Osho's words _______________ _______________ Why is love so painful? Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms; love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean. You cannot use your mind with the new; with the old, the mind is skillful. The mind can function only with the old; with the new, the mind is utterly useless. Hence, fear arises, and leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. It is the same pain that the child feels when he comes out of the womb of the mother. It is the same pain that the bird feels when he comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when he will try for the first time to be on the wing. The fear of the unknown, and the security of the known, the insecurity of the unknown, the unpredictability of the unknown, makes one very much frightened. And because the transformation is going to be from the self towards a state of no-self, agony is very deep. But you Cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire. Love is fire. It is because of the pain of love, millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative; it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste; it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle. The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror? You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is, because he will not have the mirror to see his own reflection. Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But the higher love needs that you should be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armor; that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love. The reflection that you will find in the other of your own self may be ugly; that is the anxiety. Avoid the mirror. But by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken. One has to go into love. That is the first step towards God, and it cannot be bypassed. Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach God. That is absolutely necessary because you become aware of your totality only when you are provoked by the presence of the other, when your presence is enhanced by the presence of the other, when you are brought out of your narcissistic, closed world under the open sky. Love is an open sky. To be in love is to be on the wing. But certainly, the unbounded sky creates fear. And to drop the ego is very painful because we have been taught to cultivate the ego. We think the ego is our only treasure. We have been protecting it, we have been decorating it, we have been continuously polishing it, and when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego; certainly it is painful. It is your whole life's work, it is all that you have created -- this ugly ego, this idea that "I am separate from existence. " This idea is ugly because it is untrue. This idea is illusory, but our society exists, is based on this idea that each person is a person, not a presence. The truth is that there is no person at all in the world; there is only presence. You are not -- not as an ego, separate from the whole. You are part of the whole. The whole penetrates you, the whole breathes in you, pulsates in you, the whole is your life. Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the first lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego. If you can be in harmony with a woman, if you can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if you can be in harmony with your child or with your mother, why can't you be in harmony with all human beings? And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if you are in harmony with all human beings? And if you can be in harmony with all human beings, why can't you be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another. Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell. Modern man is living in a dark cell; it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind. And then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere; they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess. Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered; they have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love. If you don't go into love, as many people have decided, then you are stuck with yourself. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean; your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing. A river remains clean because it goes on flowing. Flow is the process of remaining continuously virgin. A lover remains a virgin. All lovers are virgin. The people who don't love cannot remain virgin; they become dormant, stagnant; they start stinking sooner or later -- and sooner than later -- because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead. That's where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken epidemic proportions. It is no more that a few individuals are psychologically ill; the reality is the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis. And that neurosis is coming from your narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with one's own illusion of having a separate self; then people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative. You may not commit suicide by taking poison or jumping from a cliff or by shooting yourself, but you can commit a suicide which is a very slow process, and that's what happens. Very few people commit suicide suddenly. Others have decided for a slow suicide; gradually, slowly, slowly they die. But almost, the tendency to be suicidal has become universal. This is no way to live, and the reason, the fundamental reason, is we have forgotten the language of love. We are no more courageous enough to go into that adventure called love. Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don't get involved. Love is involvement; it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you have not met at all; in fact, you avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other's original faces. Love is the greatest Zen koan. It is painful, but don't avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God, as a Buddha. And love will give you the first tongue-tip-taste of Tao, of Sufism, of Zen. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless. The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All that they are saying is that their life has missed love. Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach to a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes. My whole approach here is that of love. I teach only love and only love and nothing else. You can forget about God; that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God -- not the God of theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis. Love is a tariqa, a method, to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean, but you will have to pass through the door of love. And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts, because one has been thinking, "I am this, and now this is going. I am dying. " You are not dying, but only an illusion is dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whenever you speak of our failings, you usually mention anger, sex andjealousy. anger and sex seem fairly straightforward, but there's some confusionabout exactly what jealousy is, and it's harder to get to the core. would youtell us about jealousy? Osho: Yes, I make more mention of anger, sex, and less of jealousy, becausejealousy is not a primary thing. It is secondary, it is a secondary part of sex. Whenever you have a sexual urge in your mind, a sexual happening in yourbeing, whenever you feel sexually attracted and related to somebody, jealousyenters because you are not in love. If you are in love, jealousy never enters. Try to understand the whole thing. Whenever you are sexually related you areafraid, because sex is really not a relationship, it is an exploitation. If youare attached to a woman or man sexually, you are always afraid that this womanmay go to somebody else, this man may move to somebody else. There is norelationship really, it is just mutual exploitation. You are exploiting eachother, but you don't love and you know it, so you are afraid. This fear becomes jealousy so you may not allow things, you will guard; youwill make every security arrangement so this man cannot look at another woman.Even looking will be a danger signal. This man should not talk to another womanbecause talking.... and you feel afraid he may leave. So you will close all thepaths, all the ways of this man going to another woman, of this woman going toanother man; you will close all the ways, all the doors. But then a problem arises. When all the doors are closed, the man becomesdead, the woman becomes dead, a prisoner, a slave, and you cannot love a deadthing. You cannot love one who is not free because love is beautiful only whenit is given freely, when it is not taken and demanded and forced. First you make security arrangements, then the person becomes dead, becomeslike an object. A beloved may be a person, a wife becomes an object; a belovedmay be a person, a husband becomes an object to be guarded, possessed,controlled. But the more you control, the more you are killing, because freedomis lost. And the other person may be there for other reasons, but not for love,because how can you love a person who possesses you? He looks like an enemy. Sex creates jealousy but it is a secondary thing. So it is not a question ofhow to drop jealousy; you cannot drop it because you cannot drop sex. Thequestion is how to transform sex into love, then jealousy disappears. If you love a person, the very love is enough guarantee, the very love isenough security. If you love a person, you know he cannot go to anybody else.And if he goes, he goes; nothing can be done. What can you do? You can kill theperson, but a dead person will not be of much use. When you love a person you trust that he cannot go to anybody. If he goes,there is no love and nothing can be done. Love brings this understanding. Thereis no jealousy. So if jealousy is there, know well there is no love. You are playing a game,you are hiding sex behind love. Love is just a painted word, the reality is sex. In India, because love is not allowed much, not allowed at all -- marriageis arranged -- tremendous jealousy exists. A husband is always afraid. He hasnever loved so he knows -- and the wife is always afraid because she has neverloved, so she knows -- that this has been an arrangement. The parents arranged,astrologers arranged, society arranged; the wife and husband were never asked.In many cases they never knew each other, they had never seen each other. Sofear exists. The wife is afraid, the husband is afraid, and both are spying oneach other. The very possibility is lost. How can love grow in fear? They can live together, but that living togetheris also not living together; they only tolerate together, they somehow carry ontogether. It is just utilitarian, and out of utility you may manage, but ecstasyis not possible. You cannot celebrate it, it cannot become festive; it will be aburdensome affair. So a husband is dead before death, and a wife is dead before death. It istwo dead persons taking revenge on each other, because each thinks that one haskilled the other. Taking revenge, angry, jealous -- the whole thing becomes sougly. But in the West a different type of phenomenon is happening which is thesame on the other extreme. They dropped arranged marriage and it is