Chapter title: Love

‌Chapter title: Love‌

9 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8002095 ShortTitle: WITHME09 Audio:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

You have to become more conscious so that you can discover your lovingness, so that you can discover the lovingness of the whole existence and once you know, you start sharing. Then it is not a relationship, not that you love somebody, but a state: you love. You are love, rather.

In seeking love, you will find not only love, you will find your true being too.

I am talking about a love that is beyond your so-called love and I am talking about a bliss that is beyond every possible idea of bliss that you can have. I am talking about a god which is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, which is really incomprehensible. I am talking about mysteries which cannot be 1/08/07

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expressed adequately in any words, which are intrinsically inexpressible. Love is

one of those mysteries.

We know a love that is not love; it is something else. It is biology, physiology, chemistry, but not love, It is instinctive, and anything instinctive is something unconscious. Anything instinctive makes you a slave.

And the whole effort of sannyas is to make everything conscious.

When your love becomes conscious the other side of it, the hatred side, disappears. No jealousy is found in it, no possessiveness, no domination. It is no more an ego trip. When love becomes part of your awareness it is a totally different phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the ordinary love. The ordinary love is an effort to somehow fulfil your emptiness, to somehow not be lonely, to remain occupied with the other; it is a biological occupation with the other. And the other is also doing the same with you: both of you are using the other so that you are not lonely.

When love becomes conscious it is not an effort to avoid loneliness; on the contrary it flows out of your aloneness. You are perfectly joyous being alone, you are so joyous that you want to share it. Conscious love is a sharing: you give because it is coming to you in such abundance that you becomes burdened like a raincloud -- it has to shower somewhere.

The ordinary love comes out of your emptiness, not out of your fullness. You are afraid to face your loneliness. Whenever your are left alone you don't know what to do with yourself. You are so afraid of yourself, you hate your company so much that you are ready to be with anybody, even with a prostitute.

And people call this love. They are using such a beautiful name, such a beautiful word to hide very ugly things.

When I use the word "love" I mean conscious love. Consciousness is always implied: whether I say bliss, joy, celebration, love, peace, consciousness is always there. Without it nothing is possible.

You have to become more conscious so that you can discover your lovingness, so that you can discover the lovingness of the whole existence. And once you know, you start sharing. But then you simply share unconditionally; you don't ask for anything in return. You are grateful just to share, you are thankful just to share. It is sharing for sharing's sake. You are not using the other.

Then love has a height, a Himalayan height; then you are moving on virgin heights. The purity of it is immense, overwhelming, and the ecstasy of it is inexhaustible. Then it is not a relationship -- not that you love somebody -- but a state. You love, you are love, rather.

Love has three dimensions. One is animal love -- absolutely unconscious, instinctive, biological. The second is human love -- a little higher than the biological, a little more psychological, a little higher than instinct. It has something of intelligence in it, a little more refined than the crude biological, the instinctive.

But still it is not the highest. There is still one more dimension -- that is divine love -- which is spiritual.

Man has three layers. first is his physiology, second is his psychology, third is his spirit, his soul, his real being.

One can seek bodily pleasures. That's what millions of people go on doing. Nothing is wrong in it, but it is a little stupid. Not a sin, but it is as if you have been given a big palace to live in and you go on living on the porch. You never enter into the palace, so you have completely forgotten about it. You have made the porch your whole life. And the palace is waiting for you, and it is yours, you just have to explore a little bit deeper.

Very few people enter into human love. Those are the people who are sensitive, alert, intelligent, who have some sense of poetry in life, some aesthetic values, for whom sex in itself is not of much value unless it is rooted in love, for whom to be under the influence of chemistry and hormones looks like slavery. They will go into a sexual relationship but only when there is a higher intimacy.

Sex can be shared but not as an end unto itself. It can only be a small part of the whole phenomenon of love. Then it has also a beauty, if it is part of a love energy.

And only once in a while ever fewer -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao-Tzu -- reach to the third. The third is not a relationship at all. Divine love is a state, not a relationship.

