What happens when a love relationship leads to independence?

Question: BELOVED OSHO, IN MY SIXTY-THREE YEARS OF LIFE YOU ARE THE FIRST LOVE RELATIONSHIP WHICH HAS MADE ME INDEPENDENT. HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? Paritosh Lore, love brings freedom. And a love that does not bring freedom is not love. Love is not domination. How can you dominate someone you love? How can you make him dependent, and still be loving? But that's what goes on happening in the world in the name of love -- something else -- a lust to power, to dominate the other. Naturally independence cannot be allowed. Every effort is made that the other should be a carbon copy of you. You are afraid of the freedom of the other, because freedom is not controllable, and freedom is not predictable. So all so-called love tries in every way to destroy freedom -- and the moment freedom is destroyed, love dies.

It is only through love -- the anguish and the ecstasy of it -- that you learn, that you see, that you visualise, that you become capable of coming to certain conclusions. And the greatest conclusion that one arrives at spontaneously one day is that if one really wants to be eternally happy, then that happiness has to be in aloneness; it cannot depend on the other. That which depends on the other certainly depends on the other -- you are not the master of it; you are a slave. And that's why there is conflict: nobody wants to be a slave. Freedom is a higher value than love, and the whole conflict is between these two values: love and freedom. But you can know only that freedom is a higher value than love if you have been in love. Going through experience beyond love, you arrive at freedom.

And it is possible that the man will love you more than ever. Because you don't possess he will feel even more grateful to you. He may stay with you forever. Where can he go? Where will he find a person who loves and does not cling? Everybody is searching for that person who will love and who will not possess. In fact, people start moving from one to the other just because that one started possessing. In the beginning we keep our possession repressed. In the beginning we show a different face, because to show an ugly face in the beginning will destroy the whole thing from the very start. So in the beginning lovers show beautiful faces, and when they are trapped with each other, involved, committed, and things have become settled, their ugly faces start surfacing.

Osho, one kind of love becomes a prison and another becomes a temple. Is there a difference even between love and love?

A little girl! But every girl is born a mother, and a man remains a small child to his last breath. No man ever goes beyond being a little boy. Every man seeks the mother in a woman, and every woman seeks the child in a man. Therefore when a man loves a woman deeply, he becomes like a small child, and in the deep moments of love the woman becomes like a mother. The rishis of the Upanishads blessed newlyweds: may you have ten children, and in the end may the eleventh be your husband becoming your son. They spoke very rightly. But if a child does not learn love—unconditional love—from his mother, where will he learn it? The first school is missed. And if a girl does not receive love from her father, she will not be able to love any man; the well became poisonous at the…

You said that love can make you free. But ordinarily we see that love becomes attachment, and instead of freeing us it makes us more bound. So tell us something about attachment and freedom.

Right now you are not. When you say, "When I love someone it becomes an attachment," you are saying you are not, so whatsoever you do goes wrong because the doer is absent. The inner point of awareness is not there, so whatsoever you do goes wrong. First BE, and then you can share your being. And that sharing will be love. Before that, whatsoever you do will become an attachment. And lastly: if you are struggling against attachment, you have taken a wrong turn. You can struggle. So many monks, recluses, sannyasins are doing that. They feel that they are attached to their house, to their property, to their wives, to their children, and they feel caged, imprisoned. They escape, they leave their homes, they leave their wives, they leave their children and possessions, and they become beggars and escape to a forest, to a loneliness. But go and…