Osho on Love

Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness. It is just like a fragrance of a flower. Don’t search for it in the roots; it is not there. Your biology is your roots; your consciousness is your flowering. As you become more and more an open lotus of consciousness, you will be surprised — taken aback — with a tremendous experience which can only be called love. You are so full of joy, so full of bliss, each fiber of your being is dancing with ecstasy. You are just like a rain cloud that wants to rain and shower. The moment you are overflowing with bliss, a tremendous longing arises in you, to share it. That sharing is love.

Love is not something which you can have from someone who has not attained to blissfulness. And this is the misery of the whole world: everybody is asking to be loved, and pretending to love. You cannot love because you don’t know what consciousness is. You don’t know the satyam, the shivam, the sundram. You don’t know truth, you don’t know the experience of the divine, and you don’t know the fragrance of beauty. What have you got to give? You are so empty, you are so hollow…. Nothing grows in your being, nothing is green. There are no flowers within you. Your spring has not come yet. Love is a by-product… when the spring comes and you suddenly start flowering, blossoming, and you release your potential fragrance. Sharing that fragrance, sharing that grace, sharing that beautitude is love.

And there is no question of making it better. It is already perfect; it is always perfect. If it is, it is perfect. If it is not perfect, it is not there. Perfection and love cannot be separated. If you had asked me, Indradhanu, “What is love?” it would have been more truthful, honest, sincere, authentic. But you are asking me, “How can I love better?” You have already accepted as a fact that you know what love is — not only that, your question implies that you already love. Now the question is how to better it. I don’t want to hurt you, but I am helpless, I have to say the truth to you. You don’t know what love is. You can’t know because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. You have not experienced yourself. You know nothing of who you are. In this blindness, in this ignorance, in this unconsciousness, love does not grow. This is a desert in which you are living. In this darkness, in this desert, there is no possibility of love blossoming.

First you have to be full of light, and full of delight — so full that you start overflowing. That overflowing energy is love. Then love is known as the greatest perfection in the world. It is never less, and never more. But our very upbringing is so neurotic, so psychologically sick that it destroys all possibilities of inner growth. You are being taught from the very beginning to be a perfectionist, and then naturally you go on applying your perfectionist ideas to everything, even to love. Just the other day I came across a statement: A perfectionist is a person who takes great pains, and gives even greater pains to others. And the outcome is just a miserable world.

Everybody is trying to be perfect. And the moment somebody starts trying to be perfect, he starts expecting everybody else to be perfect. He becomes a condemnor. He starts humiliating people. That’s what all your so-called saints have been doing down the ages. That’s what your religions have done to you — poisoned your being with an idea of perfection. Because you cannot be perfect, you start feeling guilty, you loose respect for yourself. And the man who has lost respect for himself has lost all the dignity of being human. Your pride has been crushed, your humanity has been destroyed by beautiful words like perfection. Man cannot be perfect.

Yes, there is something which man can experience, but which is beyond the ordinary conception of man. Unless man also experiences something of the divine, he cannot know perfection.

Perfection is not something like a discipline; it is not something that you can practice. It is not something for which you have to go through rehearsals. But that is what is being taught to everybody, and the result is a world full of hypocrites, who know perfectly well that they are hollow and empty, but they go on pretending all kinds of qualities which are nothing but empty words. When you say to someone, “I love you,” have you ever thought what you mean? Is it just biological infatuation between the two sexes? Then once you have satisfied your animal appetite all so-called love will disappear. It was just a hunger and you have fulfilled your hunger and you are finished. The same woman who was looking the most beautiful in the world, the same man who was looking like Alexander the Great — you start thinking how to get rid of this fellow. It will be very enlightening for you, Indradhanu, to understand this letter written by Paddy to his beloved Maureen:

My darling Maureen,

I met you last night but you did not show up. Next time I will meet you again whether you show up or not. If I am there first, I will write my name on the gatepost to let you know. And if it is you that is first, rub out my name and nobody will be any the wiser.

Darling Maureen, I would climb the highest mountain for your sake, and swim the wildest sea. I would endure any hardships to spend a moment by your side.

Your ever-loving, Paddy.

P.S. I’ll be over to see you on Friday night if it is not raining.

The moment you say to someone “I love you,” you don’t know what you are saying. You don’t know that it is just lust hiding behind a beautiful word, love. It will disappear. It is very momentary. Love is something eternal. It is the experience of the buddhas, not the unconscious people of whom the whole world is full. Only very few people have known what love is, and these same people are the most awakened, the most enlightened, the highest peaks of human consciousness. If you really want to know love, forget about love and remember meditation. If you want to bring roses into your garden, forget about roses, and take care of the rosebush. Give nourishment to it, water it, take care that it gets the right amount of sun, water. If everything is taken care of, in the right time the roses are destined to come. You cannot bring them earlier, you cannot force them to open up sooner, and you cannot ask a roseflower to be more perfect.

