[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]
[Loving, murmured Hetal, an Indian woman, when Osho wanted to know the meaning of her name. Loving he repeated. And from what language does it come? Gujurati, she said shyly.
Gujurati? Mm mm. Then it is good. And he showed her the sheet of paper on which he'd written: Ma Anand Hetal.]
Anand means bliss. Hetal means loving. These are the two qualities which are like two aspects of the same coin. Sannyas has to be a meeting of these two. One has to be loving to others because love basically needs the other; it is a sharing, it is addressed to the other. The other may be a man, a woman, a tree, a star, a rock, but somewhere the other is bound to be present. Love is a relatedness.
Blissfulness is not a relatedness. It needs nobody, one can be blissful alone. In fact it is easier to be blissful alone than to be together.
My sannyasins have to be capable of both. When they are alone they have to be blissful and when they are together they have to be loving. The energy that becomes bliss when you are alone is the same energy that becomes love when you are together.
In the past people divided these two energies. The people who thought that they wanted to be blissful escaped from the world because the world was an opportunity for love. So they went to the Himalayas, to the monasteries; they renounced the world, afraid of love. That was not a very courageous bliss, that was very cowardly.
In the past sannyas was very cowardly. I am making sannyas courageous, life-affirming. My sannyas is not renunciation, it is rejoicing. Because in the past the people who wanted to be blissful and peaceful saw the difficulty -- that if they were with somebody else their peace was disturbed, their bliss was disturbed; they had to compromise with the other, they had to think of the other, they had to consider the others they couldn't be as free as they were when they escaped into solitude.
When you are alone you can be blissful but your bliss will have something very cold in it. It won't be really alive, it won't be breathing, it won't be warm. And a bliss which is cold, ice cold, is not worthwhile. Hence my approach is to experience bliss but not at the cost of love because it is love that keeps your inner being warm. Experience love but not at the cost of bliss either because it is bliss that keeps your love cool. If love is not cool it becomes feverish, it becomes insane; if bliss is not warm it becomes dead. We have tried these two things in the past and we have utterly failed.
My sannyas is a new beginning, beginning from-ABC. I am trying to do the impossible, to do that which has never even been tried. And I am tremendously happy that it is succeeding, that I can see in thousands of peoples' lives both flowers blossoming together in a deep relatedness, in a deep co-existence.
And when love is blissful and bliss is loveful then there is nothing lacking in your life -- you have come home. You can call that home paradise, god, nirvana -- any word will do, but that is the ultimate goal.
[Henk from Holland became Dhyan Apurvo. Meditation is a unique experience, Osho explained to him.]
All other experiences in life are ordinary compared to it because millions of people go through the same experiences; there is nothing special in them. But meditation is the choice of very few intelligent people -- very few; they can be counted on one's fingers. It is the ultimate venture into the unknown, the unexplored, and it really brings unique experiences.
For example, it brings you the experience that not the body, so clearly, so solidly, so categorically, that even if the whole world denies it, it cannot make any difference: you know from your innermost core you are not the body. It brings you the experience that you are not the mind either. And the moment you know you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly a door opens. You have never been born and you are never going to die because only that which is born can die.
The body was born, the mind was born -- they will die -- but you were before your birth and you will be after your death. Once this reality is revealed to you all fears and all miseries disappear. You become part of eternity. Only one thing remains and that is pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is nothing but godliness.
Hence I say meditation is the key to the world of the miraculous, to the world of the unbelievable. And it is a very simple key, it is not very complicated. Once you decide that you want to explore this world you can learn the art very easily. In a single word it is nothing but awareness of your body-mind activities, a watchfulness, keeping a constant watch on what your body is doing, what your mind is doing -- without any judgment, without any evaluation. Slowly slowly the body goes farther and farther away and the mind goes farther and farther away and soon you are left in absolute emptiness.
That emptiness is freedom, ultimate freedom -- and there is nothing more precious than that.
[His name, Kiyota, is a beautiful one, Osho told a Japanese sannyasin. It means emptiness -- which is exactly what meditation means too.]
Meditation is a state of no-mind. Mind is always full, full of what Chinese call ten thousand things -- thoughts, memories, imagination, dreams, desires, frustrations, angers, greeds, jealousies. There is no end to it; the mind is a great multitude, a crowd. And they are all shouting, they are all hankering for attention and they all want to dominate you. So there is great politics in the mind, mind is a very political phenomenon. All desires are fighting with each other because you cannot fulfil all desires; you have to choose.