In the first you are not concerned with the individual. You can see it in animals. There is no concern for the individual, it is a pure sexual urge. Any male, any

female will meet and then they will separate forever.

They will not say even a thank-you. No gratefulness, no intimacy arises. That's the case with many human beings also, and if that is the case those human beings are not yet human; they are still living an animal life.

Their bodies are human but they don't have human souls yet. It is not personal.

The animal love is impersonal, human love is personal. You love a certain person and then intimacy grows. And then for you there is nobody else. Your whole world revolves around that person. You cannot 1/08/07

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conceive of yourself making love to somebody else. Yes, you can be friendly, but love becomes a very intimate phenomenon. It will be sacrilegious to you, profane, ugly, to move into sex with each and everybody. It will be falling back to the animal level.

The human level is personal and the divine love is impersonal, on a higher plane. Animals are impersonal because they are unconscious and Buddhas are impersonal because they are absolutely conscious. They don't love anybody in particular, they simply love. The animal love is not love at all but only sex. And the love of a Buddha is not sex at all, it is only love.

Man is just between the two: half animal, half divine. His love is both something of the beyond and something of the below. Hence human love is a tense phenomenon, it is a sort of anxiety. One is pulled apart. The lower and the higher are both trying to catch hold of us; hence human love is painful. But one has to grow through it; that pain is a necessary part of maturity. But one should remember that one has to reach beyond it.

When one is in the state of divine love one is simply love. There is no question of preference, there is no question of loving this person or that. Whosoever comes to a Buddha is filled with his love. His love is constantly showering. Even when he is sitting alone he vibrates love. That's the ultimate, that is the goal of

sannyas.

And only the ultimate can fulfil. Only the ultimate can bring you absolute contentment. Only the ultimate can be a blessing and a benediction.

Man's basic search is for love. He wants to love and he wants to be loved and he wants to be loved with no motive, with no ulterior motive. He wants to be loved unconditionally, and he can feel fulfilled only when that happens. But it does not happen for the simple reason that he wants to be loved unconditionally but he never loves anybody unconditionally.

You don't create the right space, everything goes wrong, from your side something is missing and the same is the case with the other person, from his or her side something is essentially missing. All lovers are expecting unconditional love from the other and nobody is ready to give it. So how can it happen? One has to begin with oneself, one has to take the initiative.

So in being as sannyasin this is going to be your work upon yourself, love unconditionally, not only people but trees, animals, clouds. Go on spreading your love, make it huge, enormous. Let it spread to the whole.

The day that you can love the whole without in any way asking for anything in return you will have known what prayer is and you will have known what worship is and you will have known the most fundamental secret of life, because you will be showered with a thousand and one blessings. The whole universe will start pouring its love energy over you. And that is the moment we have been seeking and searching for for lives together, but missing for the simple reason that we never create the right space for it to happen. Sannyas has to become the right space for love to happen.

All these ultimate experiences of surrender, of worship, of devotion, of consecration, are possible only if the heart is full of love. They are all flowers of love. without love there is no possibility of knowing God.

Without love there is no bridge. Logic is a barrier, love is a bridge -- and we live in logic.

The stupidity of our minds is such that we have even made God an object of logic. We have created a whole philosophy around the idea, we have created theology. Theology means logic about God. That is the most absurd thing

possible, the most absurd thing conceivable. There can be no logic about God, only love.

Logic is something outgoing. It is needed in the world, it is a perfect instrument for scientific investigation, for objective observation. but it is not helpful in going in, it prevents it.

And God is within you. God is not an object, God is your very subjectivity, your very interiority.

One has to drop logic and one has to learn the ways of love more and more. The question is not what you love, that is not so important. Love people, love animals, love trees, love nature, poetry, music. That is not significant. What is significant is that you love... because by loving more and more you become it. The day you become love, when it becomes so natural, like breathing, that day is of great rejoicing, because God is experienced then and only then.

