destined to fail. Love that finds his or her own self is destined to be love in the here and now, not in the future. In the words of Buddha, enjoyed by Osho, and stolen by me: Love yourself and watch. When I met Osho, it was a wake-up call for me. He reminded me in no uncertain words to drop loneliness and to live in my aloneness. My inner voice sang out, "Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!" I walked out of this particular darshan with Osho in '75 complete unto myself. As I staggered out of His room, I bumped into His garden full of delicious women. I got confused all over again. My God, in those days there were three ma's for every swami. Aloneness quickly took a backseat. I was able to give up my mother's concept of marriage, but my manliness was excited to the max, and my loneliness was so covered up with lust that I simply had no idea I was not getting Osho. Through the following years of trial and error I have come to the understanding that aloneness is who I am and loneliness is simply aloneness without a center. So allow me one moment here to say “I am sorry” to those ladies whom I loved and lost along the way from here to here. This is it. Let me make it perfectly clear… Ladies, hold up your index fingers. And gentlemen, hold up high your middle fingers. Now ladies, is there anything you would like to say to all the middle fingers on this planet? For example, "Go fuck yourself!" I, for one middle finger, can handle anything you want to say because after all is said and done, we are all fingers of one hand. And as fingers of one hand, there is no such thing as separation. We are one hand appearing as two fingers. How does a guy like me hit the wall? After I had dated for years and years in the ashram, the commune, and finally in the meditation resort, and had never met Miss Right, it finally dawned on me that I must be Mister Wrong. So instead of running out to the cappuccino bar to make a date I found myself dancing alone at Kundalini Meditation. I could have continued blaming all the Miss Takes in the world but until I cleaned up my own act, love was just an impossible dream. The real Miss Take was meeting my friend Jwala. We fell in love, and I absolutely did not change. This was not good enough for her. She insisted that if we actually wanted to give our love a chance, I could either have a frontal lobotomy or enroll in Primal Therapy followed by Co-Dependency and Path of Love. Or she would leave me. I broke up with her immediately. A month later, I came to my senses, begged her to come back to me, and against my better judgment agreed to embark on a crash course of therapy. In therapy I was confronted with this character " K.P.,'' with his wild mood swings, and I had to look at his life and love affairs. Then I got that these cyclones are on the periphery and the real me is at the center. What a Miss Take Jwala turned out to be! We have been together for 13 years now. We’re still not married, still making love without having children, and still growing together. We’re simply being together. For me, this feeling of oneness with a beloved allowed me for the first time to experience my aloneness, not my loneliness. For me, Osho pointed out the truth – but who gives a shit until the truth is “who I am”? So scream away, love away, lonely away…whatever it takes to love out of your aloneness. For now, I don't know what it feels like to be a center without a cyclone, but I can say from my very center that Miss Take never felt so good. So allow me one more moment to say to Miss Take, as well as Mr. Right, that I love you until the “I” and the “you” disappear, and only love remains.

Love is, krishna prem

Picture is from 30 years ago with my beloved friend Jwala... proof positive I am finally growing up with Jwala's help

Ps… and here is a moment with Osho...

"Each child is born beautiful, and then we start distorting his beauty, crippling him in many ways, paralyzing him in many ways, distorting his proportion, making him unbalanced. Sooner or later he becomes so disgusted with himself that he is ready to be with anybody. He may go to a prostitute just to avoid himself."

"LOVE YOURSELF..., says Buddha. And this can transform the whole world. It can destroy the whole ugly past. It can herald a new age, it can be the beginning of a new humanity."

"Hence my insistence on love -- but love begins with you yourself, then it can go on spreading. It goes on spreading of its own accord; you need not do anything to spread it."

"LOVE YOURSELF..., says Buddha. And then immediately he adds: AND WATCH.... That is meditation, that is Buddha's name for meditation. But the first requirement is to love yourself, and then watch. If you don't love yourself and start watching, you may feel like committing suicide."

"Socrates says: Know thyself, Buddha says: Love thyself. And Buddha is far more true, because unless you love yourself you will never know yourself -- knowing comes only later on, love prepares the ground. Love is the possibility of knowing oneself, love is the right way to know oneself."

- Osho, The Dhammapada Vol 5 Chapter #5 Love Knows Nothing of Duty