If you want power you cannot want money; if you want money you may not be able to attain power. If you want fame then you cannot enjoy a relaxed life; if you want to enjoy a relaxed life then forget about fame. Each desire has its antagonistic desire and they are all there, altogether, simultaneously. And then there are memories, hangovers of the past...
Each thing that has remained incomplete in the past goes on hankering to be completed, it goes on goading you "Complete me!" It is something like a natural law that nothing wants to remain incomplete.
Try it. Just say half a statement and don't say the other half and you will be in trouble; the other half will insist "Say me too, let the statement be complete." Do half of anything and the other half will hang around you waiting for an opportunity to jump upon you, to force you to fulfil it.
The past follows you like a ghost and there are many ghosts. And as the past grows bigger every day you are followed by a long line of ghosts. And the future is there and you have great dreams to fulfil. Mind is full of all these things. In fact it is a miracle how such a small mind can contain so many people.
To take a jump out of the mind means to enter emptiness. Mind is a crowd, meditation is absolute solitude. It is pure emptiness, nothingness, as if there is nothing left, only a subtle sense of being. That too is not a thought, just a vague fragrance of being; one simply is. One knows not anything else -- who one is, what one wants to do, from where one comes. Nothing is there; this moment is all, now and here is all. One is tremendously contented in that emptiness, and because there is contentment the emptiness is not negative.
In western languages there is no positive idea of emptiness. They have never reached that peak of meditation. Their meditation was never really meditative, it remained more or less prayer. Prayer is a very childish form of meditation; meditation is a very mature form of prayer. And the ultimate maturity has been achieved in the East.
So in western languages particularly there is no positive word for emptiness. Emptiness moans nothingness, nothingness also means nothingness -- there is no positive sense in it. But in eastern languages -- in Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean -- there is a totally different dimension of emptiness. It is emptiness in the sense that the crowd of the mind is dispersed. But it is not emptiness in a negative sense; it is full of joy, full of peace, full of silence, full of serenity, full of contentment. Empty in one sense, full in another sense. It is a very full emptiness. It is a beautiful name... try to make it a reality!
[Man can be a sprouting seed or a useless weed. But without meditation he remains just a maybe. Osho said to the next sannyasin:]
Much is possible but it has to be made possible. All that is needed to make It possible is available but one has to work consciously on it. It is like you have plenty of land and plenty of seeds and plenty of water and sun, but you never sow the seeds in the field. Flowers won't come and your land will remain desert, Grass will grow, weeds will grow. That is one of the most important things to remember, that all that is useless grows on its own and that which is significant has to be worked out.
To achieve the significant is an uphill task. If you don't do anything weeds will grow; they will fill the whole ground, they will fill your whole being. But then you cannot hope for roses and that was the promise. Everybody comes as a great promise but very few people fulfil the promises. They come empty-handed and they go empty-handed. It is a shame.
But my sannyasins have to go totally fulfilled. They have to actualise the promise that their life contains. They have to become that for which they are meant, they have to fulfil their destiny.
[But make the fulfilling a full-of-fun-thing, he added.]
Meditation is not a serious phenomenon. It is a song, a dance, a celebration. Don't take meditation religiously, take it playfully. To take it religiously is to miss the whole point. It is religion but don't take it religiously. It has to be taken as fun 0.. just like children making sandcastles, with no particular goal in view, just enjoying the very activity itself.
Meditation is not a means to any end, an end unto itself. Love it, enjoy it and don't ask for any results. Results come but don't ask for them, then they come sooner. Tremendous consequences are there, consequences that will transform your whole life, but you need not bother about them.
Meditation should not be done with any motive. In life there must be a few things which you do without any motive -- unless your life is just a marketplace, then everything is a commodity. Meditation is not a commodity.
And if one starts playfully a great song arises in the heart of its own accord and you start feeling a dance arise in you that you have never felt before. For the first time you feel a new heartbeat, a new wonder, a new awe. That wonder, that awe, gives you the first glimpse of god. And the song and the dance and the celebration -- that's what prayer is.
Prayer is the fragrance of meditation. Those who have not known meditation have not known prayer either. What they call prayer is a plastic phenomenon.
[God resides in love-filled eyes, Osho told Emanuele from Italy.]
Except for love, there is no proof for God. Those who have loved tremendously have known what God is all about. Only the lovers -- because the mysteries of life open up only to the lovers, not to the logicians.