Our century is one of the most strange in the whole history of humanity. People have never felt such outsiders as they are feeling now. Everybody feels like an stranger, as if they are not needed, as if they are only accidental. This feeling has arisen because we have lost contact with the roots of life. We are the most 1/08/07

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uprooted people in the whole of history; hence so many people go mad, so many people commit suicide.

And those who don't go mad and don't commit suicide are not in a better situation either. Their life is a long long hell, they drag just somehow. They also contemplate committing suicide but they cannot gather courage. They are also many times just on the brink of going crazy but somehow they go on holding themselves together. It is such a strain that although they remain normal deep down they go on repressing many many abnormal things, many perversions, obsessions.

So everybody who looks normal on the surface is just normal on the surface; deep down he is as abnormal as any insane person. Any every person is a potential insane person. He carries the potentiality, he can go crazy any moment.

This situation can be changed by only one thing; if we again start learning how to connect ourselves with existence. The thing that is disconnecting us is the ego. We have started to look at ourselves as if we are islands -- and no man is an island. We are all part of a vast continent. And we are not accidental, we are needed. Nobody can replace you. You are absolutely essential, intrinsically essential to existence.

Once this is felt a great grounding happens. As you go deeper into meditation you become aware that the existence loves you, that it is showering many many blessings every moment. Then you don't take them for granted, you start feeling grateful. And slowly slowly you feel that there is great love flowing towards you from every direction. In that moment, when for the first time you feel love flowing from all directions, pouring into your being, the soul is born. One really becomes a soul, otherwise the soul is just an idea. The soul is born only when feel that god loves you. And by god I simply mean the whole. God is not a person but another name for the whole, a very loving name.

My effort here is to help you to feel that existence is not indifferent towards you. It is deeply concerned about you, it cares for you, it loves you. and when one feels loved and cared for, one is capable of loving and caring. when existence pours its love into you, you start sharing your love with others. You become so burdened with love that you have to share. You cannot contain it, it is uncontainable. It starts spreading, radiating.

That's what ecstasy is. Ecstasy is the flowering of meditation. Meditation is the beginning, the seed; ecstasy is the flower. And by meditation I mean not looking through the mind -- it is the mind that cuts you away from the world, but looking through the heart. It is the heart that joins you with the world, it is the heart that has the courage to melt and merge with the whole. The mind is a coward, the heart is really courageous.

So move from the mind to the heart, from logic to love, from ego to egolessness, and then all kinds of miracles start happening in your life. You are entitled to all those miracles.

It is love and nothing else that makes one a king. You can possess the whole world but you will be a beggar if you don't have love. And you may not possess anything, you may really be a beggar, but if you have love overflowing love in you heart you are an emperor, far greater than any Alexander the Great.

Love is the real treasure. Seek love and in seeking love you will not only find love, you will find God too. In seeking love you will not only find love, you will find you true being too. In seeking love one finds the kingdom of God, one truly becomes a king.

And love is something that cannot be taken away from you. even death cannot destroy it. that's why lovers are the only people in the world who are not afraid of death. If a person is afraid of death that simply show that he has not known love. If you have known love death disappears. If you have not known love then life is nothing but death.

Every effort should be made to seek and search for love. And it is your own energy. You are not to go anywhere else, you have to within yourself, and one day the spring starts flowering. You become full of love, you start overflowing with love. In that moment not only are you blessed, through you the whole existence is blessed.

Your name will mean, a loving solitude, a solitude full of love, and a love centred, rooted in solitude. It is one of the most difficult things in life. It is one of the greatest challenges. If one accepts the challenge and moves towards it, one grows. Even a single step towards it is a great leap of consciousness.

Why is it difficult? It is difficult because to feel your aloneness and yet be loving seems to be contradictory to the mind. The mind feels perfectly right: if you are loving, then forget about your aloneness, then be lost in togetherness. According to the mind that's what love is, it is the meeting with the other. But if you don't know what aloneness is, who is going to meet whom? Two empty shells will be 1/08/07

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meeting, two bodies will be meeting. But unless two souls meet and merge love never reaches to its ultimate crescendo. And one becomes a soul only when one knows the beauty of being alone.