good, thatinstitution is not worth keeping, but by dropping it, love has not arisen, onlysex has become free. And when sex is free you are always afraid, because it isalways a temporary arrangement. You are with this girl tonight, tomorrow shewill be with somebody else, and yesterday she was with somebody else. Yesterdaythe girl was with somebody else, tomorrow she will again be with somebody else;only tonight she is with you. How can this be very intimate and deep? It can only be a meeting of thesurfaces. You cannot penetrate each other because penetration needs seasoning,it needs time, it needs depth, intimacy, living together, being together. A longtime is needed then depth opens -- depths talking to each other.... This is just acquaintance. It may not even be acquaintance -- in the Westyou can meet a woman on the train and make love, and at midnight you drop her atsome station. She never bothers that she may never know you again; she may noteven have asked your name. If sex becomes such a trivial thing -- just a bodily affair where surfacesmeet and separate -- your depth remains untouched. You are again missingsomething -- something great, something very mysterious -- because you becomeaware of your own depth only when somebody else touches it. Only through theother do you become aware of your inner being; only in deep relationship doessomebody's love resound in you and bring your depth into being. Only throughsomebody else do you discover yourself. There are two ways of discovery. One is meditation -- without the other yousearch for the depth; another is love -- with the other you search for thedepth. He becomes a root to reach to yourself. The other creates a circle, andboth lovers help each other. The deeper love goes, the deeper they feel theyare; their inner-beings are revealed. But then there is no jealousy. Love cannotbe jealous, it is impossible. Love is always trusting, and if something happensthat breaks your trust you have to accept it; nothing can be done about itbecause whatsoever you do will destroy the other. Trust cannot be forced; jealousy tries to force it. Jealousy tries, makesyou make every effort so that trust can be maintained, but trust is notsomething to be maintained. It is there, or it is not there, and I say thatnothing can be done about it. If it is there, you go through it; if it is notthere, better separate. But don't fight for it because you are wasting time, life. If you lovesomeone and your depth speaks to the other's depth -- you have a meeting inbeing -- it is okay, beautiful; if it is not happening, separate. But don'tcreate any conflict, struggle or fight for it, because it cannot be achieved through fight, and time islost -- and not only time, your capacity will be damaged. You may start againwith another person repeating the whole pattern. If there is no trust, separate -- the sooner, the better -- so you are notdestroyed, so you are not damaged, so your capacity to love remains fresh andyou can love somebody else. This is not the place, this is not the man, this isnot the woman for you. Move, but don't destroy each other. Life is very short and capacities are very delicate. They can be destroyed,and once damaged there is no possibility of repairing them. I have heard that once it happened that Winston Churchill was invited tospeak in a small club of friends. Everybody knew that Churchill was a drunkardand loved alcohol very much, and the man who introduced him, the president ofthe club, said, "Sir Winston has drunk so much wine up to now, that if wepour all the wine into this hall the level will come up to my head." It wasa big hall, and he was just joking. Winston Churchill stood, looked at the imaginary line, looked at the ceiling-- the ceiling was high -- became very sad, and he said, "So much still tobe done, and so little time left to do it." As far as love is concerned, so much is to be done for everyone and solittle time is left to do it. Don't waste your energy in fighting, jealousy,conflict; move, and move in a friendly way. Search somewhere else for the person who exists who will love you. Don't getfixed with someone who is wrong, not for you. Don't be angry, there is no pointin it, and don't try to force trust; nobody can force it, it never happens. Youwill miss the time, you will miss the energy, and you may only become aware whennothing can be done. Move. Either trust or move. Love always trusts, or if it finds that the trust is not possible it simplymoves in a friendly way; there is no conflict and fight. Sex creates jealousy;find, discover love. Don't make sex the basic thing -- it is not. India missed with arranged marriage; the West is missing with free love. India missed love because parents were too calculating and cunning. Theywould not allow falling in love: that is dangerous, nobody knows where it willlead. They were too clever, and through cleverness India missed all possibilityof love. In the West they are too rebellious, too young; not clever -- too young, toochildish. They have made sex a free thing, available everywhere: no need to goso deep to discover love, enjoy sex and be finished. Through sex, the West is missing: through marriage, the East has missed. Butif you are alert you need not be Eastern, you need not be Western. Love isneither Eastern nor Western. Go on discovering love within you. And if you love, sooner or later theperson will happen to you, because a loving heart, sooner or later, comes to aloving heart -- it always happens. You will find the right person. But if youare jealous you will not find, if you are simply for sex you will not find, ifyou live only for security you will not find. Love is a dangerous path and only those who have courage can travel it. AndI say to you it is the same, just like meditation -- only for those who arecourageous. And there are only two ways to reach the divine: either meditationor love. Find out which is your way, which can be your destiny. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What is love? Osho: It is unfortunate that we have to ask this question. In the natural course of things everybody would know what love is. But I understand that nobody knows - or only very rarely - what love is. Love has become one of the rarest experiences. Yes, it is talked about, filmed, stories are written about it, songs are composed about it. Films are made, on the TV you will see it, on the radio, in the magazines - a great industry continuously goes on supplying you with the idea of what love is. Many people are continuously involved in it, helping people understand what love is. Poets, authors, novelists - they all go on. Still, love remains an unknown phenomenon - and it should be one of the most known. It is almost as if somebody comes and asks, "What is food?" Would you not be surprised if somebody came and asked, "What is food?" If somebody has been starved from the very beginning and he has never tasted what food is, the question will be relevant. So is this question.You ask, "What is love?" Love is the food of the soul. But you have been starved, your soul has not received love at all, so you don't know the taste. Your question is relevant, but it is unfortunate. The body has received food so the body continues; but the soul has not received food so the soul is dead, or is not born yet, or is always on its death-bed. When a child is born he is fully born; he is fully equipped with the capacity to love and to be loved. Each child is born full of love and knows perfectly what it is. There is no need to tell the child what love is. But the problem arises because the mother and the father don't know what love is. No child receives the parents that he deserves - no child ever receives the parents that he deserves. Those parents simply don't exist on the earth. And by the time this child becomes a parent he will have lost the capacity to love. It is almost like.... In Mexico there was a small valley where children were born and within three months they would all become blind. It was a small, primitive society. A fly existed there which was poisonous to the eyes, so the whole community was blind. Every child was born with eyes - perfectly functioning eyes - but within three months there would be an attack of the fly and the poison would enter the system and the eyes would go blind. Now, somewhere later in his life the child would ask, "What are eyes? What do you mean when you use the word 'eye'? What is vision? What is seeing? What do you mean?" And the question was relevant. The child was born with eyes but they were lost somewhere on the way of so-called growth. That's what has happened to love. Every child is born with as much love as one can contain, with more love than one can contain, with overflowing love. A child is born as love; a child is made of the stuff called love. But the parents cannot give love. They have their own hangovers - their parents never loved them. The parents can only pretend. They can talk about love. They can say, "We love you very much" but whatsoever they do is very unloving. The way they behave, the way they treat the child is very insulting; there is no respect. No parent respects the child. Who ever thinks of respecting a child? A child is not thought to be a person at all. A child is thought to be like a problem. If he keeps quiet, he is good; if he is not a screamer, a primal therapist, good. If he simply keeps out of the way of the parents, perfectly good - that's what a child should be. But there is no respect and there is no love. The parents have not known what love is. The mother has not loved the husband, the husband has not loved the wife. Love does not exist there. Domination, possessiveness, jealousy, and all kinds of poisons are there which destroy love. Just as a certain poison can destroy your vision, so the poison of possessiveness and jealousy destroys love. Love is a very fragile flower. It has to be protected, it has to be strengthened, it has to be watered; only then does it become strong. And the child's love is very fragile - naturally, because the child is fragile, his body is fragile. Do you think a child left on his own will be able to survive? Just think how helpless man is. If a child is left on his own, it is next to impossible that he will survive. He will die. And that is what is happening to love. Love is left alone. The parents can't love, they don't know what love is, they have never flowed in love. Remember your own parents...and remember, I am not saying that they are responsible. They are victims just as you are victims - their own parents were the same. And so on... you can go back to Adam and Eve and God the Father. It seems that even God the Father was not very respectful towards Adam and Eve, was not respectful enough. That's why from the very beginning he started commanding them, "Do this," and "Don't do that," and he started doing all the rubbish that all parents do. "Don't eat the fruit of this tree." And when Adam had eaten the fruit, the Father, God, was so angry in reaction that he threw Adam and Eve out of heaven. That expulsion is always there, and each parent threatens to expel the child, to throw him out. "If you don't listen, if you don't behave, you will be thrown out." And naturally a child is afraid. Thrown out? Into the wilderness of this life? He starts compromising. The child by and by becomes a twister, he starts manipulating. He does not want to smile, but if the mother is coming