Logicians go on running in circles, about and about. The meaning of the word 'about' is around; they think about God, they think about truth, they think about love, they think about life -- that means they go on around and around. They never live, they never love, they never experience reality. God never becomes a reality to them.
It is not surprising that all the logicians of the world sooner or later become convinced that God does not exist. In fact if a logician does not come to this conclusion he is dishonest. That is the natural outcome of logic; logic cannot come to any other conclusion. If it comes to any other conclusion that means the man has been insincere. He has not followed even his logic totally, he has deceived himself.
I respect logicians more than theologians because logicians are at least sincere people. Friedrich Nietzsche was a logician -- he said, "God is dead and man is free." Of course his own statement was such a shock to him that he went mad. But I respect that man; he risked madness but he was sincere.
Of course what he said is wrong -- God is and very alive because life itself is God -- but Nietzsche was sincere and he risked even his sanity for his sincerity. Hence I have tremendous respect for the man, pity and respect both. I feel sorry for the man -- such a sincere soul could not become a Buddha. He had all the potential of becoming a Buddha, of becoming a Christ, but he got entangled in the intricacies of logic and he lost the world of love.
Theologians are very insincere people. Thomas Aquinas is very insincere and dishonest because he tries to prove God through logic, he tries to give logical arguments for God. The very effort shows the man is not honest; he is trying to befool others and is trying to befool himself too.
Logic can come to only one conclusion, that there is no God. And love can come to only one conclusion, that there is nothing but God. Now it is your choice: you can choose logic and a life without God... And remember, a life without God means a life without poetry, without music, without meaning, without bliss. A life without God is not really life; one only vegetates.
But the choice is everybody's. You can choose love, then God is with you; as you go deeper into love, you go deeper into God. Jesus says God is love. I would like to improve upon Jesus because two thousand years have passed and his statement can be improved. I don't say God is love, I say love is God.
When you make God the first thing the question arises: how to believe? If you say God is love then the first thing is to believe in God, and all beliefs are superstitious. No belief is possible for a real seeker of truth.
The man who wants to know cannot believe, he cannot afford to believe; he has to remain open. He cannot believe, he cannot disbelieve; he can simply say "I don't know. I will search, I will put all my energies into the search, I will go as far as it is humanly possible. Unless I know I cannot say whether God is or is not."
Hence I say it is better to change the statement now, the time has come: Love is God. Love need not be believed in -- you can experience it. It is humanly possible. You not go to any church, you need not believe in any theology, you need not go into great philosophical contemplation -- love is a natural phenomenon. But love becomes the jumping board into the unknown, into the unfathomable, into God.
[Love is natural, yet so few of us have got the hang of it, Osho told the last sannyasin.]
It is very difficult to find a man or a woman who is not desirous of love, but at the same time it is also difficult to find a person who has really loved. It is a very ironical situation: everybody wants to love, everybody wants to be loved, but love is a rare flower. It happens very rarely for the simple reason that love needs great courage. So people want love, they want to love and be loved but they don't have the essential courage to go into it.
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.
It is true, he is interested in love, but one is there: all those things are substitutes; he has not been able to experience it. He needs false substitutes. He goes to a movie, sees somebody else in the act of love, becomes in a vicarious way a participant in it, forgets that he is just a spectator, becomes part of the story and enjoys it, he becomes identified with certain characters. Reading a novel he becomes part of the novel; reciting beautiful poetry or song he thinks as if he is talking about his own experience. These are poor substitutes for the real experience.
If man really goes into love all this nonsense will disappear from the earth. Always remember, only hungry people think about food, naked people think about clothes, people who don't have any roofs think about houses, naturally. We only think about things which we don't have, we don't think about things we have.
If we look at the whole past love seems to be the one thing we have thought more about than anything else. That means something is missing. And the reason is that nobody has been able to figure out clearly that love needs courage. It is not just your desires and dreams that can make you a lover, it needs guts to be a lover. And why does it need guts? -- because love demands one of the greatest things in life and that is surrender of the ego.
Unless you surrender the ego love is not possible. And that is not only true about love, that is true about god too, that is true about sannyas too, about disciplehood too. In fact all that is great in life happens only when you are courageous enough to put the ego aside, when you can stand in your total nakedness, hiding nothing, being nothing being nobody.
Then miracles start happening. Then love comes in, rushes in, fills you, and starts overflowing from you. And ultimately love itself becomes your experience of god, your experience of truth. Love contains the greatest truth there is.