Have you ever seen a roseflower which is not perfect? What more do you want? Every roseflower in its uniqueness is perfect. Dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun… can’t you see the tremendous beauty, the absolute joy? A small ordinary roseflower radiates the hidden splendor of existence. Love is a roseflower in your being. But prepare your being; dispel the darkness and the unconsciousness. Become more and more alert and aware and love will come on its own accord, in its own time. You need not worry about it. And whenever it comes it is always perfect. Love is a spiritual experience — nothing to do with sexes and nothing to do with bodies, but something to do with the innermost being.

But you have not even entered into your own temple. You don’t know at all who you are, and you are asking about love. First, be thyself; first, know thyself, and love will come as a reward. It is a reward from the beyond. It showers on you like flowers… fills your being. And it goes on showering on you, and it brings with it a tremendous longing to share. In human language that sharing can only be indicated as `love’. It does not say much, but it indicates the right direction. Love is a shadow of alertness, of consciousness. I teach you to be more conscious, and love will come as you become more conscious. It is a guest that comes, that comes inevitably to those who are ready and prepared to receive it. You are not even ready to recognize it….

If love comes to your door, you will not recognize it. If love knocks on your doors, you may find a thousand and one excuses; you may think perhaps it is some strong wind, or some other excuse. You will not open the doors. And even if you open the doors you will not recognize love because you have never seen love before; how can you recognize it? You can recognize only something which you know. When love comes for the first time and fills your being you are absolutely overwhelmed and mystified. You don’t know what is happening. You know your heart is dancing, you know you are surrounded by celestial music, you know fragrances that you have never known before. But it takes a little time to put all these experiences together and to remember that perhaps this is what love is. Slowly, slowly it sinks into your being.

Love is not to be found in poetry. My own experience is that the people who write poetry about love are the people who do not know love. I am personally acquainted with great poets who have written beautiful poetry about love, and I know they have never experienced love. In fact their poems are just substitutes, consolations. By writing about love they are deceiving themselves and others that they know love. Only mystics know love. Other than mystics there is no category of human beings which has ever experienced love. Love is absolutely the monopoly of the mystic. If you want to know love you will have to enter into the world of the mystic.

Jesus says “God is love.” He has been part of a mystery school, the Essenes, an ancient school of mystics. But perhaps he did not graduate from the mystery school, because what he is saying is just not right. God is not love, love is God — and the difference is tremendous; it is not just a change of words. The moment you say God is love you are simply saying that love is only an attribute of God. He is also wisdom, he is also compassion, he is also forgiveness. He can be millions of things besides love; love is only one of the attributes of God. And in fact, even to make it a small attribute of God is very irrational and illogical, because if God is love then he cannot be just; if God is love then he cannot be cruel enough to throw sinners into eternal hell. If God is love then God cannot be the law.

One great Sufi mystic, Omar Khayyam, shows more understanding than Jesus when he says, “I will go on just being myself. I am not going to take any notice of the priests and the preachers because I trust that God’s love is great enough; I cannot commit a sin which can be greater than his love. So why be worried? — our hands are small and our sins are small. Our reach is small; how can we commit sins which God’s love cannot forgive? If God is love then he cannot be present on the last judgment day to sort out the saints and throw the remaining millions and millions of people into hell for eternity.”

The teachings of the Essenes were just the opposite; Jesus quotes them wrongly. Perhaps he was not very deeply rooted in their teachings. Their teaching was “Love is God.” That is such a tremendous difference. Now God becomes only an attribute of love; now God becomes only a quality of the tremendous experience of love. Now God is no more a person but only an experience of those who have known love. Now God becomes secondary to love. And I say unto you, the Essenes were right. Love is the ultimate value, the final flowering. There is nothing beyond it. Hence, you cannot perfect it. In fact, before you attain to it you will have to disappear. When love will be there you will not be there.

A great Eastern mystic, Kabir, has a very significant statement — a statement that can be made only by one who has experienced, who has realized, who has entered into the inner sanctum of ultimate reality. The statement is, “I had been searching for truth, but it is strange to say that as long as the searcher was there, truth was not found. And when the truth was found, I looked all around… I was absent. When the truth was found, the seeker was no more; and when the seeker was, truth was nowhere.” Truth and the seeker cannot exist together. You and love cannot exist together.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse Series: Satyam Shivam Sundram Chapter #4

Chapter title: A quality which is immeasurable

8 November 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Love’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. A Sudden Clash of Thunder
2. The Book of Wisdom
3. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
4. The Divine Melody
5. From Bondage to Freedom
6. From Death to Deathlessness
7. The Invitation
8. The Messiah, Vol 1, 2
9. The Razor’s Edge
10. Sermons in Stones
11. Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1, 2
12. The Path of the Mystic
13. Sufis: The People of the Path