Why is love considered a secret?

Question: BELOVED MASTER, LOVE IS A SECRET. WHY? Ganesh Giri, love is certainly a secret, but not an ordinary secret -- an extraordinary secret. And its extraordinariness consists in its being an open secret. Everybody knows it and yet nobody knows it; hence I call it the open secret. Everybody knows it in his deepest heart, but nobody knows it in his head. It is a totally different kind of knowing. It is NOT knowledge. You cannot learn about it, you can only live it. Living is knowing. It is not something that scriptures can give to you; nobody can give it to you. Only you are capable of conferring this gift upon yourself; it is your responsibility. You can KNOW it, but knowing is intuitive. This word 'intuition' is beautiful. You know the other word, 'tuition'; tuition means somebody else is giving it to you.

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…

One has to sow the seeds; one has to prepare the soil. One has to be very loving, careful. One has to defend the new sprouts, because there are a thousand and one dangers, and love is very delicate. One has to handle it carefully: love is very subtle and the world is very gross. Love is like a flower, and in the world you will find only rocks and rocks. The flower can be crushed very easily. Its beauty can be destroyed at any moment. It is a miracle that it happens in such a hard world, but it does happen. Love makes one aware that miracles are possible. There is no other miracle which is bigger than love. Be a gardener of love. Let your heart be the soil Tend the garden carefully in the right time, when the spring comes.

OSHO: Love is the most intoxicating phenomenon. It is the wine that wells up within. It is not something chemical that comes from the outside, it is not even part of the body, not part of the mind either. It is the dance of the heart in tune with the whole. Love is your heart in deep harmony with the heart of the universe. Then there is great intoxication. And yet the intoxication does not make you unconscious; on the contrary it makes you more conscious than ever. That's the paradox of love: on one hand one is intoxicated, on the other hand one has never been so aware before. It is an intoxication that makes you wake up. HER SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER: PREM GARIMA, GLORY OF LOVE. NENE BECOMES MA PREM KUNDAN OSHO: It is by passing through the fire of love that one becomes one's real self.

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…