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Osho on Love is must for Spiritual Growth
Question:
Why is Love so Essential for
Spiritual Growth?
Osho:
Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity –
just like man/woman, life/death, darkness/light,
summer/winter, outer/ inner, yin/yang, the body and the
soul, the creation and the creator. Love and awareness
is the highest form of polarity, the last polarity, at
which transcendence happens.
Love needs two. It is a relationship, it is outgoing, it
is energy moving outwards. There is an object: the
beloved. The object becomes more important than
yourself. Your joy is in the object. If your beloved is
happy, you are happy; you become part of the object.
There is a kind of dependence, and the other is needed.
Without the other you will feel lonely. Awareness is
just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being
alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed
at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.
Love is the movement of the light out of your being.
Awareness is the reverse movement, the backward movement
of the light to the source again, returning to the
source. This is what Jesus calls repentance – not in the
sense of repentance, but in the sense of returning to
the source. Patanjali calls it PRATYAHARA, coming back
home, Mahavir calls it PRATIKRAMAN, coming back
to oneself; the circle is complete.
The Secret of the
Golden Flower
is based, totally based, on this backward movement of
your energy. But the backward movement is possible only
if you have moved forward. You have to go into love, you
have to relate in order to come to yourself. It
looks paradoxical. The child has to get lost into the
world to become a child again. The innocence has to go
into all the turmoil of cunningness and calculation to
become really innocent again. A child is innocent, but
his innocence is that of ignorance. A saint is also
innocent, but his innocence is not of ignorance but of
experience, of ripeness, of maturity. He is again
innocent, but that again has great importance – he
cannot be distracted from his innocence anymore.
The child is bound to get distracted: every Adam has to
leave the Garden of Eden, the world of innocence. Every
Adam has to go into the world, into the mud of it,
because only there will you mature, will you ripen. Only
there will you learn, only there will you see in
contrast the beauty of innocence, will you understand
the splendour of innocence. The day you have learned the
beauty of innocence, you have become aware of it, you
will have come back home.
The Adam cannot become Christ if he does not leave
paradise; he will remain a child. Adam means outward
movement, Christ means inward movement. Adam means love,
Christ means awareness. The circle is complete. The
difference between Adam and Christ is only that of
direction. Adam is going extrovertedly, and the same
person, when he turns back and becomes introverted, is
Christ. Adam is the potential Christ, Christ is the
actualized Adam.
Love is very essential.
You have to lose yourself to gain yourself. Love is the
only possibility of losing yourself totally. When you
are lost totally, then you will be able to remember what
you have done. It is like a fish which has always lived
in the ocean. It will never become aware of the ocean
and the benediction of it. It has to be caught in a net,
a fisherman has to come to take it out, throw it on the
shore. Only on the shore, in the hot sun, will it
remember for the first time. Although it lived for years
in the ocean, it was oblivious, completely oblivious, of
the ocean. Now the thirst, the heat, makes it mindful of
the ocean. A great longing arises to go back to the
ocean. It makes every effort to jump back into the
ocean.
That is the state of a seeker: thirsty to be back at the
original source. And if this fish can enter the ocean
again... can’t you imagine the celebration! And the fish
has lived in the ocean forever but there was no
celebration. Now there is the possibility of
celebration. Now it will feel so delighted, so blessed.
Love is a must for spiritual growth. And, moreover, love
functions as a mirror.
It is very difficult to know
yourself unless you have looked at your face in the eyes
of someone who loves you. Just as you have to look into
the mirror to see your physical face, you have to look
in the mirror of love to see your spiritual face. Love
is a spiritual mirror. It nourishes you, it integrates
you, it makes you ready for the inner journey, it
reminds you of your original face. In moments of deep
love there are glimpses of the original face, although
those glimpses are coming as reflections. Just as on a
full moon night you see the moon reflected in the lake,
in the silent lake, so love functions as a lake.
The moon reflected in the lake is the beginning of the
search for the real moon. If you have never seen the
moon reflected in the lake you may never search for the
real moon. You will go again and again into the lake to
search for the moon because in the beginning you will
think, ’This is where the real moon is, somewhere deep
down at the bottom of the lake.’ You will dive again and
again and you will come up empty-handed; you will not
find the moon there. Then one day it will dawn on you
that maybe this moon is just a reflection. That is a
great insight.
Then you can look upwards. Then where is the moon if
this is a reflection? If it is a reflection you have to
look in the opposite direction. The reflection was
there, deep in the lake – the real must be somewhere
above the lake. For the first time you look upwards and
the journey has started. Love gives you glimpses of
meditation, reflections of the moon in the lake –
although they are reflections, not true. So love can
never satisfy you. In fact, love will make you more and
more dissatisfied, discontented. Love will make you more
and more aware of what is possible, but it will not
deliver the goods. It will frustrate you; and only in
deep frustration – the possibility of turning back to
your own being.
Only lovers know the joy of meditation.
Those who have never loved and have never been
frustrated in love, those who have never dived into the
lake of love in search of the moon and are never
frustrated, will never look up to the real moon in the
sky; they will never become aware of it. The person who
loves is bound to become religious sooner or later. But
the person who does not love – the politician, for
example, who cannot love any person, he loves only power
– will never become religious. Or the person who is
obsessed with money, who loves only money, who knows
only one love – love of money, will never become
religious. It will be very difficult for him for so many
reasons. Money can be possessed; you can have money and
you can possess it.
It is easy to possess money, it is difficult to possess
a beloved – impossible, in fact. You will try to
possess, but how can you possess a living person? The
living person will resist in every way, will fight to
the last. Nobody wants to lose their freedom.