and he wants milk, he smiles. Now this is politics - the beginning, the ABC of politics. Deep down he starts hating because he is not respected; deep down he starts feeling frustrated because he is not loved as he is. He is expected to do certain things and only then will he be loved. Love has some conditions; he is not worthy as he is. First he has to become worthy, then the parents' love will be possible. So he starts becoming worthy and starts becoming false; he loses his intrinsic value. His respect for himself is lost by and by, he starts feeling that he is guilty. And many times the idea comes to the mind of the child, "Are these my real parents? Is it possible they have adopted me? Maybe they are deceiving, because there seems to be no love." And a thousand and one times he sees the anger in their eyes, the ugly anger on the faces of the parents, and for such small things that he cannot see the proportion of it. Just for very small things he sees the parents' rage. He cannot believe it, it is so unjust and unfair! But he has to surrender, he has to bow down, he has to accept it as a necessity. By and by his love capacity is killed. Love grows only in love. Love needs a milieu of love - that is the most fundamental thing to be remembered. Only in a milieu of love does love grow; it needs the same kind of pulsation around. If the mother is loving, if the father is loving - not only to the child, if they are loving to each other too, if the home has a love atmosphere where love flows - the child will start functioning as a love-being, and he will never ask the question, "What is love?" He will know it from the very beginning, it will become his foundation. But that doesn't happen. It is unfortunate, but it has not happened up to now. And you learn the ways of your parents...their nagging, their conflict. Just go on watching yourself. If you are a woman, watch: you may be repeating, almost repeating, the ways your mother used to behave. Watch yourself when you are with your boyfriend or your husband - what are you doing? Are you not repeating? If you are a man, watch: what are you doing? Are you not being your daddy? Are you not doing the same nonsense that he used to do? Once you were surprised - "How can daddy do this?" - and now you are doing the same. People go on repeating. People are imitators, man is a monkey. You are repeating your daddy or your mummy. That has to be dropped. Only then will you know what love is; otherwise you will remain corrupted. I cannot define what love is because there is no definition of love. It is one of those indefinables like birth, like death, like God, like meditation. It is one of those indefinables - I cannot define it. I cannot say, "This is love." I cannot show it to you, it is not a visible phenomenon. It cannot be dissected, it cannot be analyzed; it can only be experienced. And only through experience do you know what it is. But I can show you the way to experience it. The first step is: get rid of your parents. And by that I don't mean any disrespect towards your parents, no. I will be the last person to say that. And I don't mean get rid of your physical parents, I mean get rid of your parental voices inside, your program inside, your tapes inside. Erase them... and you will be simply surprised that if you get rid of your parents from your inner being, you become free. For the first time you will be able to feel compassion for your parents - otherwise not; you will remain resentful. Every person is resentful towards his parents. How can you not be resentful when they have done so much harm to you - although not knowingly? They wished all good for you, they wanted to do everything for your well being. But what can they do? Just by wanting, nothing happens; just by good wishes, nothing happens. They were well-wishers, that is true. There is no doubt about it. Every parent wants the child to have all the joys of life. But what can he do? He has not known any joy himself. He is a robot, and knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or undeliberately, he will create an atmosphere in which the child will sooner or later be turned into a robot. If you want to become a man and not a machine, get rid of your parents. And you will have to watch. It is hard work, arduous work; you cannot do it instantly. You will have to be very careful in your behavior. Watch when your mother is there, functioning through you - stop that, move away from it. Do something absolutely new that your mother could not even have conceived of For example, your boyfriend is looking at some other woman with great appreciation in his eyes. Now watch what you are doing: are you doing the same as your mother would have done in the case of your father looking at another woman appreciatively? If you do that, you will never know what love is, you will simply be repeating a story. It will be the same act being played by different actors, that's all; the same rotten act being repeated again and again and again. Don't be an imitator, get out of it. Do something new. Do something that your mother could not have conceived of. Do something new that your father could not have conceived of. This newness has to be brought to your being, then your love will start flowing. So the first essential is getting rid of your parents. The second essential is: people think that they can love only when they find a worthy man - nonsense! You will never find one. People think they will love only when they find a perfect man or a perfect woman. Nonsense! You will never find them because perfect women and perfect men don't exist. And if they exist, they won't bother about your love. They will not be interested. I have heard about a man who remained