< Previous | Contents | Next >
ONLY LOVE REMAINS
Only after you have moved in deep love and the ego has really been dropped—and there is something very valuable which can be gained only if you drop the ego, and that price has to be paid—when you have really loved deeply, then a new kind of integration will arise in you.
Love does two things: first it takes the ego away, then it gives you the center.
Love is a great alchemy.
There are three kinds of love. I call them love one, love two, love three. The first love is object-oriented; there is an object of love. You see a beautiful woman, really graceful, with a proportionate body. You are thrilled. You think you are falling in love. Love has arisen in you because the woman is beautiful, because the woman is nice, because the woman is good. Something from the object has stirred love in you. You are not really the master of it; the love is coming from the outside. You may be a very unloving person, you may not have the quality, you may not have that benediction, but because the woman is beautiful you think love is arising in you. It is object-oriented.
This is the ordinary love, this is what is known as eros. It is lust. How to possess this beautiful object? How to exploit this beautiful object? How to make it your own? But remember, if the woman is beautiful she is not only beautiful for you, she is beautiful for many. So there will be many people falling in love with her. And there is going to be great jealousy, competition, and all kinds of uglinesses that come into your love, into your so-called love.
The story is that Mulla Nasruddin married a very ugly woman, the ugliest possible. Naturally the friends were puzzled and they asked Mulla, “You have money, you have prestige, you could have got any beautiful woman that you wanted, why have you chosen this ugly woman?”
He said, “There is a reason for it. I will never suffer from jealousy. This woman will always be faithful to me. I cannot believe anybody falling in love with her. In fact, even I am not in love with her. It is impossible. So I know nobody can love her.”
With orthodox Mohammedans it is a tradition that a wife has to remain behind a purdah, behind a veil; she cannot show her face to everybody. And the new wife has to ask the husband, “To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show my face?”
So when this woman asked Nasruddin, “To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show it,” he said, “You can show it to everybody except me!”
If you are falling in love with a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, you are getting into trouble. There is going to be jealousy, there is going to be murder, there is going to be something. You are in trouble. And from the very beginning you will start trying to possess the person so that there is no possibility of anything going wrong, or beyond your control. You will start destroying the woman or the man. You will stop giving freedom. You will encroach on the person from all sides and try to close all the doors.
Now, the woman was beautiful because she was free. Freedom is such an ingredient in beauty that when you see a bird on the wing in the sky, it is one kind of bird, but if you see the same bird in a cage it is no longer the same. The bird on the wing in the sky has a beauty of its own. It is alive. It is free. The whole sky is his. The same bird in a cage is ugly. The freedom is gone, the sky is gone. Those wings are just meaningless now, a kind of burden. They remain from the past and they create misery. Now this is not the same bird.
When you fell in love with the woman, she was free; you fell in love with freedom. When you bring her home you destroy all possibilities of being free, but in that very destruction you are destroying the beauty. Then one day suddenly you find that you don’t love the woman at all, because she is beautiful no more. This happens every time. Then you start searching for another woman and you don’t see what has happened; you don’t look at the mechanism, at how you destroyed the beauty of the woman.
This is the first kind of love, love one. Beware of it. It is not of much value, it is not very significant. And if you are not aware, you will remain trapped in love one.
Love two is: the object is not important, your subjectivity is. You are loving so you bestow your love on somebody. But love is your quality, it is not object- oriented. The subject is overflowing with the quality of love, the very being is loving. Even if you are alone you are loving. Love is a kind of flavor to your being.
When you fall in love, the second kind of love, there is going to be greater joy than the first. And you will know—because this love will know—how to keep the other free. Love means to give all that is beautiful to the beloved. Freedom is the most beautiful, the most cherished goal of human consciousness; how can you take it away? If you love a woman really, or a man, the first present, the first gift, will be the gift of freedom. How can you take it away? You are not the enemy, you are the friend.
This second kind of love will not be against freedom, it will not be possessive. And you will not be worried very much that somebody else also appreciates your woman or your man. In fact, you will be happy that you have a woman whom others also appreciate, that you have chosen a woman whom others also desire. Their desire simply proves that you have chosen a diamond, a valuable being, who has intrinsic value. You will not be jealous. Each time you see someone looking at your woman with loving eyes you will be thrilled again. You will fall in love with your woman again through those eyes.