Love is not as valuable as freedom is. Love is a great
value, but not higher than freedom. So one would like to
be loving, but one would not like to be imprisoned by
love. Hence, sooner or later you become frustrated. You
try to possess, and the more you try to possess, the
more impossible love becomes and the more the other
starts going away from you. The less you possess, the
closer you feel to the other. If you don’t possess at
all, if there is freedom flowing between the lovers,
there is great love.
Firstly, the effort to possess a person is bound to fail:
in that frustration you will be thrown back on yourself.
Secondly, if you have learned not to possess the person,
if you have learned that freedom is a higher value than
love, a far more superior value than love, then sooner
or later you will see: freedom will bring you to
yourself, freedom will become your awareness,
meditation.
Freedom is another aspect of meditation. Either start
with freedom and you will become aware, or start with
awareness and you will become free. They go together.
Love is a kind of subtle bondage – they go together –
but it is an essential experience, very essential for
maturity.
There is a beautiful definition of realness through love
in Margery William’s beautiful book The Velveteen
Rabbit. ’What is REAL?’ asked the Rabbit one day. ’Does
it mean having that buzz inside of you, and a stick-out
handle?’ ’REAL isn’t how you were made,’ said the Skin
Horse. ’It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child
loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but
really loves you, then you become REAL. ’Does it hurt?’
asked the Rabbit. ’Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for
he was always truthful. ’When you are REAL, you don’t
mind being hurt.’
’Does it happen all at once like being wound up,’ he
asked, ’or bit by bit?’
’It doesn’t happen all at once.’ said the Skin Horse.
’You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t
often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp
edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by
the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved
off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the
joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at
all, because once you are REAL, you can’t be ugly,
except to people who don’t understand... Once you are
REAL, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for
always.’
Love makes you real;
otherwise you remain just a fantasy, a dream, with no
substance in it. Love gives you substance, love gives
you integrity, loves makes you centered. But it is only
half of the journey; the other half has to be completed
in meditation, in awareness. But love prepares you for
the other half. Love is the beginning half and awareness
is the ending half. Between these two you attain to God.
Between love and awareness, between these two banks, the
river of being flows. Don’t avoid love. Go through it,
with all its pains. Yes, it hurts, but if you are in
love it doesn’t matter.
In fact, all those hurts strengthen you. Sometimes it
really hurts badly, terribly, but all those wounds are
necessary to provoke you, to challenge you, to make you
less sleepy. All those dangerous situations are
necessary to make you alert. Love prepares the ground,
and in the soil of love the seed of meditation can grow
– and only in the soil of love. So those who escape from
the world out of fear will never attain to meditation.
They can sit in the Himalayan caves for lives together,
they will not attain to meditation. It is not possible –
they have not earned it. First it has to be earned in
the world; first they have to prepare the soil. And it
is only love that prepares the soil.
Hence my insistence for my sannyasins not to renounce
the world. Be in it, take its challenge, accept its
dangers, its hurts, wounds. Go through it. Don’t avoid
it, don’t try to find a short-cut because there is none.
It is a struggle, it is arduous, it is an uphill task,
but that is how one reaches the peak. And the joy will
be more, far more, than if you were dropped on the peak
by a helicopter, because you will have reached there
ungrown; you will not be able to enjoy it. Just think of
the difference... You try hard to reach Everest. It is
so dangerous – every possibility of dying on the way,
every possibility of never reaching to the peak;
hazardous, dangerous; death waiting for you at each
step; so many traps and so many possibilities of being
defeated rather than being successful.
Out of one hundred possibilities there is only one
possibility that you may reach.
But the closer you come to the peak, the higher the joy
rises in you. Your spirit soars high. You earn it; it is
not free. And the more you have paid for it, the more
you will enjoy it. Then think: you can be dropped from a
helicopter on the top. You will stand on the top and you
will just look silly, stupid – what are you doing here?
Within five minutes you will be finished, you will say,
’So I have seen it! There is nothing much here!’
The journey creates the goal. The goal is not sitting
there at the end of the journey, the journey creates it
at each step. The journey is the goal. The journey and
the goal are not separate, they are not two things. The
end and the means are not two things. The end is spread
over all the way; all the means contain the end in them.
So never miss any opportunity of living, of being alive,
of being responsible, of being committed, of getting
involved. Don’t be a coward. Face life, encounter it.
And then slowly slowly something inside you will
crystallize. Yes, it takes time. The Skin Horse is
right: ’Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of
your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and
you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these
things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL,
you can’t be ugly, except to people
who don’t understand... Once you are REAL, you can’t
become unreal again. It lasts for always.’ It is
forever. But one has to earn it. Let me repeat it: in
life you cannot get anything free. And if you do get it,
it is useless. You have to pay, and the more you pay for
it the more you will get out of it.
If you can risk your whole life in love,
great will be your attainment. Love will send you back
to yourself; it will give you a few reflections of
meditation. The first glimpses of meditation happen in
love. And then a great desire arises in you to attain to
those glimpses, not only as glimpses but as states, so
that you can live in those states forever and forever.
Love gives you the taste of meditation.
A loving orgasmic experience is the first experience of
SAMADHI, of ecstasy.
It will make you more thirsty. Now you will know what is
possible and now you cannot be satisfied with the
mundane. The sacred has penetrated you, the sacred has
reached your heart. God has touched your heart, you have
felt that touch. Now you would like to live in that
moment forever, you would like that moment to become
your whole life. It does become – and unless it becomes
man remains discontented. Love on the one hand will give
you great joy and on the other hand will give you a
thirst for eternal joy.
Source: “The Secret of Secrets, Volume 1” -
Osho
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