What is the difference between your love and a Christian's love?

What is the difference between your love and a christian's love?

There is a tremendous difference. The Christian's love is only an idea in the mind. My love is my heart; it has nothing to do with my thoughts, it has something to do with my being. For example, Jesus defines God as love. According to me, this is very insulting towards love. God is non-existent and he is making love only an aspect of God -- "God is love." God can be many more other things. If I were to define with the same words I would say, "Love is God." Then God cannot be anything else than love, then it becomes synonymous with love -- and if love is God then there is no need to prove the existence of God. It is proved by the experience of love. God is no longer a person who creates the world; it is an energy of love which is creative. This…

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy typed. It is for reference purposes only.] Osho (to Kirsten): Christ says God is love. God is not known to us. God is absolutely unknown. When we utter the word "god" it is hollow, empty, because we have not experienced anything of God. But the word "love" is full of meaning; it is warm. There is something in love which has been experencied by everybody. It may not be in its purest form, it may be much adultered -- but whater is water even though it is muddy, and love is love even though it is full of lust. Something of the divine remains always present in it. Howsoever dark the night is, a ray of light is still light and not darkness. So it is the case with love.

Love is the only religion there is -- not Christianity, nor Hinduism nor Mohammedanism, but love. Enough of all these isms -- they have tortured man enough, more than enough. It is time to get rid of all these isms and ideologies, all these dogmas and creeds. It is time to reject all that is non-essential and to save just the essential. The danger is that because the non-essential has grown so much and man has become so tired of it, he may throw out the whole thing -- even the essential with the non-essential, the baby with the bathwater. That danger is there. For the first time in the history of man we have come to a very critical moment. If we want to save the essential then the non-essential has to be rejected, and the sooner the better, because almost half of humanity has rejected religion.

Friedrich Nietzsche has said that the first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years before -- the first and the last! And he is right. He was a madman, but about many things his insight is far deeper than that of your so-called pope!. Sometimes it happens that mad people have greater insight than the so-called sane people because the so-called sane are not really sane. Christians are not really interested in Christ, neither are Buddhists interested in Buddha, nor are the Hindus really interested in Krishna -- because it is not a question of worship. Christ is not Jesus' name, his name is Jesus. He attained to a certain peak of consciousness. That peak is known in the West as Christ-consciousness, in the East we call it Buddha-consciousness. It is the same, it is the same peak. There are different languages describing the same peak.

Beloved Osho, what is the difference between the emptiness of the child before the formation of the ego and the awakened childlikeness of a buddha?

Whether you are for it or against it doesn't matter -- your concern shows where your ego is hanging. And I will include the capitalist in it also: his whole concern is how to gather money, hoard money -- because money has power over matter. You can purchase any material thing through money. You cannot purchase anything spiritual, you cannot purchase anything that has any intrinsic value; you can purchase only things. If you want to purchase love, you cannot purchase; but you can purchase sex. Sex is the material part of love. Through money, matter can be purchased, possessed. Now you will be surprised: I include the communist and the capitalist both in the same category, and they are enemies, just as I include Charvaka and Mahatma Gandhi in the same category, and they are enemies. They are enemies, but their concern is the same. The capitalist is trying…