This second kind of love will be more a friendship than lust, and it will be more enriching to your soul.
And this second kind of love will have one more difference. In the first kind of love, the object-oriented, there will be many lovers surrounding the object, and there will be fear. In the second kind of love there will be no fear and you will be free to bestow your love not only on your beloved, you will be free to bestow your love on others too.
In the first, the object will be one and many will be the lovers. In the second, the subject will be one and it will be flowing in many directions, bestowing its
love in many ways on many people, because the more you love, the more love grows. If you love one person, then naturally your love is not very rich; if you love two, it is doubly rich. If you love many, or if you can love the whole of humanity, or you can love even the animal kingdom, or you can love even trees, the vegetable kingdom—then your love goes on growing. And as your love grows, you grow, you expand. This is real expansion of consciousness. Drugs only give you a false idea of expansion; love is the basic ultimate drug that gives you the real idea of expansion.
And there is a possibility: Albert Schweitzer has talked about “reverence for life,” all that lives is to be loved. Mahavira in India has said the same thing. His philosophy of ahimsa, nonviolence, says to love all that lives. And there is the possibility to take even one step further than Mahavira and Schweitzer. One can have reverence for things, too. That is the ultimate in love. You don’t only love that which lives, you love even that which simply exists. You love the chair, the shoes, the door through which you enter your house, the plates on which your food is served. You love things, too, because they also have a kind of being. When one has come to this point that you love the whole of existence irrespective of what it is—that love becomes unconditional. It is turning into prayerfulness, it is becoming a meditation.
The first love is good in the sense that if you have lived a loveless life it is better than no love. But the second love is far better than the first and will have less anxiety, less anguish, less turmoil, conflict, aggression, violence. The second kind of love will be more of a love than the first kind, it will be more pure. In the first, the lust is too great and it spoils the whole game, but even the second love is not the last. There is love three—when subject and object disappear.
In the first type of love the object is important; in the second the subject is important. In the third there is transcendence. One is neither a subject nor an object, and one is not dividing reality in any way: subject, object, knower, known, lover, loved. All division has disappeared. One is simply love.
Up through the second type of love you are a lover. When you are a lover something will hang around you like a boundary, like a definition. With the third, all definition disappears. There is only love; you are not. This is what Jesus means when he says, “God is love”—love three. If you misunderstand the first, you will never be able to interpret rightly what Jesus’ meaning is. It is not even
the second, it is the third. God is love. One is simply love. It is not that one loves, it is not an act, it is one’s very quality.
It is not that in the morning you are loving and in the afternoon you are not loving—you are love, it is your state. You have arrived home. You have become love. Now there is no division. All duality has disappeared.
The first kind of love is “I-it.” The other is taken as a thing. That’s what Martin Buber calls it, “I-it.” The other is like a thing that you have to possess. “My” wife, “my” husband, “my” child, and in that very possession you kill the spirit of the other.
The second kind of love Martin Buber calls “I-thou.” The other is a person. You have respect for the other. How can you possess somebody you respect? But Martin Buber stops at the second; he has no understanding about the third. He goes up to “I-thou,” and it is a great step from “I-it” to “I-thou.” But it is nothing compared to the step that happens from “I-thou” to no dualism, to oneness, where only love remains.
Even “I-thou” is a bit of a tension-creating phenomenon. You and the beloved are separate, still, and all separation brings misery. Unless one becomes totally one with the beloved, with the loved one, some kind of misery is bound to remain lurking by the side. In the first the misery is very clear, in the second the misery is not so clear; in the first it is very close, in the second it is not so close; it is far away, but it is there. In the third it is no more.
So I would like you to learn more of love. Move from the first to the second and keep it in your consciousness that the third is the goal. With the second kind of love it is a question of being. You love. You love as many people as are available. And you love in different ways: somebody you love as your wife, somebody you love as your friend, somebody you love as your daughter, somebody you love as your sister, somebody as your mother. And it is possible also that you can share one kind of love with many people. So first attain to the second kind of love.
And with the third kind of love, you are simply love. Then you can go on loving, there is no end to it.
< Previous | Contents | Next >