Osho - The power of love: what does it take for love to last a lifetime?

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Between life and death the most important thing that can

happen to a man or to a woman is love.

And love has many manifestations:

meditation is one of the manifestations of love.

OSHO

It is only love that makes a person creative. It is only in love that one starts overflowing into existence, because it is only in love that one has something to give and share. The person who has not known love cant be creative; he can only be destructive. It is the same energyjoined together with love it becomes creative; disconnected from love it becomes destructive.

The world can be a totally different kind of place if people are allowed and not hindered from loving. If people are given a climate of love, a milieu of love in which they can easily grow into loving beings, the world can become the very paradise. World wars wont stop unless and until we have released love energy. Now, only love energy can be the survival for humanitys future. Only a love explosion can be the antidote to the atomic explosion; otherwise man is already coming closer and closer every day to a universal suicide.

We have forgotten how to love, and we have created so many destructive weapons that it is almost impossible to survive unless the miracle of love happens on the earth. The situation is like this: in a room there are all kinds of ammunition, and you have given a child a matchbox to play with there. You are just hoping that nothing wrong will happen, but there is every possibilitybecause the matchbox is there, the child is there, the childs curiosity is there. He will open the matchbox; he cannot resist. He will try to do something with the matchbox; he cannot resist. And explosive ammunition is all around the room. It is almost impossible to avoid the accident.

This is the situation: man is almost retarded as far as the heart is concerned, and he has great powers released by science. Unless, in the same proportion, we can release mans lovehis poetry, his capacity to enjoy, live, celebrateit is impossible to survive.

But this is one of the fundamentals: whenever you find a destructive person, dont be angry with him. Feel pity for him. Even people like Adolf Hitler need to be pitied; they need compassion. Their energies have turned sour and bitter and poisonous because somehow they missed what love is. And the society is such that it creates hate and prevents love. It creates competitiveness and prevents camaraderie. It teaches you how to fight; it never teaches you how to befriend.

My whole effort here is to release your love sources, to ignite your love flame. And once that is there, then it takes care; then your life will become creative of its own accord.

Love should be unaddressed. Love need not be oriented toward the other. Love oriented toward the other is not true love; love as a relationship is not true love. Love as a state of being is true love. One can love a woman, one can love a man, one can love ones children, one can love ones parents, one can love roses and one can love other flowers, one can love a thousand and one thingsbut these are all relationships.

Learn how to be love. So it is not a question of to whom your love is addressed, it is simply a question of your being loving. Sitting alone, still love goes on flowing. Absolutely alone, still, what can you do? Just as you breathe you dont breathe for your wife; it is not a relationship. You dont breathe for your children; it is not a relationship. You simply breatheit is life. Just as breathing is life for the body, love is the life of the soulone is simply love. And then only does one know that love is God.

Jesus says, God is love. I say to you, Love is God. The words are the same, but the significance is very different. Jesus says, God is love. Then love becomes only one of the qualities of God; he is wise also, powerful also, a judge also, and many things more. Amid all those qualities, he is love too. Jesuss statement was very revolutionary in those days, but not anymore.

I say, Love is God. Then it is not a question of God having many other qualities. In fact, God disappearslove itself becomes God. Love is the real thing. God is the name given by the theologians to something they know nothing about. There is no God; the whole existence is made of the stuff called love.

Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why? First sight of love, last sight of wisdom. Is it true?

Love is prayerfulness groping toward godliness. Love is poetry born out of the sheer joy of being. Love is song, dance, celebration: a song of gratitude, a dance of thankfulness, celebration for no reason at all, for this tremendous gift that goes on showering on us, for this whole universe, from the dust to the divine. Love is not what you understand it to be, hence the question.

You ask, Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why?because love is religion at its highest; love is the supreme-most religion. Love is the search for godlinessof course, an unconscious search in the beginning, stumbling, groping in the dark. The direction may not be right, but the intention is absolutely right.

Love is not the ordinary thing that you understand by it; it is not just a biological attraction between a man and a woman. It is that, too, but that is only the beginning, just the first step. Even there, if you look deep down, it is not really an attraction between man and woman; it is an attraction between masculine energy and feminine energy. It is not an attraction between A and B; far deeper mysteries are involved, even in ordinary love affairs.

Hence nobody can define love. Thousands of definitions have been tried; all have failed. Love remains indefinable, very elusive, mercurial. The more you want to grasp it, the more difficult it becomes, the further away it goes. You cannot catch hold of it. You cannot manage to know what exactly it is. You cannot control it. Love remains unknowable. Man wants to know, because knowledge gives power. You would like to be powerful over love, but that is impossible; love is far bigger than you. You cannot possess it; you can only be possessed by it. Hence those people who want to possess love never come to know anything of it.

Only those who are courageous enoughonly those who are gamblers, who can risk their very lives and be possessed by some unknown energyare able to know what love is.

Love is the first step toward godliness. Hence it appears mad to those who are hung up in their heads, who dont understand the whole mystery of love, who try to understand it through the mind. It can be understood only through the heart. Remember: all that is great is available to the heart. The heart is the door to all great values of life, to all ultimate values, and the head is only a useful mechanism, a gadgetgood in the marketplace but utterly useless in a temple. And love is a temple; it is not a marketplace. If you drive love into the marketplace, it is reduced to ugly sexuality.

Thats what people have done: rather than raising love to godliness, they have reduced love into ugly, animalistic sexuality. And the strange thing is, the same people who have reduced love to an ugly phenomenonthe priests, the politicians, the puritansare against sex, are enemies of sex. And they are the people who have destroyed a power with tremendous potential!