What is the relationship between love and enlightenment?

You recently said that only an enlightened one can love. At other times you also said that unless one loves one cannot become enlightened. From which door to enter?

This is from Anand Prem. She has been standing at the door for many years. The real thing is to enter; the door is irrelevant. From which door you enter is meaningless. Please enter. If you want to enter from the door of love, then enter from that door. Enlightenment will follow; it is the highest peak of a loving heart. If you are afraid of love.... As people are, because the society has made you very much afraid of love and life. Society thinks love is dangerous. It is. One never knows where one is going. It is a sort of madness -- beautiful, but a madness still. If you are afraid of that then enter meditation, become meditative. If you are really meditative you will feel, suddenly, an upsurge of energy. and you will become loving. But don't, please, go on standing at the door. Even the doors…

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] [Love can be the prelude to enlightenment, Osho said tonight.] Enlightenment is not something that can be made a goal, it cannot be made an achievement, it cannot be an object of ambition because it is our intrinsic nature; we are already it. It has to be discovered and the way to discover it is love, because the thing that keeps it covered is the ego and love absolutely kills the ego and leaves no trace behind. Love means absence of ego. If A happens between two persons, that means between those two persons ego is no more present, that they commune without the ego. If it happens between a person and the whole universe that means prayer, the highest form of love.

And only when one is full of light.... The first child of light is love. And love contains all that is beautiful, all that is divine: compassion, prayer, creativity, grace. They all follow love, you need not think about them, they are by-products, consequences of love. But love itself happens only through light. All meditation techniques are devices to bring you out of your sleep, to help you wake up. OSHO (to Aige) : Your heart starts pulsating in a different rhythm. The whole world remains the same but your eyes are no more the same; hence you start seeing things which you have never seen before and you stop seeing things which you have always been seeing. So in a sense the world remains the same and in another sense it is no more the same, because when the seer changes, the seen changes.

Once you have understood the rhythm then there is no fear. You are not afraid of the other being angry, you are not afraid of your being angry. You know your love is strong enough to bear all these situations. Only poor love is afraid. when love is rich, has great roots, it is unafraid; it can simply enjoy the great wind and the rain and the lightning. It is all thrilling and adventurous. Once you have seen that one automatically becomes silent -- and that is the beauty of going totally into any emotion -- then you have learned something great. The other will be able to understand your anger, and his understanding will make you more understanding of your anger. and anger understood is anger transformed: the same anger becomes love, compassion. Go into it and don't be afraid.

That's what happens in ordinary love: great dark nights and once in a while, far and few in between, just a little star... and that too looks illusory because it is so fleeting. But nothing is wrong with love; love has to join hands with consciousness. It has to drop its companionship with unconsciousness, it has to divorce unconsciousness. And that's the whole spiritual work: how to take your love from the hold of the unconscious. Once your love has become conscious you start rising; you are being uplifted. Then there is no height that you cannot reach, and the higher you reach, the more fulfilling it becomes. At the highest point of the ladder is satchitananda -- truth, consciousness, bliss... and love is the ladder. But one end of the ladder is in the mud, has to be; the other end is at the feet of god.