Why is love described as blind, madness, and a dream?

Osho, love has been called blind, and you teach love. Love has been called madness, and you teach love. Love has been called a dream, and you teach love. Why?

Every twenty-five hundred years, a great moment of transition comes into the life of humankind—a moment of revolution—every twenty-five hundred years. Twenty-five hundred years after Krishna came Buddha. And now Buddha’s twenty-five hundred years are complete. And you know, in Buddha’s time there was a flood, a deluge of awakened ones—Zarathustra in Iran; in Greece, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates; in China, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Mencius; and in India, Buddha, Mahavira, Sanjaya Belatthiputta, Ajita Keshakambala, Makkhali Gosala—remarkable beings. As if the ocean had never risen so high! The world’s cycle completes a turn in twenty-five hundred years. Another twenty-five hundred are complete. These last twenty or twenty-five years of this century are extraordinary. You are fortunate to be here in this hour. If you make use of it, you will cross. Sometimes it happens that when the winds blow in the right direction, you need not row; you…

Osho, what is the difference between surrender and blind imitation?

So be careful: the freedom you allow yourself, allow the other too. You have no right to judge another as blindly credulous or as a surrendered being. Drop that concern. You cannot judge anyway—how will you enter another’s heart? How will you know? Think only about yourself. See within whether, up to now, you have lived by blind belief or by surrender. Decide only there; leave worrying about others. Otherwise, all your judgments will be wrong. Jesus said: Judge not; do not set yourself up as a judge in relation to another. To the friend who has asked: if you are asking for yourself, good. Drop worrying about others. Look within and see: whatever I have been clinging to till now—have I ever staked my life to hold it? Have I meditated for it? Have I loved for it? Or am I just clutching what culture, society, civilization handed me?…

Osho, “O friend, I am mad in love; none knows my ache. I know not aarti or worship’s ways; I have cupped the two lamps of my eyes. O friend, I am mad in love; none knows my ache. There is nothing but tears. What can I offer you?”

Love is the door to living, to knowing. Love is a unique path to knowing. One path is scripture-knowledge, word-knowledge—that is a fraud of knowing. It only creates the appearance that you have known; nothing comes to knowing through it. Read the Vedas, read the Koran, read the Bible—you will memorize words, you will begin to repeat those words. They are beautiful, lovely words. Repeating them you will even feel good; your heart will feel tickled. But you came empty and you will go empty. Parrots repeating “Ram-Ram, Ram-Ram,” muttering mantras, turning rosaries—thus you will die. By intellect one does not know; one knows by the heart. By logic one does not know; one knows by love. Love is the way of knowing. But it is a very mad way, a very crazy way. That is why only a few gather the courage. Only a few dare. Who wishes to…

Prem means love, amaro means deathless, eternal, non-ending. Love that begins and ends is just a name... for something else, not for love. Love that begins and never ends is the true love. It knows no end: it goes on becoming deeper and deeper. It is moving into an unfathomable sea; it is going into the immeasurable. That's why Jesus says, "God is love," because "love" is the only word that can indicate something about God -- his unfathomable, immeasurable quality. What we ordinarily know as love is something else -- maybe lust, maybe the desire to possess, maybe an ego trip or maybe just a biological urge: nature wants to reproduce through you, nature is using you as a vehicle. But it is not love. And I am not saying that it is something wrong.

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…