Osho,
What is love?

“What you call love is not love. What you call love may be many other things, but it is not love.

“It may be sex, it may be greed, it may be loneliness, it may be dependence, it may be possessiveness. It may be many more things, but it is not love.

Love is nonpossessive. Love has nothing to do with somebody else, it is your state of being.

“Love is not a relationship. A relationship is possible but it is not relationship; a relationship can exist but it is not confined to it. It is beyond it, it is more than that.

Love is a state of being.

“When it is a relationship, it cannot be love because the two exist. When two egos are there, there is bound to be constant conflict. So what you call love is a constant struggle….

“When you come and ask me about love, I always feel it such an impossible thing to talk about because you mean something and I mean something else.

“We can go on talking for ages and there will be no meeting, no conversation because you have labeled something ‘love’ which is not love.

“Remove that label, look at what it contains. Look deep – what does it contain? – hatred, anger, greed, jealousy, ambition, lust for power, destructiveness.…

You can be love but you cannot do it.

“Then love has tremendous beauty and a stillness, a silence, and then love becomes prayer. Then there is no need to go to any other temple; the state of love is the temple….

“Sometimes I see that people who renounce the world are very deep egoists. Their renouncing the world is really a deep failure of their love. They have failed to love and because they failed to love, the world became miserable.

“They think the world is miserable. They think they are unhappy because of the others.

“A husband leaves the wife and goes to the Himalayas; he thinks he was in trouble, misery because of the wife. This is absolutely wrong. He was in trouble and misery because he was not in the state of love. In the state of love, nobody can create misery for you – impossible.

A man who has known love remains unconditionally blissful.

“Whatsoever happens is irrelevant to his state of being.

“You can kill him but you cannot make him miserable. You can throw him in imprisonment but you cannot make him miserable.

“His freedom remains total; his freedom remains untouched, uncorrupted.”

END

Excerpted and abridged from Osho, The True Sage, Talk #2 – The Shadow of the Ego

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