What is the difference between longing for the divine and loving another?

Osho, what is the difference between surrender and blind imitation?

So be careful: the freedom you allow yourself, allow the other too. You have no right to judge another as blindly credulous or as a surrendered being. Drop that concern. You cannot judge anyway—how will you enter another’s heart? How will you know? Think only about yourself. See within whether, up to now, you have lived by blind belief or by surrender. Decide only there; leave worrying about others. Otherwise, all your judgments will be wrong. Jesus said: Judge not; do not set yourself up as a judge in relation to another. To the friend who has asked: if you are asking for yourself, good. Drop worrying about others. Look within and see: whatever I have been clinging to till now—have I ever staked my life to hold it? Have I meditated for it? Have I loved for it? Or am I just clutching what culture, society, civilization handed me?…

I don't understand. You said that longing is in and of itself divine. Yet you have often said that all desiring, even for god, is mundane and not spiritual.

Deva Ashoka, longing in its purity is divine, longing when it longs for nothing is divine. The moment an object of the longing arises, it becomes mundane. Longing is a pure fire that purifies, longing is a smokeless fire, a smokeless flame. But the moment it becomes attached to any object whatsoever -- worldly, otherworldly; money, meditation, God, nirvana, it doesn't matter -- any object, and the longing is no more pure, it is contaminated by the object. Then the object becomes more important than the longing itself. Then the longing is only a means, it is no more the end in itself. And the whole effort of sannyas is to help you drop all objects of longing. Longing will not disappear -- in fact, the more objects are dropped, the more intense, the more total the longing will become, because the energy involved in the objects will be released.…

What is the difference between desire and longing?

KRISHNA, DESIRE IS DESIRE FOR SOMETHING that is outside you. Desire is objective. Longing is not objective. Longing is for that which wants to explode in you. It is inner, it is subjective. If a rose wants to become a lotus, it is a desire. But if the rose LONGS to become a rose, it is longing. If the seed wants to sprout and become a tree, it is a longing! It is perfectly in order. It is how it should be. But if a seed wants to become a butterfly, it is a desire. Desire is absurd: longing is existential. Longing is perfectly beautiful: desire is dangerous. And the distinction is very delicate and one has to be very much alert. Longing is opening of the inner: desire is accumulation of the outer. Man desires money: man longs for meditation. Man desires power: man longs for purity. Man desires…

Osho, to long for you is easy, but you are difficult. I have not been able to quiet this longing for you. A lifetime has passed in longing, yet you did not come. Death has begun to glimmer in life, yet you have not come.

Santosh Saraswati! To realize the Divine, first there must be an intense longing—in the first stage—indomitable, unwavering, unmoving. A longing bold enough to stake everything. Like a moth racing to the flame—such a longing! The longing to be annihilated. The courage to take every risk. Such urgency, such density that only one longing remains, and all other longings are absorbed into it. Let your heart become a single arrow, catch the flight of the Divine, and set out for the Divine’s destination. First such longing is needed. And then comes a very paradoxical law: the longing must be dissolved. No one arrives merely through longing; and without longing, no one arrives either. Longing is indispensable—but in the final moment the longing itself becomes the obstacle. In that last hour, longing too must fall away, in that very instant. First, longing refines you, shapes you, makes you undivided; then the longing…

Someone has asked—the second question: Osho, yesterday you said that the other can never make anyone happy. But the joy, the bliss, and the sense of awe one experiences when one is immersed in love with a beloved—what is that?

I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin was sitting with a friend. He told his son, “Go to the cellar and bring the bottle of wine.” The boy went and returned. He had poor eyesight and a condition in which one thing appears as two. He said, “Shall I bring both bottles, or just one?” Nasruddin was troubled: there was only one bottle. If he said in front of the guest, “Bring just one,” the guest might think him stingy. If he said, “Bring both,” where would the boy find a second—there was only one. And if he told the guest, “My son sees double,” it would be needless disgrace; he still had to marry the boy off. So he said, “Do this—bring one and break the other. Smash the one on the left and bring the one on the right; the left one is useless anyway.” The boy went and smashed…