Chapter #28 The Zero Experience #28
Discourse Overview
Main Teaching: Love is a sacrificial death of the self that allows a new being to be born; only by giving yourself utterly does love become real rather than a dream. The sacrifice must be unconditional and without bargaining — sacrifice without love becomes torture, and fear of sacrifice arrests love's unfolding. Lovers often misread one another because love itself, not the partner, demands this surrender; both are instruments through which the god of love operates. Osho illustrates this with the Indian myth of Shiva burning the god of love into bodilessness: love moves through bodies but has no body of its own. On love: love is not possession but the experience that requires disappearing into the other and thus reappearing as a new, shared life. On sacrifice: true sacrifice is voluntary and ecstatic, not coerced or performed for reward — it is the soil where love grows. On misunderstanding between lovers: the quarrel is a confusion about who demands sacrifice; recognizing love as the asker dissolves blame and opens compassion. On the myth of the bodiless god of love: the story shows that love uses bodies as instruments and that its demand transcends individual wills, explaining why lovers feel used yet are asked by something greater.
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Osho's Commentary
Love is almost like death. You die, you disappear, you dissolve, and in that very disappearance you appear for the first time in a totally new way with a totally new being. So it is sacrifice and it is a new birth.
When you sacrifice without love it is torture. One should never sacrifice unless there is love. And when there is love, if you are afraid to sacrifice, love will never grow. It will always remain a dream, it will never become a reality.
Love demands total sacrifice; that's why there is constant struggle, conflict between lovers. And there is a misunderstanding between lovers, a very fundamental misunderstanding: they think that the other is demanding sacrifice. The other is not demanding sacrifice, love demands sacrifice! The other is not love, the other feels you are demanding sacrifice. You are not demanding it.
Love beyond both, the god of love, demands sacrifice. It is not that you sacrifice to your beloved or your beloved sacrifices to you. You both sacrifice to the god of love.
There is a misunderstanding between lovers: they think the other is too demanding: the other is not demanding.
Maybe the god of love is using the other as he is using you, mm? because he has no body.
In India we have a myth about the god of love -- that he has no body, he is bodiless. The myth is beautiful....
Shiva was meditating on the Himalayas. The god of love tempted him and he became very angry. He opened his third eye and it was such a tremendous energy, it was fire! He poured his fire on the god of love so that he was burned, his body was burned utterly, forever. Since then he has been without a body, he moves amongst people with no body.
So love uses your body, your lover's body; hence the cause of misunderstanding. But it is love that demands sacrifice. Love is not possible without sacrifice. It exists only when there is utter sacrifice with no condition, with no bargain....