Chapter #13

love and life are synonymous in language they may have different meanings but in existence they are precisely the same phenomenon no difference, no gap exists between the two

the really alive person is pure love and if love is missing then life is nothing but a vegetation one can go on vegetating without love life has not happened at all

one was born, one existed, one died but life never happened

life happens only the moment love starts flowing and the greater the love, the deeper life becomes

a sannyasin has to remember not to put any limitations on his love love should not become object-focussed the moment you become object-focussed you are getting trapped for example, if you love one person that means that the remaining whole existence has been rejected you have excluded it out of your love affair your love has become very narrow and a narrow love becomes an imprisonment love should never become like a tunnel it should remain open from all sides one should love as many people as many aspects of life as many dimensions as possible one should go on exploring

when love excludes nothing then it reaches to its ultimate peak that is the moment when one experiences life that is the moment when life becomes not just an ordinary existence it takes a new flavour, it becomes godliness

love is not a duty the moment you make a duty out of it you have destroyed it if there is a should in it, it is a corpse you can carry it, you can decorate it but there is no heartbeat in it and that’s how humanity has been conditioned for thousands of years love has been killed in such a subtle way not directly but very indirectly and the methodology used to kill, to murder love is make love a duty love your mother, it is your duty love your father, it is your duty love your wife, it is your duty love your children, it is your duty even love your neighbours, it is your duty love your enemies

love is a spontaneous flowering of being it cannot be reduced to a commandment one cannot be ordered to love because then whatsoever you do is only pretension then you are going through empty gestures

remember it – that i don’t teach you any duty at all duty is a four-letter-dirty-word

love for no reason at all love for the sheer joy of loving

love because only by loving will you be able to know what it is all about this whole existence this life this miraculous universe that surrounds you love is the bridge between you and the whole hence it has to be just a song of the heart just as in the morning the sun is rising and birds start singing, for no reason at all the sheer joy of the sun rising the night is finished the sheer joy of seeing the sky again and the vastness and the freedom of it the sheer joy of seeing flowers again opening up and all the colours and all the fragrance and the bird cannot contain himself he starts overflowing, he starts singing that song is exactly what happens when you drop the idea of duty responsibility, virtue, morality and you start enjoying whatsoever is available in that very enjoyment something is triggered in you the heart starts dancing, singing and those moments of heartfelt joy are the real moments, the only real moments and once you have tasted them there is no need to have any other kind of moments then twenty-four hours a day the song can continue underneath, just below your consciousness it can become a constant presence deep inside your being

to me when love becomes your constant innermost core god has happened that’s the only way god happens there is no other way

love has a way of its own it becomes victorious but in a very strange way without conquering, without fighting in fact without even desiring to be victorious victory comes as a gift as a reward from the beyond

love is ready to be defeated love enjoys to be defeated love is ready to surrender love is never willing to fight but this is one of the miracles of life that love surrenders but in that very surrender becomes victorious without any desire, without any motive victory comes on its own accord

the people who try to be victorious are never victorious they can force others into submission, into slavery but they cannot win their hearts – that’s impossible the body can be made a slave

it can be chained, imprisoned, killed, destroyed but you cannot imprison the heart and the heart is the real core of the person

love without any effort to conquer reaches to the very core of the person it is the only victory there is all alexander the greats are failures utter failures only lovers have known the taste of victory and it depends on us if we want to remain beggars go on struggling, fighting if one wants to be the emperor then surrender to existence, relax with existence be in a state of loving let-go and suddenly all is yours, the whole kingdom of god is yours

love can reach to its ultimate peak only when it becomes friendliness

these are the three possibilities for love one is lust – that is biological nothing wrong about it but it is the lowest form of energy all the animals have it nothing special about it if man has it lust joins humanity with the animal kingdom

it is a reproductive force it is nature’s way to continue the species to remain confined to lust is to miss the real point one should go a little higher, then there is love

love is not biological, it is psychological it is a higher dimension it is not reproductive, it is creative

the moment two persons are in deep love all their creativity explodes they may start things they had never done before they may start painting, they may start music they may start dancing things they had never dreamt of suddenly start arising in their being love brings a new climate and new flowers start growing but very few people attain to love ninety-nine point nine per cent of people remain confined to the animal world, lust

love is freedom from being an animal it is the birth of the human being there is still a higher peak than love because love although it is far more beautiful than lust tremendously pregnant with creativity has still some hangover of lust remaining with it it has come out of lust

something of lust follows it like a shadow it becomes a shadow but it is there and it goes on affecting that’s why love is possessive, jealous, envious these are ugly traits, they are hangovers of the past they destroy the beauty of love and as love starts settling these things start raising their heads

so love is beautiful only when the honeymoon is on and it is not long; it comes and goes so quickly that when it goes then only you know it was there and then there is something which is not love the shadow starts possessing you

