How can love be attained?

You have asked: How can love be attained?

The path of love seems hard because you are standing upside down. If a man is doing a headstand, you have to tell him that walking is very difficult. What else can you say? If you say, “Walking is very easy,” he will answer, “If it’s easy, why can’t I take even an inch?” For the one who is on his head, walking is hard. For the one on his feet, walking is easy. All of you are on your heads. The arrangements of society—of priests, pundits, politicians—have put you upside down, so walking has become hard. Stand on your feet and walking becomes simple. But standing on your feet now seems hard, because you think standing on your head is the only way to stand. A man is filled by what he is taught. He is bound by what initiations, what conditionings he receives. And your conditionings seem to…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, HOW CAN I LOVE BETTER? Love is something eternal. It is the experience of the buddhas, not the unconscious people of whom the whole world is full. Only very few people have known what love is, and these same people are the most awakened, the most enlightened, the highest peaks of human consciousness. If you really want to know love, forget about love and remember meditation. If you want to bring roses into your garden, forget about roses, and take care of the rosebush. Give nourishment to it, water it, take care that it gets the right amount of sun, water. If everything is taken care of, in the right time the roses are destined to come. You cannot bring them earlier, you cannot force them to open up sooner, and you cannot ask a roseflower to be more perfect.

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…

One has to sow the seeds; one has to prepare the soil. One has to be very loving, careful. One has to defend the new sprouts, because there are a thousand and one dangers, and love is very delicate. One has to handle it carefully: love is very subtle and the world is very gross. Love is like a flower, and in the world you will find only rocks and rocks. The flower can be crushed very easily. Its beauty can be destroyed at any moment. It is a miracle that it happens in such a hard world, but it does happen. Love makes one aware that miracles are possible. There is no other miracle which is bigger than love. Be a gardener of love. Let your heart be the soil Tend the garden carefully in the right time, when the spring comes.

And only when one is full of light.... The first child of light is love. And love contains all that is beautiful, all that is divine: compassion, prayer, creativity, grace. They all follow love, you need not think about them, they are by-products, consequences of love. But love itself happens only through light. All meditation techniques are devices to bring you out of your sleep, to help you wake up. OSHO (to Aige) : Your heart starts pulsating in a different rhythm. The whole world remains the same but your eyes are no more the same; hence you start seeing things which you have never seen before and you stop seeing things which you have always been seeing. So in a sense the world remains the same and in another sense it is no more the same, because when the seer changes, the seen changes.