The mind is ready to say that if you want to be alone then be alone, forget all about love. The mind seems to be absolutely logical. The mind says choose either love or aloneness, and those who have followed the mind have chosen either one or the other.

The people who live in the world, the majority of people have chosen love; hence they don't meditate.

Meditation seems to be going against their choice, because meditation is the art of enjoying your aloneness.

And whenever a person will start meditating, if he has a lover, the lover will be antagonistic to the approach.

The lover or the beloved is bound to create trouble. fear arises, because if the other becomes capable of being alone, then what will be the need of love? "Then I will not be needed any more," that is the fear. And everybody wants to be needed. That fulfils the ego, that "I am needed," that "without me you cannot live,"

that "I am absolutely essential for your life."

A few people have chosen to be monks and nuns. They have moved away from the world -- the world of love and togetherness and relationship. They live alone. That's exactly the meaning of the word "monk": one who lives alone, but without love you cannot be joyous. And the world is in misery. You can be loving but without knowing your aloneness your love remains superficial.

I teach something very paradoxical. I teach you love and aloneness together. Love deeply and be alone deeply. Let love arise out of you solitude. Then it will be something divine, something supramundane, something of the beyond, something that will fill you with contentment and light and bliss and benediction.

Hence my sannyasins are not to leave the world. They have to be in the world and yet be alone, they have to be in relationships and yet remain alone. I am

giving a very hard task to be fulfilled. But it is my observation that this is a challenge worth accepting because it can bring your total potential into manifestation. It can become an opportunity for your potential to become actualised.

Love is not attachment. Love flowers only when you have dropped all attachment. It is because of attachment that love is not happening to millions of people. Attachment creates jealousy, possessiveness, and all kinds of pathological tendencies. Attachment is out of fear, one wants to cling. But the moment you cling you are creating trouble for yourself and the other. The more you try to cling, the more the other will try to escape, because nobody wants to carry a burden, nobody wants to become unfree, nobody wants to lose their freedom.

But then a vicious circle is created: the more you feel that the other is escaping, the more you cling. The more you cling, the more the other escapes. And there is no end to it unless you destroy the whole relationship. That's what attachment does: it goes on poisoning all relationships. All relationships can bloom into prayer, they can become divine. It is because of attachment that they become poisoned.

One has to understand ones tendency to get attached. You get attached to people, to things, to places.

There are thousands possibilities of being attached. And the more you become attached, the more you are caught in the web that you have created around yourself. You lose your freedom, you lose growth, you lose all possibility of attaining to the ultimate, you become trivia. You become that which you want to possess, to which you become attached.

You can see it happening. If a man becomes too attached to money he starts becoming more like money than like a man. He becomes dead, dull, dirty, like currency notes which go on moving from one hand to another. You can't find anything more dirty than currency notes. If you become too attached to things you become a thing because your possessions start possessing you.

Sannyas means learning the art of love without getting attached. There have been many people who renounced attachment but they renounced love also. That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

They became dead because without love there is no life. Of course they were not attached, but just to escape from attachment they dropped being loving -- and when you drop being loving you have to become hard, you have to become insensitive. That's why your so-called saints are so hard and so insensitive, so dead -- just walking corpses, that's all. They stink of death not of the perfume of life.

My effort here is to give you a new synthesis: love without attachment.

There are two kinds of people: people who are attached, but because of attachment love is killed. Then there are the other kind who have escaped attachment and have dropped being loving because they are afraid that if they love they will become attached.

I want the third kind of man in the world: one who is capable of loving and yet remaining unattached.

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Love is the only phenomenon which is immortal. Everything else dies, love never dies. Death overcomes everything except love. Love overcomes death; hence in love is our victory. The man who lives without love lives a life of defeat and failure. He lives an ugly life, utterly meaningless, hollow. He somehow drags. His life is nothing but a slow suicide.