one can rise a little more when love becomes just friendliness i am not even calling it friendship because that may give you the idea of relationship i call it friendliness when love becomes just a friendliness no possessiveness, no jealousy no desire to dominate when love starts giving freedom to the other total freedom, unconditional freedom then it becomes friendliness and that is the highest human consciousness can reach very few people have known friendliness their names can be counted on the fingers

it is a sad thing that such a vast humanity goes on missing their own intrinsic potential

my sannyasins have to transform lust into love, love into friendliness the moment you have reached to the state of friendliness you have arrived home

seriousness is like a desert the desert has to be transformed into a garden

you need a green revolution love can do that miracle only love can do that miracle love is the only beautiful experience which is non-serious – it is playful hence all the religions have been denying love for the simple reason that with love cannot be serious and seriousness has become the very characteristic of the saint he has to be without juice just like a dehydrated fruit the more dehydrated, the more he looks like a saint whenever you want to see a saint you can just see a dehydrated prune and that will give you the idea of all the saints of all the religions all the juice has gone out

love is juice we in the east have defined god as god has been defined nowhere else i have never come across a better definition and i don think there exists any the upanishads say raso vai saha – god is juice this ii a very strange definition sometimes i wonder i may have written that upanishad maybe in a past life otherwise who would do it? i cannot find anybody else doing it

love is non-serious, it is alive, it is playful love makes life fun, a celebration and my whole effort here is to create for the first time in the whole history of humanity a new kind of religious person for whom laughter is far more valuable than prayer tor whom playfulness is far more spiritual than seriousness who should be closer to a poet than to a philosopher closer to music than to mathematics closer to sensitivity rather than being dull closed, walled from all sides, afraid of life escapist, renouncing life – no that is not going to be my sannyasins’ way

instead of renouncing life my sannyasins have to rejoice in life and the way to rejoice is to love

so drop all your seriousness and it is only a question of seeing that seriousness is a barrier it makes you closed and hard it does not allow you to be vulnerable and receptive and one has to be so vulnerable so available to existence that the wind, the rain, the sun they can all reach to your very heart

love makes one utterly contented because love is always an experience in the present you don’t love tomorrow love has nothing to do with yesterdays and tomorrows love knows only one time: now and only one place: here that’s why mind feels it very difficult to be in love because mind is always concerned with the future or with the past those are the two constant references for the mind it moves between past and future it is a constant shuttling between past and future it never stops in the middle and love is exactly in the middle love is without any nostalgia for the past and without any desire in the future hence the contentment

these are the two discontents people live in either they think of the past all those trains that they have missed now nothing can be done about it it is simply utter stupidity now there is no point in just going on reading the timetable of the trains about the trains that you have missed in the past it cannot be changed, you cannot undo it but mind is stupid, mind as such is stupid

i have never seen an intelligent mind the heart is intelligent and mind is always mediocre or one starts planning for the future and life is passing by every moment hence mind has a condemnation for love it thinks it is something crazy

all the languages of the world have this expression falling in love strange – why do all the languages call it falling in love – why not rising in love? it is mind’s condemnation, mind is saying you have fallen, you have gone cuckoo you have lost your sanity it is a way of condemning

mind lives in discontentment and condemns love which is absolute contentment mind always asks for more that’s how it creates discontentment

love is always thankful for whatsoever is happening love always feels that i am getting more than i am worthy of that i am getting from existence things which i don’t deserve at all i have not earned them, they are coming as gifts the moment you start seeing all the gifts

that existence goes on showering on you how can one remain discontented? and out of a contented heart thankfulness arises that thankfulness is the very core of religion of real religion not of christianity, hinduism, mohammedanism but of religiousness as such

if one can feel grateful to existence then there is no need to believe in any theology, any doctrine, any dogma that thankfulness is enough

deep in the himalayas, from virgin peaks where snow has never melted, the ganges starts the point where ganges starts is called gangotri it is a very small place just a small face of a cow somebody has sculpted a rock into the face of a cow and from that face of the cow the great river ganges starts it starts as a small stream and then goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger finally it becomes the very ocean itself

that’s also the way of love it starts in a very small way but one should not stop there

one should go on flowing, moving love should never become static it should remain dynamic the moment it becomes static it starts stinking the moment it becomes static it loses the freshness of a river, the aliveness of a river it becomes just a muddy pool people call it marriage it was just a muddy pool and such a small pool and they go on round and round chasing each other and creating more mud and throwing mud at each other

love should be a river, always moving from the known into the unknown and from the unknown towards the unknowable the beginning has to be small but the end has to be the infinite, the oceanic

if one can remain aware of it then love is all that there is to spirituality except love, whatsoever goes on in the name of spirituality is all bullshit esoteric bullshit, occult bullshit

