What happens when I experience love and fear of being hurt?

Beloved Osho, I love you, and I have been in love before and been hurt. I am afraid. Will you help me?

There are a few sannyasins who think that they are dependent on me. And how do I know they think that? I have come to know from their questions and their letters. They write angry letters to me, angry questions to me. Then I know that in some way they must be feeling dependent on me -- this is their revenge. Otherwise there is no need to be angry with me. I do not possess you -- you can leave at any moment. Not even for a single moment will you be prevented from leaving. It is absolutely up to you to be here or not to be here, to be a sannyasin or not to be a sannyasin. I am not obliging you to be a sannyasin, I am not obliging you by initiating you into sannyas. It is my joy. Remember, it is my joy to share my…

Nobody wants to hurt anybody -- but it happens, that's true. So never carry wounds. It is not only a question of [your husband. If you carry the wound and the hurt feeling, you will become incapable, by and by, of loving and trusting -- and that is bad. It is not only that [your husband] has hurt you -- he has hurt love. Whenever you move in a love relationship again you will shrink, you will become afraid. Or you will move up to an extent, and not more than that. And that is bad. Persons come and go. One should never become distrustful of love. Love is bigger than the whole world. One [husband], a thousand and one [husbands] come and go, but nobody should be allowed to disturb the trust in love. Because if that is allowed, you lose all meaning in life.

The very possibility of love gives you an idea of pain, mm? It is not ungrounded -- love can bring pain... tremendous pain. If you are not very understanding. Love can become hell! Love is a fire. If you don't know how to use it, you will be burned. If you know, you can cook many things you can cook many things out of love! But that's my whole work here; to teach you how to cook out of love! .... Sometimes you even cook, and you fear that something may get burned or something -- but that fear has to be accepted and you have to go in still. The fear comes not from love exactly but from many other things which are hiding behind the cover of love. Jealousy is always hiding behind love, so whenever you are in love you become afraid.

Why is love so painful?

Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don't get involved. Love is involvement; it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you have not met at all; in fact, you avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other's original faces. Love is the greatest Zen koan. Latifa, it is painful, but don't avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is…

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…