Buddha laughed and he said, “You fool, that is the whole point. You can shower it on the whole universe because you are indifferent to the whole universe. You cannot shower it on your neighbor because you have an enmity. Love knows no enmity. First you shower on your neighbor; only then will the universe receive it. There is no other way. First shower on your enemy, first befriend your enemy, then the whole universe will befriend you.”

That’s the meaning when Jesus says: Love your enemy. Love thy enemy as thyself. Jesus also says: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Maybe, in almost all cases, the enemy and the neighbor are the same person, they are not different people. The neighbor and the enemy are almost always the same person – because he who is very far away from you cannot be your enemy. To be your enemy somebody has to be very close to you. To be an enemy somebody has to be just on the boundary of your being, has to be your neighbor. Then he pinches you, then his very existence becomes an anxiety, then he interferes, then his very existence is nonacceptable.

Buddha says: Shower your meditation, otherwise you have missed. Now, this is a very new teaching – Patanjali has not said so. This is a very new insight. Buddha says: If you attain to meditative states, shower it immediately. If you don’t shower it, then you have not attained to the space that you think you have attained. Then you are in a deception, you are in an illusion because a meditative state is, by its very nature, sharing. If you cannot share, then you must be in a deception somewhere. Then the state is pseudo, then the space is not real. A real meditative space, by its very nature, wants to be shared. If your meditation does not become compassion, then somewhere, something has gone wrong.

This is his first parmita, the quality on which you can ride and go to the other shore. But ordinarily we live very clinging, afraid. Our attachments are more to things than to persons, and our attachments to persons are also very self-motivated. There is no compassion in them.

So many people come to me and they say, “I am in love with this woman or with this man,” and I look into them, and I see that they are in love only with themselves. Nobody seems to be in love with anybody else – hence so many problems. If you really love a woman or a man, love will be enough. There will be no problem out of it. Love knows no problems. If problems arise, that simply shows that somewhere love is not true, or it is something else just pretending to be love. Everybody is trying to exploit the other. It is not a sharing thing; you are using the other as a means. Sooner or later the other starts feeling that too – that he or she is being used as a commodity – then there is rebellion, reaction, revenge, conflict.

People you call “lovers” are continuously trying to dominate each other: we possess things, we possess people. And in this race, this mad race for possessions, we lose our own selves; one is lost in his possessions. If you really want to know who you are, you will have to become a little loose from your possessions.