Why is it so hard for me to fall in love?

Osho, I would like to fall in love, but I am afraid of beautiful women, and so afraid of love, and I don't know why. Why is it so hard for me to fall in love?

Parivartan, that thing you are certainly saying with some intelligence. And when you are thinking and planning a well planned life, then fall in love with an ugly woman. It will be difficult in the beginning, but then it is sweet all the way! And always think of the future -- that's how calculating people do. What it is? Just a bitter pill in the beginning, it's okay, but then it is very health-giving. Ugly women are medicinal, but beautiful women are sweet in the beginning and very bitter in the end. And this is not my advice to you; Gautam Buddha also says the same thing -- in a different context, of course. He cannot be so truthful as I am. He says: The world is sweet in the beginning but very bitter in the end, and the other world is very bitter in the beginning but very sweet…

You mentioned that love is a need. Why is this essential need always so hard to fulfill for most people?

When love is not there, you become miserly because you are afraid. You don't have the shelter of love, so you need some shelter. Wealth becomes the substitute. The society also wants you to hoard, because how wealth is to be created if everyone becomes a lover? The society will be very, very rich, but rich in a totally different way. It may be poor materially, but it will be rich spiritually. But that richness is not visible. The society needs visible wealth, so in the whole world, religion, society, culture, they are in a conspiracy because you have only one energy: that is love energy. If it moves rightly into love, then it cannot be forced to move anywhere else. If you don't love, your very missing of love may become a research into science. Freud had many glimpses of truth. He was really a rare man; so many…

It is like a coward who wants to swim in the ocean and remains sitting on the bank only thinking about it, dreaming about it, reading books about it, talking about it. An old man went to the doctor and the doctor said "Your physical situation is not good. You will have to cut your sex life to half." The old man said "Which half? -- talking about it or thinking about it." That's what people are doing: talking, thinking... About love more is written than about anything else. In fact more is written about love than about god. So much poetry, so many songs, so many fictions, novels, stories -- they all are concerned with the phenomenon of love. Why is humanity so much obsessed with love? Films, television, radio, magazines, literature -- all are concerned about love. It seems as if man is tremendously interested in love.

What is love? Why am I so afraid of love? Why does love feel like an unbearable pain?

Meditate on these lines of Raymond John Born. What is required of us in our time is that we go down into uncertainty, where what is new is as old as every morning, and what is well-known is not known as well. That we go down into the most human where living men have vanished and the music of their meaning has been trapped and sealed. What is asked of us in our time is that we break open our blocked caves and find each other. Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit, nor release the heart to act in love. You ask, "WHAT IS LOVE?" It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source, out of that separation the desire arises to fall back into…

Osho, if love has so much glory, then why am I afraid to love?

Exactly for that reason—because it has so much glory. And your conditionings keep you from rising to such glory. Love is vast, and your conditioning has made you petty, small, mean. Love is celebration and your conditioning has taught you renunciation. Love is bliss and your conditioning says, “Become indifferent.” Love is nectar—rasa—and your conditioning is anti-rasa. That is why you are afraid. And you are afraid also because on the path of love the ego must be sacrificed. You have to cut off your head and offer it. You have to lose yourself. As a drop falls into the ocean, so must you fall into the ocean of love. Then fear arises: love is so immense, such a great sky! And you have become accustomed to living in a cage. Have you seen? Even if you open the door of a caged bird, it does not fly out. I…