Can Truth be attained through love?

Question: First question: Osho, can Truth be attained through love? Love and truth are not two events; they are two facets of one event. Realize truth and love manifests. Realize love and truth is directly revealed. Set out in search of truth and, upon reaching the goal, you find yourself entering the temple of love as well. You went looking for truth—love arrived alongside. Or travel by the path of love; the moment you arrive at love’s temple, truth will be there. They go together. Love and truth are two names of the Divine. There are, however, two kinds of people in the world. For some, attaining truth is easy—love follows as its fragrance. For others, love is easy—truth comes as its consummation. Hence knowledge (jnana) and devotion (bhakti) are the two fundamental paths. Woman and man are the two primordial polarities.

Osho, you have titled this series of talks “Sahaj Yoga.” Do “sahaj” and “yoga” not seem mutually opposed?

Anand Maitreya! They don’t just seem opposed, they are opposed. But no ultimate truth of life can manifest without contradiction. Life is made of opposites—darkness and light, day and night, woman and man, negative electricity and positive electricity, birth and death. The very structure of life is woven of opposites. Hence the opposites are not only opposed; they are complementary to each other. If you have labored hard all day, you will be able to sleep deeply. Labor and rest are opposites, yet only the one who has worked can rest deeply—and the one who has not worked cannot. So the opposites are not only opposed, they complete each other. And only the one who has rested deeply at night can rise in the morning and engage in work again. One who has not rested through the night will not be able to work in the morning. Look closely at…

Raising on the ray of love one can enter the enlightened kingdom of God. It is better to say that love is God than to say that truth is God, because the harmony, the beauty, the vitality and the bliss that are part of love are not part of truth. Truth is to be known; love is to be felt as well as known. The growth and perfection of love lead to the ultimate merger with God. The greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven. You can look at man as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison.

... because if they really loved truth they would not believe. A believer is not searching for truth, he is looking for some consolation. He wants to believe because he is afraid. For example, in India people believe in the immortality of the soul and for twenty-two centuries they have been slaves. Now this is unexplainable: a country that believes that the soul is immortal should be absolutely fearless, nobody can enslave it, because what can you do? -- at the most you can kill the body but the soul is immortal. But India has behaved just the contrary to its belief -- very cowardly, clinging to life, afraid of death. But I can see a deep logic in it. It is not apparent, it is hidden, but if you just dig a little bit you can discover it.

Beloved Osho,sometimes while just sitting, the question comes up in the mind: what is truth? But by the time I come here I realize that I am not capable to ask. But may I ask what happens in those moments when the question arises so strongly that had you been nearby I would have asked it. Or if you had not replied, I would have caught hold of your beard or collar and asked, "what is truth, Osho?"

When you fall in love with a woman there is some truth -- if you have fallen absolutely unaware, if you have not 'done' it in any way, if you have not acted, managed, if you have not even thought about it. Suddenly you see a woman, you look into her eyes, she looks into your eyes, and something clicks. You are not the doer of it, you are simply possessed by it, you simply fall into it. It has nothing to do with you. Your ego is not involved, at least not in the very, very beginning, when love is virgin. In that moment there is truth, but there is no interpretation. That's why love remains indefinable. Soon the mind comes in, starts managing things, takes possession of you. You start thinking about the girl as your girlfriend, you start thinking of how to get married, you start thinking…