Osho's Commentary
[Loving, murmured Hetal, an Indian woman, when Osho wanted to know the meaning of her name.
Loving he repeated. And from what language does it come?
Gujurati, she said shyly.
Gujurati? Mm mm. Then it is good. And he showed her the sheet of paper on which he'd written: Ma Anand Hetal.]
Anand means bliss. Hetal means loving. These are the two qualities which are like two aspects of the same coin. Sannyas has to be a meeting of these two. One has to be loving to others because love basically needs the other; it is a sharing, it is addressed to the other. The other may be a man, a woman, a tree, a star, a rock, but somewhere the other is bound to be present. Love is a relatedness.
Blissfulness is not a relatedness. It needs nobody, one can be blissful alone. In fact it is easier to be blissful alone than to be together.
My sannyasins have to be capable of both. When they are alone they have to be blissful and when they are together they have to be loving. The energy that becomes bliss when you are alone is the same energy that becomes love when you are together.
In the past people divided these two energies. The people who thought that they wanted to be blissful escaped from the world because the world was an opportunity for love. So they went to the Himalayas, to the monasteries; they renounced the world, afraid of love. That was not a very courageous bliss, that was very cowardly.
In the past sannyas was very cowardly. I am making sannyas courageous, life-affirming. My sannyas is not renunciation, it is rejoicing. Because in the past the people who wanted to be blissful and peaceful saw the difficulty -- that if they were with somebody else their peace was disturbed, their bliss was disturbed; they had to compromise with the other, they had to think of the other, they had to consider the others they couldn't be as free as they were when they escaped into solitude.
When you are alone you can be blissful but your bliss will have something very cold in it. It won't be really alive, it won't be breathing, it won't be warm. And a bliss which is cold, ice cold, is not worthwhile. Hence my approach is to experience bliss but not at the cost of love because it is love that keeps your inner being warm. Experience love but not at the cost of bliss either because it is bliss that keeps your love cool. If love is not cool it becomes feverish, it becomes insane; if bliss is not warm it becomes dead. We have tried these two things in the past and we have utterly failed.
My sannyas is a new beginning, beginning from-ABC. I am trying to do the impossible, to do that which has never even been tried. And I am tremendously happy that it is succeeding, that I can see in thousands of peoples' lives both flowers blossoming together in a deep relatedness, in a deep co-existence.
And when love is blissful and bliss is loveful then there is nothing lacking in your life -- you have come home. You can call that home paradise, god, nirvana -- any word will do, but that is the ultimate goal.
[Henk from Holland became Dhyan Apurvo. Meditation is a unique experience, Osho explained to him.]
All other experiences in life are ordinary compared to it because millions of people go through the same experiences; there is nothing special in them. But meditation is the choice of very few intelligent people -- very few; they can be counted on one's fingers. It is the ultimate venture into the unknown, the unexplored, and it really brings unique experiences.
For example, it brings you the experience that not the body, so clearly, so solidly, so categorically, that even if the whole world denies it, it cannot make any difference: you know from your innermost core you are not the body. It brings you the experience that you are not the mind either. And the moment you know you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly a door opens. You have never been born and you are never going to die because only that which is born can die.
The body was born, the mind was born -- they will die -- but you were before your birth and you will be after your death. Once this reality is revealed to you all fears and all miseries disappear. You become part of eternity. Only one thing remains and that is pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is nothing but godliness.
Hence I say meditation is the key to the world of the miraculous, to the world of the unbelievable. And it is a very simple key, it is not very complicated. Once you decide that you want to explore this world you can learn the art very easily. In a single word it is nothing but awareness of your body-mind activities, a watchfulness, keeping a constant watch on what your body is doing, what your mind is doing -- without any judgment, without any evaluation. Slowly slowly the body goes farther and farther away and the mind goes farther and farther away and soon you are left in absolute emptiness.
That emptiness is freedom, ultimate freedom -- and there is nothing more precious than that.
[His name, Kiyota, is a beautiful one, Osho told a Japanese sannyasin. It means emptiness -- which is exactly what meditation means too.]
Meditation is a state of no-mind. Mind is always full, full of what Chinese call ten thousand things -- thoughts, memories, imagination, dreams, desires, frustrations, angers, greeds, jealousies. There is no end to it; the mind is a great multitude, a crowd. And they are all shouting, they are all hankering for attention and they all want to dominate you. So there is great politics in the mind, mind is a very political phenomenon. All desires are fighting with each other because you cannot fulfil all desires; you have to choose.
