What is the essence of love?

Lao tzu says: he who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know. Fill up its apertures, close its doors, dull its edges, untie its tangles, soften its light, submerge its turmoil, -- this is the mystic unity. Then love and hatred cannot touch him. Profit and loss cannot reach him. Honour and disgrace cannot affect him. Therefore is he always the honoured one of the world.

And you call this man a genius! You call this man very very intelligent? He may be clever, but he is not wise. He may be clever, but he is not intelligent. He may be knowledgeable, but he has no capacity of knowing. And what does it matter if slippers are not found in the right place? No, that may be just again an excuse. That may be connected with other things -- in the night he had a nightmare, and he was afraid, and trembling when he got up, and then he found that the slippers were not in the right place; now the whole anger is focussed on this fact. He may throw the servant out, fire him, or this may become a cause for a divorce. You may think that I am going too far -- I am not. I have watched many divorces and I have…

Beloved Osho, I feel we all use the word love like another four-letter word -- not really knowing at all what this state is. Can you please talk about what love really is?

Kendra, you are right. The way people use the word love is exactly like a four-letter word, obscene -- because to call it lust would be offensive. If you say to someone, "I lust for you," you can't expect that that woman is going to have any respect for you. She will say, "Lust? Then get lost!" But if you say, "I love you," then everything is good. And deep in your mind you are simply lusting. It is a biological desire to use the woman but a beautiful word hides the ugly reality. The problem is that people are not aware of what love is, so they are not only deceiving others, they are themselves deceived. They also think it is love. Love needs immense consciousness. Love is a meeting of two souls, and lust is the meeting of two bodies. Lust is animal; love is divine. But unless…

Osho, why is love indescribable? The moment it is remembered in the heart, speech falls silent. One cannot say what happens then. The eyes grow half-lidded and everything is lost! Why does this happen? I can’t understand it. What is this form of love?

The more science advances, the heavier life becomes. Everything becomes understandable, and then nothing remains worth living for. If life becomes all prose, nothing remains but suicide. There must be some poetry in life. Poetry means: ungraspable—there is a glimpse, but it won’t be caught. There must be something like mercury too—close your fist and it scatters. And there is much of this in life. Love is exactly like mercury: the more you try to grasp it in explanations, the more it slips away. In the silent night, how is it that suddenly my heart brimmed over? I know not which sweet dreams stretched upon the inner screen. What unfamiliar remembrance filled my life-breath with monsoon rains? With the drizzling of my own eyes I put the rainy season to shame; and the world too, with moist eyelashes, raised this innocent question: These little pitchers, my eyes—how did they hold…

This is the real process of transforming your love from the lowest to the highest. Such a person has no interest in unnecessary philosophical questions. His problem is existential, not philosophical. He does not ask "What is love?" He lives it, enters into it, tries, falls many times, gets up again, and by experimenting, by trial and error, he learns. That's the only way to learn. The great questions of life cannot be answered philosophically: you have to live those questions, you have to become a quest. I have heard a famous story . A young man was in search. For seven years he traveled from one country to another, from one Master to another, asking the same question, but his question was such that it could not be answered. Finally he reached the deepest caves of the Himalayas.

Osho, I have fallen in love with chuang tzu, with joshu, with mumon, with bodhidharma. How can I not follow them? I feel already they have transformed me. How can I not be thankful?

Let me tell you one anecdote first. When Rabbi Nor, Rabbi Moudekai's son, assumed the succession after his father's death, his disciples noted that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently to his father, and asked him about this. 'I do just as my father did,' he replied.'He did not imitate and I do not imitate.' Meditate over this anecdote. He said,'I do just as my father did. He did not imitate and I do not imitate.' If you really understand Joshu, Bodhidharma or me, you will not imitate -- because I have not imitated, because Bodhidharma never imitated anybody. Joshu used to say to his disciples,'If you utter Buddha's name, go and rinse your mouth immediately.' Joshu also used to say,'If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately.' And he used to worship Buddha every day. Ordinarily Zen looks puzzling, but…