According to Osho, when you truly allow yourself to feel love, you don’t receive a feeling—you are flooded by being itself. Real love isn’t a relationship or a doing; it overflows impersonally, like an ocean pouring into your small heart. Its sheer intensity can feel like pain at first, because the ego isn’t prepared, yet it dissolves you into gratitude, expansion, and life’s very heartbeat.
Letting in real love can feel big and even a bit painful at first, but it melts your small self and fills you with warm, grateful aliveness.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Sabai Sayane Ek Mat · Discourse 8
1975-09-18 · Pune · Hindi · English translation
Question: Second question: Osho, is love life itself? Is it aliveness? What is a well, after all? Merely a window through which the ocean peeks. The well is connected below to the ocean, to endless springs. It is just a little aperture where the ocean has looked out. Do not be afraid. You too are an aperture through which the Divine looks. Do not fear. You are connected. Pour yourself out and you will find you expand. Hold back and you will shrink and rot. And then a vicious circle begins: if you hold back, do not share, do not give love, fear arises—“Everything is already drying up; if I give, I will have even less.” You clamp down even more. The more you hold, the less you have; you keep drying up. Be brave. Give—and see.Read the full discourse →
Jin Sutra · Discourse 22
1976-06-01 · Pune · Hindi · English translation
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…Read the full discourse →
The Golden Wind · Discourse 22
1980-07-22 · Chuang Tzu Auditorium · English
That first shock makes you feel like you are dying because that's what you had always known as your life. Your very identity has disappeared as if the earth beneath your feet has suddenly disappeared: you look and there is no earth and you are falling into an abyss. But soon -- and you cannot do anything you have to go on falling, there is nothing to do -- soon you start feeling a great joy instead of fear. The shock disappears, and instead of the fear a great joy arises in you because now for the first time there is space for the joy to happen. It needs space, and thoughts are occupying your inner space so much that it is impossible for bliss to happen. My sannyasins have to do only one thing, that is, they have to become watchers of the mind, not controllers, just watchers.Read the full discourse →
The Sound Of One Hand Clapping · Discourse 13
1981-03-13 · Chuang Tzu Auditorium · English
love and life are synonymous in language they may have different meanings but in existence they are precisely the same phenomenon no difference, no gap exists between the two the really alive person is pure love and if love is missing then life is nothing but a vegetation one can go on vegetating without love life has not happened at all one was born, one existed, one died but life never happened life happens only the moment love starts flowing and the greater the love, the deeper life becomes a sannyasin has to remember not to put any limitations on his love love should not become object-focussed the moment you become object-focussed you are getting trapped for example, if you love one person that means that the remaining whole existence has been rejected you have excluded it out of your love affair your love has become very narrow and a…Read the full discourse →
Sermons In Stones · Discourse 13
1986-12-12 · English
Question: BELOVED OSHO, SITTING IN MY ROOM THOUSANDS OF KILOMETERS AWAY FROM YOU, I CAN FEEL YOU. AND IF HAD HAVE EYES TO SEE, I WOULD SEE YOU STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID TO US IN DISCOURSE `IF YOU DON'T FEEL ME WHEN YOU ARE NOT HERE, YOU HAVEN'T LET ME IN.' IT'S SO TRUE -- BUT WHAT A GIFT THAT YOU REALLY, REALLY CAME WHEN I WAS OPEN, THAT YOU REALLY FILLED MY BEING. IN SOME MOMENTS SITTING IN FRONT OF YOU I GOT IT. IN OTHER MOMENTS IT HAPPENED BUT I WASN'T AWARE OF IT AT THAT MOMENT. PUTTING THIS OUT TO YOU MY HEART IS BEATING FASTER AND MY HANDS ARE TREMBLING. FOR THE FIRST TIME I FEEL TO SHOW SOMETHING OF MYSELF. THIS IS A GIFT ALSO.Read the full discourse →