Why is love essential for spiritual growth?

Why is love so essential for spiritual growth?

Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity -- just like man/woman, life/death, darkness/light, summer/winter, outer/ inner, yin/yang, the body and the soul, the creation and the creator. Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity, the last polarity, at which transcendence happens. Love needs two. It is a relationship, it is outgoing, it is energy moving outwards. There is an object: the beloved. The object becomes more important than yourself. Your joy is in the object. If your beloved is happy, you are happy; you become part of the object. There is a kind of dependence, and the other is needed. Without the other you will feel lonely. Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing. Love is the movement of the light out…

Love is the most precious gift of god, because love contains the whole spectrum of life -- from the lowest to the highest, from sex to prayer, from body to soul, from earth to heaven. Love is the ladder. It is resting on the earth in the lowest mud, but the other end of it is resting in god, in the very heart of god. If one goes on following love, purifying it, maturing it, integrating it, then no other religion is needed. Love is enough unto itself: it will take you to the farthest shore. The only thing to be remembered is that love should not become entangled anywhere. You should not fall in love with a rung of the ladder. Be in love with the ladder but don't fall in love with any rung, otherwise you will start clinging. And the moment you cling, growth stops.

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and clearned up. It is for reference purposes only.] Love is a song, because basically it is an uprising in the heart, it is an explosion of feeling, it is sensitivity to beauty. And to be sensitive to beauty is to be available to joy. That's the only window through which joy comes in. Joy cannot enter into a being without love. Many have tried -- millions in fact, down the ages. All the monasteries have been full of such people. They have tried to be joyful without love. It was a great experiment but it failed. It was bound to fail: their joy was phony, a pretension, their smile remained just a painted smile, there was no soul in it because the window was closed.

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.

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.