According to Osho, returning to the heart does not heighten passion; the heart is the seat of compassion and quiet, nonaggressive love. Passion arises from the sex center. When sex and heart join, love can appear passionate; when the heart stands alone, love is pure, tender, invitational, never violent or demanding.
Going to your heart makes you kind and gentle, not hot, pushy, or aggressive.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, does returning to the heart center mean becoming more passionate? Is the heart also the source of passion? Can a man who is authentically centered at the heart be called passionate?
Sex can easily become violence because it is passion, it is rape. Love, the heart center or the love center, is totally different. It is nonviolent, it is passive, not even active. It can come to you like a very silent perfume, and that too when you invite. That's why persons like Buddha or Jesus, they have much love, but we cannot feel their love, because we can feel love only when it is too violent. We have become addicted to violence. And Buddha's love is so silent. It showers on us but we cannot feel it, we have become so insensitive. Only when someone attacks do we start feeling. The heart center is not the center of passion, but is the center of compassion. And compassion is absolutely different from passion, just the opposite. It is non-aggressive energy, moving without any noise, but you have to become very sensitive…
Beloved master, is there some spiritual passion of the heart that needs to drop away as has the driving force of body passions? There is essentially such longing to reach my fellow travelers. When it does not happen -- the nearer the friend is to my heart, the more I fall off center into an anguish that feels like something dying in my hands or something left unborn. Seeing paradise lost, the dream of growing and soaring up together with another -- is that my soul's agony to go astray?
Love is not part of your body system. Love is a hidden source in the body of pure energy which can make anybody rejoice, can quench the thirst. And unless your energy called the heart, blossoms, you are not perfectly alive, you are just a robot. Mind is a computer. Just the other day I received the news that for fifteen years in Japan they have been keeping the head of a monkey without the body, wired with all kinds of nourishment that the brain needs. And because they have been successful, now they are going to try on human beings. Just your head is enough; then mechanical lungs and mechanical wiring, blood that is needed for your brain -- reaching through the wires, being purified by the mechanical lungs and you will be perfectly alive. And the strangest thing is that you will feel love, you will feel emotions,…
Beloved Osho, every time you talk about transforming passion into compassion, something in my heart gets triggered; but still, I do not understand what it means. Could you explain it to me again?
The energy called passion is always addressed towards someone. It is possessive, and because it is possessive it is ugly. To transform passion into compassion means that your energy for love is not addressed to anybody in particular; it is simply your fragrance, it is simply your presence, it is simply the way you are. It is not directed, not one-dimensional. It is radiation, so whoever comes close will feel your love -- and it is non-possessive. The possessive love is a contradiction in terms because possessiveness means you are reducing the other person into a thing. Only things can be possessed, not persons. Only things can be owned, not persons. The person's essential quality that differentiates him from things is his freedom; and possession, ownership, destroys freedom. So on the one hand you think you are loving a person; on the other hand, you are destroying his very essence.…
When (in winter) still water by the wind is stirred, it takes (as ice) the shape and texture of a rock.
WHEN THE DELUDED ARE DISTURBED BY INTERPRETATIVE THOUGHTS, THAT WHICH IS AS YET UNPATTERNED TURNS VERY HARD AND SOLID. MIND IMMACULATE IN ITS VERY BEING, CAN NEVER BE POLLUTED BY SAMSARA'S OR NIRVANA'S IMPURITIES. A PRECIOUS JEWEL DEEP IN MUD WILL NOT SHINE, THOUGH IT HAS LUSTER. KNOWLEDGE SHINES NOT IN THE DARK, BUT WHEN THE DARKNESS IS ILLUMINED, SUFFERING DISAPPEARS (AT ONCE). SHOOTS GROW FROM THE SEED AND LEAVES FROM THE SHOOTS. HE WHO THINKS OF THE MIND IN TERMS OF ONE OR MANY, CASTS AWAY THE LIGHT AND ENTERS THE WORLD. INTO A (RAGING) FIRE HE WALKS WITH OPEN EYES -- WHO COULD BE MORE DESERVING OF COMPASSION? <q>A PRECIOUS JEWEL DEEP IN MUD WILL NOT SHINE, THOUGH IT HAS LUSTER.</q> SAYS SARAHA: MIND IMMACULATE... when the mind has no thoughts -- that is when the mind is pure consciousness, when the mind is a silent lake without…
[Someone asks: I feel that different centres have opened in part, but I don't know which one to go with, to live with. I don't know which one is best to put more time and energy into.] Think more about love, about the heart. We call that chakra 'anahata' in yoga psychology. There are seven chakras, and the anahata is just in the middle; three below it, three above it. The three below are muladhar, swadhisthan and manipur. Those three belong to an extrovert personality. In the west, the majority lives through those three chakras. And now in the east also, the majority is moving towards the western attitude of life. These three chakras are very easily available. They have a certain given function; you need not work much on them. Without them, life will become impossible.