Love sets you free

Love is not something that makes you fall. True love sets you free and helps you rise above all things

happy coupleLove. We use this little word to cover a whole range of emotions and feelings that are as complex as a computer manual. We love anything that gives us a pleasant tickle—from a pizza to a person that turns us on, and from watching movies to shopping. But isn’t there a difference of degrees and qualities in the way we love things and people? Is love just an emotional attachment with warm mushy feelings? Or is it an inexplicable energy that is the core and the juice of life?

Flying in love

Even though it is the favourite subject of poets, painters, filmmakers and writers, it is something more talked about and portrayed than actually lived. The phenomenon of love is so vast and complex that it cannot be merely a feeling; it is a seed that has the potential to grow into a massive tree. It may begin with romantic feelings but it grows to something much bigger than that. For love to attain this height, it has to transcend emotions and dark feelings of jealousy, possessiveness, fear and anger.

People are wary of love because it brings torture, pain and misery in its wake. But they fail to understand that it’s no fault of love. People often use the phrase falling in love to describe their experience. To me, it is quite derogatory to use this phrase for this wonderful experience. If someone is struck by love, why is it called ‘falling’?

Intellectuals must have coined the phrase, because to the intellect, loving must appear like falling from the head. For a simple person, the experience of loving is that of flying—flying in love.

Love sutras

Osho has changed the whole game of love and has given it a new identity, given it roots and wings. He says that love and meditation should go hand-in-hand. Love and meditate, meditate and love. Slowly you will see a new harmony arising in you. Only that harmony will make you contented.

Here are some sutras from the treasure trove of Osho’s wisdom to remember while you become lost in love:

  • Relationship is a great mirror. The person you love mirrors that part of your being, which you don’t want to see. Or reflect something beautiful about you that you are unaware of. Let yourself be mirrored in love. If you find that something is missing, meditate more—but never escape from love. Let yourself be mirrored in love again, and again; it will be the only criterion that shows you if you are growing. If you are really growing in love, you will soon see that love has remained and jealousy has disappeared; love has remained and possessiveness has disappeared; love has remained and hatred has disappeared. A great purity arises, a great innocence. A fragrance is released into your soul. Let love and meditation be two wings. Let them help each other.
  • Unfortunately, modern education and culture nurtures the ego. What we call a developed personality is actually a developed ego. A loving person is simple, unassuming, non-intellectual. The person is intelligent but that intelligence does not make him or her hard-core intellectual. Love is the way of the heart. Its ways are indirect, soft and have a healing touch. Develop the heart more, be in a soft melting space as much as possible.
  • Sitting near a tree, just feel the tree and feel that you have become one with it, that there is a flow within you, a communication, a dialogue, a melting. Sitting near a flowing river just feel the flow, feel that you and the river have become one. Lying under the sky, just feel that you and the sky have become one. In the beginning, it will be just imagination but by and by, you will feel that you are touching reality through imagination. Then try it with persons. This may be difficult in the beginning because there is a fear of intimacy, but as you open your petals, you will allow the other to come near you.
  • In love, you connect with the other; in meditation, you connect with yourself. Both are enriching. Unless love is based in deep meditation, it will be superficial. It will never be intimate, it will not have any profundity. It will not bring bliss to you; it will bring only agonies, it will never bring ecstasy. The love has to be based on meditation. And a meditation that is against love, will be a dry desert, a wasteland. No flower will ever bloom there.
  • Love gives freedom. And when you give freedom, you are free, that’s what detachment is. If you enforce bondage on the other, you will be in imprisonment on your own accord. If you bind the other, the other will bind you; if you define the other, the other will define you; if you are trying to possess the other, the other will possess you. That’s how couples go on fighting for domination for their whole life. It is a continuous nagging and fighting. And the man thinks that in some ways he controls the woman and the woman thinks that in some ways she controls the man. Control is not love.
  • Never treat any person as a means. Treat everybody as an end in himself, in herself. Unless love is freedom from the other, from the emotional entanglement it cannot bring joy and consciousness. Love that always presupposes the other is not true love according to the enlightened consciousness.

Love as a relationship—be it with people or things—is a sinking ship. But love as a fragrance of one’s flowering, love as a radiance of the inner glow is free of misery because it has no opposite. This kind of love is born out of meditation, awareness and by transcending feelings. This is the emptiness of the heart, which is serene, silent, and utterly blissful.

Romantic love can be the beginning, a seed which ultimately grows into awakening of consciousness. This kind of love is cool, not too hot to handle.

Amrit Sadhana
Amrit Sadhana, a long time Osho meditator, is editor Osho Times International. A member of the management team, she also writes for various magazines propagating the Osho vision, and conducts workshops and self-development courses. She lives in the Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune.

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