If you want power you cannot want money; if you want money you may not be able to attain power. If you want fame then you cannot enjoy a relaxed life; if you want to enjoy a relaxed life then forget about fame. Each desire has its antagonistic desire and they are all there, altogether, simultaneously. And then there are memories, hangovers of the past...
Each thing that has remained incomplete in the past goes on hankering to be completed, it goes on goading you "Complete me!" It is something like a natural law that nothing wants to remain incomplete.
Try it. Just say half a statement and don't say the other half and you will be in trouble; the other half will insist "Say me too, let the statement be complete." Do half of anything and the other half will hang around you waiting for an opportunity to jump upon you, to force you to fulfil it.
The past follows you like a ghost and there are many ghosts. And as the past grows bigger every day you are followed by a long line of ghosts. And the future is there and you have great dreams to fulfil. Mind is full of all these things. In fact it is a miracle how such a small mind can contain so many people.
To take a jump out of the mind means to enter emptiness. Mind is a crowd, meditation is absolute solitude. It is pure emptiness, nothingness, as if there is nothing left, only a subtle sense of being. That too is not a thought, just a vague fragrance of being; one simply is. One knows not anything else -- who one is, what one wants to do, from where one comes. Nothing is there; this moment is all, now and here is all. One is tremendously contented in that emptiness, and because there is contentment the emptiness is not negative.
In western languages there is no positive idea of emptiness. They have never reached that peak of meditation. Their meditation was never really meditative, it remained more or less prayer. Prayer is a very childish form of meditation; meditation is a very mature form of prayer. And the ultimate maturity has been achieved in the East.
So in western languages particularly there is no positive word for emptiness. Emptiness moans nothingness, nothingness also means nothingness -- there is no positive sense in it. But in eastern languages -- in Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean -- there is a totally different dimension of emptiness. It is emptiness in the sense that the crowd of the mind is dispersed. But it is not emptiness in a negative sense; it is full of joy, full of peace, full of silence, full of serenity, full of contentment. Empty in one sense, full in another sense. It is a very full emptiness.
It is a beautiful name... try to make it a reality!
[Man can be a sprouting seed or a useless weed. But without meditation he remains just a maybe. Osho said to the next sannyasin:]
Much is possible but it has to be made possible. All that is needed to make It possible is available but one has to work consciously on it. It is like you have plenty of land and plenty of seeds and plenty of water and sun, but you never sow the seeds in the field. Flowers won't come and your land will remain desert, Grass will grow, weeds will grow. That is one of the most important things to remember, that all that is useless grows on its own and that which is significant has to be worked out.
To achieve the significant is an uphill task. If you don't do anything weeds will grow; they will fill the whole ground, they will fill your whole being. But then you cannot hope for roses and that was the promise. Everybody comes as a great promise but very few people fulfil the promises. They come empty-handed and they go empty-handed. It is a shame.
But my sannyasins have to go totally fulfilled. They have to actualise the promise that their life contains. They have to become that for which they are meant, they have to fulfil their destiny.
[But make the fulfilling a full-of-fun-thing, he added.]
Meditation is not a serious phenomenon. It is a song, a dance, a celebration. Don't take meditation religiously, take it playfully. To take it religiously is to miss the whole point. It is religion but don't take it religiously. It has to be taken as fun 0.. just like children making sandcastles, with no particular goal in view, just enjoying the very activity itself.
Meditation is not a means to any end, an end unto itself. Love it, enjoy it and don't ask for any results. Results come but don't ask for them, then they come sooner. Tremendous consequences are there, consequences that will transform your whole life, but you need not bother about them.
Meditation should not be done with any motive. In life there must be a few things which you do without any motive -- unless your life is just a marketplace, then everything is a commodity. Meditation is not a commodity.
And if one starts playfully a great song arises in the heart of its own accord and you start feeling a dance arise in you that you have never felt before. For the first time you feel a new heartbeat, a new wonder, a new awe. That wonder, that awe, gives you the first glimpse of god. And the song and the dance and the celebration -- that's what prayer is.
Prayer is the fragrance of meditation. Those who have not known meditation have not known prayer either. What they call prayer is a plastic phenomenon.
[God resides in love-filled eyes, Osho told Emanuele from Italy.]
Except for love, there is no proof for God. Those who have loved tremendously have known what God is all about. Only the lovers -- because the mysteries of life open up only to the lovers, not to the logicians.
