Why is the essential need for love so hard to fulfill for most people?

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…

Osho, you have titled this series of talks “Sahaj Yoga.” Do “sahaj” and “yoga” not seem mutually opposed?

Anand Maitreya! They don’t just seem opposed, they are opposed. But no ultimate truth of life can manifest without contradiction. Life is made of opposites—darkness and light, day and night, woman and man, negative electricity and positive electricity, birth and death. The very structure of life is woven of opposites. Hence the opposites are not only opposed; they are complementary to each other. If you have labored hard all day, you will be able to sleep deeply. Labor and rest are opposites, yet only the one who has worked can rest deeply—and the one who has not worked cannot. So the opposites are not only opposed, they complete each other. And only the one who has rested deeply at night can rise in the morning and engage in work again. One who has not rested through the night will not be able to work in the morning. Look closely at…

[A sannyasin, returned from the West, says she is not ready to live in the West. She has a strong desire to be loved, feels a desperation that she hasn't been loved. Osho says that is one of the basic problems that touches everyone.... ] .... because we live in a society which is absolutely loveless, so everybody is hungry for love, desperately hungry, dying for it, starving. And the problem is that unless you love people they cannot love you -- and you cannot love because you have not been loved. This is the vicious circle. To be able to love one needs to be loved, otherwise a person never becomes able to love. They have been experimenting with monkeys.... If the mother hugs the monkey, the monkey becomes capable of hugging other females in later life.

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…

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.