remember it – because it is very easy to fall into that bullshit it has great attraction it has great systems of thought and strange ideas and all inventions of crafty people

life is very simple – so is love and if you can remember these three l’s like three r’s: life, love, light nothing else is needed to be remembered live totally, live lovingly and live not in a state of unconsciousness live consciously – that is living with light just these three words are enough and one need not bother about anything else

knowledge is of the mind, wisdom is of the heart the way of knowledge is logic the way of wisdom is love

initiation into sannyas simply means getting out of your logical structure of the mind and entering your own ignored world of love the schools, colleges, universities they exist precisely for one purpose that is to force every child towards the logical structure they force every child to ignore the love energy and once you get imprisoned in the logical structure of the mind you become almost like a machine, a biocomputer and that’s what the society needs the church needs, the state needs: biocomputers they don’t need human beings they are afraid of real, authentic individuals

because those individuals will be rebellious they cannot be manipulated, dominated they cannot be enslaved

our whole so-called civilisation eastern, western – both – are just strategies of destroying freedom, destroying the individual destroying his love and forcing him to be just an efficient machine because doctors are needed, professors are needed mechanics are needed scientists are needed the society has no use for the lover the state does not need any lover the church has no utility for love and up to now we have lived in a very utilitarian way and love is non-purposive, non-utilitarian but it is love that brings insight into the mystery of life it is not a commodity it cannot be part of the marketplace but without it you can never be ecstatic without it you can never be in tune with existence it is fundamentally the need of the individual not of the collective, the mob, the crowd, the society

so a shift is needed, one has to change the gears from the head to the heart and the moment your energy starts moving into the heart

you will have such an experience of freedom such a tremendous experience of expansiveness that you will not be able to believe that this was possible to me it looks impossible when it happens for the first time, unbelievable because we have been told by these fools for centuries that it happens only to a christ because he is the only begotten son of god not to everybody or it happens to gautam the buddha because he is a reincarnation of god not to everybody else

this is absolutely wrong it is everybody’s birthright it can happen to everybody just a simple shift, a change of the gestalt from the head to the heart, from logic to love and you become entitled to all the miracles of existence

love can either be very noisy as ordinarily it is or it can be utterly silent when love is noisy it creates more anxiety more anguish than you had ever suffered before

one woman was saying to her lover now that we are going to be married you should be happy – i will be there always to share all your suffering, problems, anxiety but the man said i don’t have any problems, anxieties, and suffering the woman said i am not talking about now i am talking about after marriage

the bachelors think the married people are living a really happy life if somebody thinks that married people are living a happy life that simply shows that he is a bachelor, nothing else it is really a mystery why people get married and there are a few people who even get married twice that is a bigger mistake that is impossible to conceive once one can understand, but twice if one is a little intelligent he will not commit the mistake even once this is happening because love the ordinary love – is more like a fever it is more like an infection, a contagious disease in fact, vd, to be exact

unless love becomes meditative it remains a disease only meditation takes the fever out of it and makes it a cool phenomenon

not cold but cool ordinarily it is hot, a very hot affair but anything that is very hot is bound to become cold sooner or later even with central heating it is going to become cold that’s the nature of things but there is a point between hot and cold exactly in the middle which is the point of coolness meditation creates that coolness and when meditation has created a coolness inside you and love starts coming through that coolness it has a totally different flavour a different perfume, a different quality it is very liberating

but silence should be the source of love not the noisy mind but a silent centre of your being love should come from the innermost shrine cool, silent, meditative, aware, alert, watchful then love can give you the most beautiful experiences of life it can give you the master key that opens all the locks of all the mysteries of existence but silence is a must without silence love simply drives people insane and silence is very easy

love is a togetherness

silence simply means entering into your aloneness before you enter into somebody’s being into somebody’s life you have to be acquainted with your own aloneness you have to be rooted in your aloneness you have to know exactly what your aloneness is only then can love blossom out of it

it is just like friedrich nietzsche says if a tree wants to rise upwards to touch the stars in the sky then its roots have to go downwards to the very rock-bottom of existence unless the roots go deeper the tree cannot go higher the tree and the roots have to balance each other in the same proportion they have to grow one in depth, one in height

love is like a tree trying to reach to the stars the longing for the stars and meditation is growing roots inwards deeper, to the very rock-bottom of your being when the roots reach to your ultimate silence the space where one hears

the Sound of one hand Clapping

then your tree can blossom into the sky can have a dialogue with the stars

love has failed in the world because meditation was not the source of it love can succeed and love has to succeed otherwise humanity is doomed

only with a meditative background

so my whole teaching here is to do two things one, to help you to become meditative to reach your absolute intimate and private being and the second part is, to grow into love when meditation blossoms into love a man is no more a man he has transcended humanity you can only call him a god a buddha, a jesus, a krishna

[!info] Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)