a bachelor his whole life because he was in search of a perfect woman. When he was seventy, somebody asked, "You have been traveling and traveling from Kabal to Kathmandu, from Kathmandu to Goa, from Goa to Poona; you have been searching. Could you not find a perfect woman? Not even one?" The old man became very sad. He said, "Yes, once I came across one: once I came across a perfect woman." The inquirer said, "Then what happened? Why didn't you get married?" He became very, very sad. He said, "What to do? She was looking for a perfect man." And remember, when two beings are perfect, their love need is not the same as your love need. It has a totally different quality. You don't understand even the love that is possible for you so you will not be able to understand the love that happens to a Buddha or the love that is flowing from me towards you - you will not be able to understand it. First you have to understand the love that is a natural phenomenon. Even that has not happened. First you have to understand the natural, and then the transcendental. So the second thing to remember is: never be in search of a perfect man or a perfect woman. That too has been put into your mind - that unless you find a perfect man or a perfect woman you will not be happy. So you go on looking for the perfect, and you don't find the perfect, so you are unhappy. And you have a reason to be unhappy. To flow and grow in love needs no perfection. Love has nothing to do with the other. A loving person simply loves, just as an alive person breathes and drinks and eats and sleeps. Exactly like that a really alive person, a loving person, loves. You don't say, "Unless there is perfect air, unpolluted, I am not going to breathe." You go on breathing even in Los Angeles; you go on breathing in Bombay. You go on breathing everywhere where air is polluted, poisoned. You go on breathing. You cannot afford not to breathe just because the air is not as it should be. If you are hungry you eat something - whatsoever it is. In a desert, if you are dying of thirst, you will drink anything. You will not ask for Coca-Cola, anything will do - any drink, just water, even dirty water. People are known to have drunk their own urine. When one is dying one does not bother what it is... anything to quench the thirst. People have killed their camels in the desert to drink water - because camels store water inside them. Now this is dangerous because they will have to walk for miles. But they are so thirsty...first things first. First the water, otherwise they will die. Even if the camel is there - what are they going to do? The camel will take the corpse to the town, they will not be alive. An alive man simply loves. Love is a natural functioning. So the second thing to remember is: don't ask for perfection, otherwise you will not find any love flowing in you. On the contrary, you will become very unloving. People who demand perfection are very unloving people, neurotic people. Even if they can find a beloved or a lover, they demand perfection - and the love is destroyed because of that demand. Once a man loves a woman or a woman loves a man, demands immediately enter. The woman starts demanding that the man should be perfect, just because he loves her. As if he has committed a sin! Now he has to be perfect, now he has to drop all his limitations suddenly - just because of this woman. Now he cannot be human. Either he has to become superhuman or he has to become pseudo, false, a cheat. Naturally, to become superhuman is very difficult, so people become cheats. They start pretending and acting and playing games. In the name of love people are just playing games. So the second thing to remember is: never demand perfection. You have no right to demand anything from anybody. If somebody loves you, be thankful, but don't demand anything - because he has no obligation to love you. If somebody loves, it is a miracle. Be thrilled by the miracle. But people are not thrilled. For small things they will destroy all possibilities of love. They are not interested much in love and the joy of it. They are more interested in other ego trips. Be concerned with your joy. Be utterly concerned with your joy, be only concerned with your joy. Everything else is non-essential. Love as a natural function, as you breathe. And when you love a person, don't start demanding; otherwise from the very beginning you are closing the doors. Don't expect anything. If something comes your way, feel grateful. If nothing comes, there is no need for it to come, there is no necessity for it to come. You cannot expect it. But watch people, see how they take each other for granted. If your woman prepares food for you, you never thank her. I'm not saying that you should verbalize your thank you, but it should be in your eyes. But you don't bother, you take it for granted - that is her work. Who told you that? If your man goes and earns money for you, you never thank him. You don't feel any gratitude. "That's what a man should do" - that's your mind. How can love grow? Love needs a climate of love, love needs a climate of gratitude, thankfulness. Love needs a non-demanding atmosphere, non-expecting atmosphere. This is the second thing to remember. And the third thing is: rather than thinking how to get love, start giving. If you give, you get; there is no other way. People are more interested in how to grab and get. Everybody is interested in getting and nobody seems to enjoy giving. People give very reluctantly; if ever they give, they give only to get, and they are almost businesslike. It is a bargain. They always go on watching that they should get more than they give - that it is a good bargain, good business. But the other is also