Osho on Love

Love is the only miracle there is. Love is the ladder from hell to heaven. Love learned well, you have learned all. Love missed, you missed your whole life. People who ask about God are not in fact asking about God; rather than asking, they are declaring that they have not known what love is. One who knows love has known the Beloved: love is the insight into the Beloved. One who asks about light, simply says that he is blind. One who asks about God, simply says his heart has not bloomed into love. Never ask about God. If you cannot see him that simply shows you don’t have eyes to see. If you cannot hear him that simply shows you are deaf. If you cannot touch him that simply shows you are without hands — that you don’t have any sensitivity. God is not the problem, God cannot be the problem. God is not far away, God is herenow. All that is, is in God and is God — so how can God be the problem? God is not to be searched: where will you search him? He is everywhere — you just have to learn how to open your eyes of love. Once love has penetrated your heart, God is there. In the thrill of love is the Beloved: in the vision of love is the vision of God.

So God is the only real inner alchemy: it transforms your material life into the divine. It is the only alchemy, I say, because it changes the baser metal into gold. Without love, life is a dull affair, grey — with no colors, with no songs, with no celebrations. One can drag and one can hope only for death: death will come and relieve you of your dragging long affair. Love brings color: the grey suddenly becomes a rainbow, explodes into a thousand and one colors, and the drab and the dull become psychedelic. Love changes the whole climate of your inner being — and with that change the whole existence is changed. Nothing is changed on the outside — but once you are full of love you have a totally different existence available to you. God and the world are not two things, it is the one existence. There is only one existence: seen without love, it looks material; seen without love, God looks like the world — SANSARA. Seen with love, the world is transformed, transfigured… and the very world becomes divine.

Yes, then in sight there is music. When love has dawned, then miracles happen — even in sight there is music; in sound, a luminous silence. Love is magical. And Kabir’s whole teaching is that of love: he calls love “the divine melody.” The heart, pulsating in love, becomes a flute on the lips of God… and a song is born. That song is religion. Religion has nothing to do with churches and temples and rituals: religion is born only when somebody pulsates with love. Each individual has to give birth to a religion — and unless you have given birth to a religion in you, you are not religious. You cannot join an organization and become religious, remember — religion is not an organization to belong to. To be religious you have to give birth to religion in your innermost core, in your very core: when religion is born THERE, only then are you religious. Not by becoming a Christian but by becoming a Christ, not by becoming a Buddhist but by becoming a Buddha, religion is born. When you are born in love, religion is born in you — and then your whole life is a melody, a beautiful song. And then you will be surprised that nothing is wrong: all fits together. Right now, nothing fits together. Right now, you are a mess: right now, you are an anarchy. Right now, you are just traffic noise — rushing in all directions, falling apart, disintegrating. Right now, you are nothing but anguish, agony. Once love is born, you have a center. Once love is born, you are centered — and everything falls in tune with the center. You become an orchestra, a beautiful harmony. It is hidden in you: you have brought it into the world, it is yet unmanifest. Kabir says: Manifest it — let your love be manifested. In that manifestation will be your prayer.

A few things, very basic and fundamental to understand, before we enter these beautiful sutras — the last of the series…

And what is love? — do not do unto others that which you would not like to be done to you. This is the criterion of love: do unto others that which you would like to be done to you. Whatsoever you ask for yourself, allow that to others too. Whatsoever you don’t want to happen to you, don’t do it to others. Think of yourself as the very center of existence. In fact, don’t think of the other as the other: only you are and in the other too, is the same life, the same song waiting to be uttered, the same urge to rise to the divine, the same seeking, the same inquiry, the same throbbing heart, the same agony, the same ecstasy. This love is waiting in you. There is no necessity; it can wait and you can die. Birth is beyond you. You are already born — nobody had asked, your permission was not taken at all, you were not even asked where you wanted to be born and what you wanted to become. You always find yourself in the middle of life; you are already here. Birth is no choice for you… nor is death. One day suddenly death will come, without even giving you any warning. And not for a single moment will death wait. Birth happens, death happens — they are beyond you; you cannot do anything about them. Between birth and death there is only one thing you can do something about, and that is love.

These are the three great things of life: life, love, death. Life has already happened. Death is going to happen — it is a certainty. In a way, it has already happened with birth: you have already taken one step into the grave. The day you are born, half the journey is complete; the remaining half will take a little time… or a little more. With life, death has also penetrated you: now only one thing remains to be done that YOU can do, something that depends on you, and that is love. And because it depends on you, there is every possibility that you may miss it. That is the agony of love: you can miss it. If you don’t do something, if you don’t become alert, if you don’t move towards it consciously, deliberately, you may miss it. There is every possibility that you may not be able to unfold it — hence the fear, the trembling, the anguish, the anxiety: will I be able to make it? will I be able to move into love? will I be able to flow into love? But side by side with this agony there is an ecstasy — that one is free. It is because of freedom that the fear exists. If love was also predestined, as life and death are, then there would have been no fear, but then there would have been no ecstasy either — because ecstasy is possible only when you achieve something, when consciously you choose something, when deliberately you arrive somewhere, when it is YOUR journey and you are not being dragged. That’s the beauty of love and that’s the danger too…

Unless you have known what love is, you have not known what melody is. It is the meeting, orgasmic meeting, of death and life. Unless love is known, you have missed. You were born, you lived, and you died — but you missed. You missed tremendously, you missed utterly, you missed absolutely — you missed the interval in between. That interval is the highest pinnacle, the peak experience. Kabir calls it the divine melody. To attain it, there are four steps to be remembered. The first step: be herenow — because love is possible only in the herenow. You cannot love in the past. Many people do that, but you cannot really love in the past. Many people simply live in the memory — they loved in the past. And there are others who love in the future — that too cannot be done. These are ways to avoid love: the past and the future are the ways to avoid love. So either you love in the past, or you love in the future — and love is possible only in the present, because only n this moment death and life are meeting… in the dark interval that is within you. That dark interval is always present, always present, always present. It is never past and it is never future. If you think too much — and thinking is always of the past or of the future — your energies will be distracted from feeling. Feeling is herenow. If your energies are moving into the pattern of thinking then you will not have enough energies to move into feelings — and love will not be possible.

So the first step is: be herenow. Future and past bring thinking; thinking destroys feeling. And a person too much obsessed with thinking, by and by completely forgets that he has a heart too. A man who is too much into thinking, by and by starts moving in such a way, starts living in such a way, where feeling has no say. Not listening to the feeling, by and by feeling starts falling away from him. There are millions of people in this state, who don’t know what heart means. They think heart is just a pump. Their whole concentration is in the head. Head is an extremity; it is needed, it is a good instrument, but it has to be used as a slave. It should not be the master. Once the head becomes the master and the heart is left behind, you will live, you will die, but you will not know what God is because you will not know what love is. The same dark interval, first contacted looks like love… and when you are lost into it totally, it becomes God. Love is the beginning of God — or God, the ultimate peak of love.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse Series: The Divine Melody Chapter #9

Chapter title: : The pause between two notes

9 January 1977 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘love, heart, religion, god’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. Ecstasy – The Forgotten Language
2. The Beloved, Vol 1, 2
3. From Death to Deathlessness
4. The Golden Future
5. The Path of Love
6. The Messiah, Vol 1, 2
7. Sermons in Stones
8. Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance
9. The Book of Wisdom
10. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6, 7
11. Satyam Shivam Sundram
12. Beyond Psychology
13. From Ignorance to Innocence
14. The Path of the Mystic
15. Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 1, 2