The man who loves really lives, lives authentically, because love brings colour, love brings joy, love brings meaning. Love makes you significant. each moment becomes eternity.

Love more and more for the sheer joy of loving, for no other motive. Love unconditionally. To put conditions on love is like putting legs on a snake. The snake needs no legs. Don't help the snake by putting legs on him, otherwise you

will destroy him. Love needs no motives, it is an end unto itself.

Love is the greatest blessing in life. There is no higher blessing than love. If one can love then everything is possible, even the impossible is possible. Then miracles start happening, unimaginable joys become yours. Incredible insights suddenly grow in your inner being, windows open up into mysteries.

doors which you had never suspected existed within you open and you can see the multi-dimensionality of existence. But it happens through love.

Love is not to be tethered to somebody in particular. Love should become a state, love should be a state of loving. One should be loveful, not that one loves this person or that person. One should be the very energy called love so that wherever one is one is showering love.

When it becomes so natural, so spontaneous that even in your sleep you radiate love, you have attained to god. In that moment love and god are synonymous. Hence I call it the greatest blessing. Love is not only a blessing to the person to whom it happens, it is also a blessing to the whole world through him.

When you are blessed you can bless the whole world. And that is real service to humanity, to existence.

The eagle represents three things: power, might, courage and strength.

Love needs all these qualities to bloom. A cowardly heart cannot love. Love is the greatest adventure in life, the most dangerous. The journey is full of hazards. And the danger is that you are moving towards the heights; if you fall you are gone forever. The higher you move, the more is the danger. And love is the highest peak in life, it is like everest. It needs great courage, guts. It needs adventurousness to move into the unknown.

Love takes you towards the further shore without any map, without any guide, without even any guidelines. And love takes you in a very small boat. The sea is there with all its turmoil and you are moving in a small boat, you can't see the other shore. But you are in deep trust, knowing that existence protects you, trusting that existence cares for you, that even if you are drowned in the middle there is nothing to worry about. It is better to be drowned in search of love than to live a long life without love. Because even a single moment of love is more valuable than a hundred years without love.

It needs a certain inner strength, a certain spiritual strength to be in love, because love demands the almost impossible. It demands unconditional surrender of the ego. It demands that you disappear. It demands that you be nothing, a nobody, because only when you are a nobody, a nothingness, are you empty enough for love to rush in, to fill you, every pore of your being. If you are too full of the ego love has no space to enter you.

And the eagle is a beautiful metaphor. It soars the highest. It crosses the boundaries of the known. It goes on moving farther and farther away from the earth and the earthly. Trusting only in its small wings it moves into total aloneness. It goes beyond the clouds. It goes farther and farther away from all shelter, security. It tries to penetrate into the unknown. And that's exactly what love is; love is an eagle. And it is only with love that you can reach the ultimate some day. Only love can become your wings.

Let love be your path. Let love be your religion. There is no higher religion than love.

Love is only for the courageous. The coward cannot be loving. At the most he can pretend, but his love will remain phony because he cannot fulfil the basic requirement of love -- and that is surrendering your ego.

Love grows only when the ego disappears. The ego is like a seed. When the seed dies in the soil then love grows like a sprout. Then there is great foliage and greenery and branches and flowers and fruits. Life becomes a fulfilment through love. The only barrier is the hard shell of the ego. Great courage is needed to get out of it. It seems very protective, secure, safe, cosy.

Love is sannyas. It is love in the ultimate sense of the word. It is love at its peak. It is a love affair with 1/08/07

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god himself, with life itself. It is falling in love with existence.

Love is always now. It never gets old. It never ages. It is always fresh. That's the

beauty of love.

Because it never grows old, it never dies. Because it always remains fresh, it is always light, unburdened by the past, unburdened by the future. It is always in the present. That's its freshness.