Logicians go on running in circles, about and about. The meaning of the word 'about' is around; they think about God, they think about truth, they think about love, they think about life -- that means they go on around and around. They never live, they never love, they never experience reality. God never becomes a reality to them.
It is not surprising that all the logicians of the world sooner or later become convinced that God does not exist. In fact if a logician does not come to this conclusion he is dishonest. That is the natural outcome of logic; logic cannot come to any other conclusion. If it comes to any other conclusion that means the man has been insincere. He has not followed even his logic totally, he has deceived himself.
I respect logicians more than theologians because logicians are at least sincere people. Friedrich Nietzsche was a logician -- he said, "God is dead and man is free." Of course his own statement was such a shock to him that he went mad. But I respect that man; he risked madness but he was sincere.
Of course what he said is wrong -- God is and very alive because life itself is God -- but Nietzsche was sincere and he risked even his sanity for his sincerity. Hence I have tremendous respect for the man, pity and respect both. I feel sorry for the man -- such a sincere soul could not become a Buddha. He had all the potential of becoming a Buddha, of becoming a Christ, but he got entangled in the intricacies of logic and he lost the world of love.
Theologians are very insincere people. Thomas Aquinas is very insincere and dishonest because he tries to prove God through logic, he tries to give logical arguments for God. The very effort shows the man is not honest; he is trying to befool others and is trying to befool himself too.
Logic can come to only one conclusion, that there is no God. And love can come to only one conclusion, that there is nothing but God. Now it is your choice: you can choose logic and a life without God... And remember, a life without God means a life without poetry, without music, without meaning, without bliss. A life without God is not really life; one only vegetates.
But the choice is everybody's. You can choose love, then God is with you; as you go deeper into love, you go deeper into God. Jesus says God is love. I would like to improve upon Jesus because two thousand years have passed and his statement can be improved. I don't say God is love, I say love is God.
When you make God the first thing the question arises: how to believe? If you say God is love then the first thing is to believe in God, and all beliefs are superstitious. No belief is possible for a real seeker of truth.
The man who wants to know cannot believe, he cannot afford to believe; he has to remain open. He cannot believe, he cannot disbelieve; he can simply say "I don't know. I will search, I will put all my energies into the search, I will go as far as it is humanly possible. Unless I know I cannot say whether God is or is not."
Hence I say it is better to change the statement now, the time has come: Love is God. Love need not be believed in -- you can experience it. It is humanly possible. You not go to any church, you need not believe in any theology, you need not go into great philosophical contemplation -- love is a natural phenomenon. But love becomes the jumping board into the unknown, into the unfathomable, into God.
[Love is natural, yet so few of us have got the hang of it, Osho told the last sannyasin.]
It is very difficult to find a man or a woman who is not desirous of love, but at the same time it is also difficult to find a person who has really loved. It is a very ironical situation: everybody wants to love, everybody wants to be loved, but love is a rare flower. It happens very rarely for the simple reason that love needs great courage. So people want love, they want to love and be loved but they don't have the essential courage to go into it.
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.
It is true, he is interested in love, but one is there: all those things are substitutes; he has not been able to experience it. He needs false substitutes. He goes to a movie, sees somebody else in the act of love, becomes in a vicarious way a participant in it, forgets that he is just a spectator, becomes part of the story and enjoys it, he becomes identified with certain characters. Reading a novel he becomes part of the novel; reciting beautiful poetry or song he thinks as if he is talking about his own experience. These are poor substitutes for the real experience.
If man really goes into love all this nonsense will disappear from the earth. Always remember, only hungry people think about food, naked people think about clothes, people who don't have any roofs think about houses, naturally. We only think about things which we don't have, we don't think about things we have.
If we look at the whole past love seems to be the one thing we have thought more about than anything else. That means something is missing. And the reason is that nobody has been able to figure out clearly that love needs courage. It is not just your desires and dreams that can make you a lover, it needs guts to be a lover. And why does it need guts? -- because love demands one of the greatest things in life and that is surrender of the ego.
Unless you surrender the ego love is not possible. And that is not only true about love, that is true about god too, that is true about sannyas too, about disciplehood too. In fact all that is great in life happens only when you are courageous enough to put the ego aside, when you can stand in your total nakedness, hiding nothing, being nothing being nobody.
Then miracles start happening. Then love comes in, rushes in, fills you, and starts overflowing from you. And ultimately love itself becomes your experience of god, your experience of truth. Love contains the greatest truth there is.