doing the same. Love is not a business, so stop being businesslike. Otherwise you will miss your life and love and all that is beautiful in it - because all that is beautiful is not at all businesslike. Business is the ugliest thing in the world - a necessary evil. But existence knows nothing of business. Trees bloom, it is not a business; the stars shine, it is not a business and you don't have to pay for it and nobody demands anything from you. A bird comes and sits at your door and sings a song, and he will not ask you to give a certificate or something. He has sung the song and then happily he flies away, leaves no traces behind. That's how love grows. Give, and don't wait to see how much you can grab. Yes, it comes, it comes a thousandfold. But it comes naturally, it comes on its own. There is no need to demand it. When you demand, it never comes. When you demand, you have killed it. So give. Start giving. In the beginning it will be hard, because your whole life you have been trained not to give but to get. In the beginning you will have to fight with your armor. Your musculature has become hard, your heart has become frozen, you have become cold. In the beginning it will be difficult, but each step will lead to a further step, and by and by the river starts flowing. First get rid of your parents. With getting rid of your parents you get rid of society, with getting rid of your parents you get rid of civilization, education, everything - because your parents represent all that. You become individual; for the first time you are no longer part of the mass. You have an authentic individuality, you are on your own - this is what growth is, this is what a grown-up person should be. A grown-up person is one who needs no parents. A grown-up person is one who needs nobody to cling to or lean on. A grown-up person is one who is happy in his aloneness - his aloneness is a song, a celebration. A grown-up person is one who can be with himself happily. His aloneness is not loneliness, his solitariness is solitude, it is meditative. One day you had to come out of your mother's womb. If you had remained there longer than nine months you would have been dead - not only you, your mother would also have been dead. One day you had to come out of your mother's womb; then one day you had to come out of your family atmosphere - another womb - to go to school. Then one day you had to come out of your school atmosphere - another womb - to go into the bigger world. But deep down you are still a child. You are still in the womb - layers upon layers of womb are there. That womb has to be broken. This is what in the East we have called the second birth. In the East a person who has become independent is called dwij, twice-born. He has attained to a second birth; he is completely free of parental impression. And the beauty is that only such a person feels grateful to the parents. The paradox is that only such a person can forgive his parents. He feels compassion and love for them, he feels tremendously for them because they have also suffered in the same way. He is not angry, no, not at all. He may have tears in his eyes but he is not angry, and he will do everything to help his parents to move towards such a plenitude of aloneness, such a height of aloneness. Become individuals, the first thing. The second thing: don't expect perfection, and don't ask and don't demand. Love ordinary people. Nothing is wrong with ordinary people. Ordinary people are extraordinary. Each human being is so unique - have respect for that uniqueness. Third: give, and give without any condition - and you will know what love is. I cannot define it. I can show you the path to grow it. I can show you how to put in a rose bush, how to water it, how to give fertilizers to it, how to protect it. Then one day, out of the blue, comes the rose flower, and your home is full of the fragrance. That's how love happens. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How do you know if someone really loves you? There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self. Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word `love' seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones -- everything material is involved in it. You fall in love with a woman or a man. Can you exactly describe why this woman attracted you? Certainly you cannot see her self, you have not seen your own self yet. You cannot see her psychology either, because to read somebody's mind is not an easy job. So what have you found in the woman? Something in your physiology, in your chemistry, in your hormones, is attracted to the woman's hormones, her physiology, her chemistry. This is not a love affair; this is a chemical affair. Just think: the woman you have fallen in love with goes to our doctor, gets her sex changed, starts growing a beard and mustache. Will you be still loving her? Nothing has changed, only chemistry, hormones. Where has your love gone? Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves. Remember it as a ground rule: Wherever you live, you cannot see beyond that. If you live in your body, if you think you are only your body, you can be attracted only to somebody's body. This is the physiological stage of love. But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person's heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while. Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together. People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like roseflowers. It is better to have a plastic roseflower, because it will be there always, and every day you can give it a shower and it will be fresh. You can put some French perfume on it. If its color fades you can paint it again. Plastic is one of the most indestructible things in the world. It is stable, permanent; hence people stop at the physiological. It is superficial, but it is stable. Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a roseflower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it. The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend. I don't know which kind of love you know -- most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love? Certainly it will be gone -- but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness. The first love should be called sex. The second love should be called love. The third should be called lovingness -- a quality, unaddressed -- not possessive and not allowing anybody else to possess you. That loving quality is such a radical revolution that even to conceive it is very difficult. Journalists have been asking me, "Why are there so many women here?" Obviously, the question is relevant, and they are shocked when I answer them. They were not expecting the answer. I have said to them, "I am a man." They looked at me, unbelieving. I said, "It is natural that many more women will be here, for the simple reason that whatsoever they have known in their life before was either sex, or in rare cases, perhaps a few moments of love. But they have never come to know the taste of lovingness." I have told these journalists, "Even the men you see here have grown many feminine qualities in them which have been repressed in the outside society." From the very beginning a boy is told, "You are a boy, not a girl. Behave like a boy! Tears are okay for a girl, but not for you. Be manly." So every boy goes on cutting his feminine qualities. And all that is beautiful is feminine. So finally what is left is just a barbarous animal. His whole function is to reproduce children. The girl is not allowed to have anything with manly qualities. If she wants to climb a tree she will be stopped immediately, "This is for boys, not for girls!" Strange! If the girl has the desire to climb the tree, that is enough proof that she should be allowed. All old societies have created different clothes for men and for women. This is not right; because each man is also a woman. He has come from two sources: his father and his mother. Both have contributed to his being. And each woman is also a man. We have destroyed both. The woman has lost all courage, adventure, reasoning, logic, because those are thought to be the qualities of a man. And the man has lost grace, sensitivity, compassion, kindness. Both have become half. This is one of the greatest problems we have to solve -- at least for our people. My sannyasins have to be both: half man, half woman. That will make them richer. They will have all the qualities that are available to human beings, not only half. At the point of being, you simply have a fragrance of lovingness. The journalists have asked me, "Do you love Sheela?" I said, "Of course. But I love so many women that I don't know even their names. And not only women -- I love so many men, because they are also half woman." In one million sannyasins around the world, I cannot point to a single person and say, "This is the person I love." I can simply say, "I love." Whoever is ready to receive my love... it is available. So don't be afraid. Your fear is right: what you think of as love will be gone, but what will come in its place is immense, infinite. You will be able to love without being attached. You will be able to love many people because to love one person is to keep yourself poor. That one person can give a certain experience of love, but to love many people.... You will be amazed that every person gives you a new feeling, a new song, a new ecstasy. Hence, I am against marriage. In my vision, marriages in the commune should be dissolved. People can live together their whole life if they want, but that is not a legal necessity. People should be moving, having as many experiences of love as possible. They should not be possessive. Possessiveness destroys love. And they should not be possessed, because that again destroys your love. All human beings are worthy of being loved. There is no need to be tethered to one person for your whole life. That is one of the reasons why all the people around the world look so bored. Why can't they laugh like you? Why can't they dance like you? They are chained with invisible chains: marriage, family, husband, wife, children. They are burdened with all kinds of duties, responsibilities, sacrifices. And you want them to smile and laugh and dance and rejoice? You are asking the impossible. Make people's love free, make people non-possessive. But this can happen only if in your meditation you discover your being. It is nothing to practice. I am not saying to you, "Tonight you go to some other woman just as a practice." You will not get anything, and you may lose your wife. And in the morning you will look silly. It is not a question of practicing, it is a question of discovering your being. With the discovery of being follows the quality of impersonal lovingness. Then you simply love. And it goes on spreading. First, it is human beings, then soon animals, birds, trees, mountains, stars. A day comes when this whole existence is your beloved. That is our potential. And anybody who is not achieving it is wasting his life. Yes, you will have to lose a few things, but they are worthless. You will be gaining so much that you will never think again of what you have lost. A pure impersonal lovingness which can penetrate into anybody's being -- that is the outcome of meditativeness, of silence, of diving deep within your own being. I am simply trying to persuade you. Don't be afraid of losing what you have.