The whole existence is fresh and young except for man's mind. Man's mind accumulates junk, memories, and goes on accumulating. And everybody is carrying such a big load. Because it is invisible nobody can see it, but when you start understanding the process of the mind, when you become a watcher, you can see everybody carrying a mountain-load. People are crushed under the load but they go on carrying it. The load goes on growing every day and they are being crushed more and more every day. They die under its load. Their life is just an unnecessary conflict, drag, boredom, for the simple reason that they never allow themselves to be renewed.

The very process of renewing oneself is love: love existence, and don't say "I will love tomorrow", because tomorrow has no meaning. Either love or don't love, but never postpone. always think as if This is the last moment, there may be no other moment available. Who knows? -- the next moment you may not be there. Death can disrupt life at any moment. Death is always hanging like a naked sword over your head, it can cut you down at any moment. And it hangs by such a thing thread that just any small accident, just a small breeze and that's enough.

Always remember that each moment has to be lived totally because there may not be any other chance to live again. so don't say "I will love tomorrow". Love this moment, right now and don't confine your love.

Let it spread, let it be as vast as possible, because you will be as vast as your love is. If your love can be as big as the whole, than you have become the whole. You are what your love is.

That will go on renewing you, rejuvenating you, and that will go on helping you to keep clean and fresh, mirrorlike, without any dust collecting on you. That's what makes one aware of that which is, aware of God.

It is through loving existence that one becomes aware of the presence of something mysterious that surrounds everything.

Love is victory, although in a very strange way, because love is also surrender. On the one hand it is surrender. on the other hand it is victory. It is the most paradoxical phenomenon in existence. If you try to win you will lose; if you are ready to lose you are already victorious.

To learn this secret of life is of immense importance, because not knowing it people go on trying to do the impossible and the impossible cannot happen; hence they suffer. All their hopes are shattered sooner or later, all their dreams prove to be nothing but dreams and all their desires bring only frustration, failure, pain and misery for the simple reason that they do not know the fundamental law of life.

You can win but the condition to win is to surrender in love. It looks difficult event to understand it, because if I want to win, how can I win through surrender? It is illogical, certainly, but life is illogical, existence is absurd -- or, you can call it mysterious.

Those who condemn existence, they call it absurd. Those who worship existence, they call it mysterious.

But it is the same thing. They are both saying that it is illogical.

Jesus says: If you cling to life you will lose it. If you are ready to lose it you will enter into the kingdom of God, you will attain to eternal life. He is indicating this law of love.

Give it a try, because only then will you understand what sannyas is. When you start feeling the truth of the law of love you really become a sannyasin. Then you rejoice in the paradoxes. Then they are no more puzzles to be solved but mysteries to be lived.

It is beautiful that life is not logical. Otherwise it would have been so mundane. It is good that life is not a problem. Otherwise man is so stupid that he would have solved it by now (laughter) and then what?

Then there is only suicide. But man cannot solve it because it is not a problem in the first place. It is utterly mysterious.

The more you enter into it, the more ignorant you become, not knowledgeable. The more you know, the less you know; the you come in contact with life, the

more you see the point that it is impossible to know it, it is simply impossible to know it. But there is no need to know it. Knowledge is superfluous. One can live without knowing it.

You eat, you digest the food without knowing how you are doing it. You transform the food into blood and bones and marrow without knowing how you are managing it. So it is the case with life. There is no need to know, there is great need to love. But only one who can love is ready to surrender.

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So surrender to be victorious!

The only quality that man already possesses which can be called divine is love. Love is the only proof that God exists. There is no other proof. So those who have not loved cannot conceive that God is possible.

Friedrich Nietzsche says that God is dead for the simple reason that his heart never flowed in love. In fact he should have said that love is dead. That's what was happening inside him: love was dead. And because love is dead there is no proof for God.

Sigmund Freud does not believe in God because he does not believe in love. He thinks sexuality is all, man ends with sex. If man ends with sex then there is no difference between man and animals, then there is no humanity really, then man is another species of animal. Sigmund Freud takes away all the glory of humanity.

And Karl Marx says that there is no God.

