What happens when spiritual passion of the heart drops away?

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, 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 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.…

Beloved Osho, the more I am able to absorb you, the more thirsty I become. Please talk about meditation and passion.

There is no harm in becoming more thirsty for truth. There is no harm in becoming more thirsty for new spaces of experience, new challenges, voyages to new stars in your innermost being. I call it divine discontentment. Only the fools are contented. You can see it. Watch a donkey... how contented he looks! He should be worshipped by all religious people. You cannot find a more contented being -- having nothing, but you will never see him frustrated, in despair, freaking out. In the world of donkeys even psychotherapies don't exist. Donkeys don't need any psychotherapist. But it is not a quality; it is not to be praised, it is a condemnation. The man of any worth is discontented. The smaller men are discontented about smaller things: money, power, prestige. These are not very far away from the donkeys -- cousin-brothers. There is just a difference of a few…

Can meditation be passionate?

Yes, that is the only way for meditation to exist. Passion is energy, passion is fire, passion is life. If you are doing meditation just so-so, without any passion, without intensity, without fire, nothing will happen. If you are praying just as a formality and it is not love that has arisen in your heart, it is meaningless, it is absurd. If you are praying to God without passion there will be no connection between you and God. Only passion can become the bridge, the thirst, the hunger. The more thirsty you are, the more is the possibility. If you are utterly thirsty, if you have become just a thirst, your whole being is consumed by your passion, then only something happens -- in that intensity, in that moment of hundred-degree passion. Don't be lukewarm. People live a lukewarm life. They are neither this nor that, hence they remain mediocre.…