But all these three people who have dominated this century are basically of the same type. These three people have not known love. I really feel deep compassion for them. Even though I criticise them, I criticise them with great compassion. I feel sorry for them. They were really capable people, very

intelligent people.

Just one thing was dead in their being, love was dead. And because love was dead there was no bridge between them and existence. Because love was dead God was incomprehensible, absolutely incomprehensible, pure nonsense.

If one wants to seek and search for God, truth, then one has to revive one's love, one has to make it flow.

And that's my work here, to help you so that you can become a flowing love.

Love is the only alchemy that brings purity, that purifies you, that helps you to become your essential self. It cuts away all that is non-essential, accidental. Then only the essential is left. The essential is that which cannot be destroyed by death, and the non-essential is that which is bound to be destroyed by time and death. That's the criterion to judge what is essential and what is non-essential.

Love is a kind of fire. Just as gold becomes pure by passing through fire, one becomes pure by passing through love. And purity brings beauty, purity brings grace, because purity brings a subtle, divine aura around you. You are no more gross, you become a fragrance. And only when your fragrance is released do you know that God is. Before all that else is argumentation; futile, sterile speculation.

When you have come to know what grace is then you know what God is. Grace is the only proof that God has happened to you. But one has to pass through the fire of love. Those who avoid love, they are avoiding God. Those who escape from love will never know what god is.

Love is synonymous with God. One should love love itself, only then can one know what God is.

Otherwise one can go on thinking about God, but thinking is not knowing. Knowing is closer to feeling, far closer to the heart than to the head, far closer to love than to logic. Knowing is an experience -- and love is the greatest experience man is capable of. One should begin with love.

My emphasis is that loving people is secondary, loving love is primary. Of course you will love people and you will love trees and you will love stars and you will love animals. That is a by-product, a by-product of being in love with love. Just as they say "Art for art's sake, " I say "Love for love's sake." When

you love love itself your love cannot be contaminated and you can love may people, in many ways. But when you forget love and you become obsessed with persons or things, then your love is contaminated. It becomes jealous, it becomes possessive, it becomes afraid. It becomes all kinds of things except love.

To keep one's love pure, unpolluted, is the path of sannyas. Love as many people as much as you can, but remember always that your devotion is towards love, not towards particular people. If you become attached you miss the whole point and love disappears.

Remain unattached and flowing. That is what I call being married to love; not being married to somebody but to the experience of love itself. You can call it being married to God -- it is the same.

Sannyas is a love affair, a love affair with love itself.

The greatest thing in life and the highest too is love. If one becomes love one becomes God. The condition to become love is only one, and that is to drop the ego. Ego is a false entity. It does not exist. It exists only because we believe in it. If we withdraw our belief it evaporates, it disappears.

So withdraw your belief in the ego, in the separate existence of yourself. We are not separate, we are all one. Man is not an island, nobody is. we are all part of a vast, infinite continent. We are small waves in a vast ocean. And to feel that 'I am part of the vastness of existence,' brings great joy.

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Drop the ego. Start feeling more and more in tune at with the whole, not separate from it. And that will become an explosion of love in you. The moment the ego is dropped, love explodes. It is the ego that hinders love like a rock hindering a small stream. Remove the rock and the stream starts flowing.

Sannyas means dropping the ego and moving more and more into the whole.

And with that all worries disappear on their own accord. When you are not separate there is no question of worrying. Worrying about the future, worrying about death -- if you are not separate you cannot die. You were here before your birth and you will be here after your death. Nobody ever dies. Death is only a shadow of the ego. Ego is false, so is death. Both are false entities, but we live dominated by these two entities, ego and death.

Sannyas means getting rid of both of them in one single stroke, in one single blow. Then life is a dance, then each moment is so precious, so exquisitely beautiful. This very moment is incomparably beautiful --

the silence, the frogs, the trees... This is what God is, this totality.

So live, not as a separate entity from now onwards, but as part of the whole. That is going to be your work upon yourself.

Love is the most immeasurable experience of life. It is absolutely unfathomable. There is no bottom to it. You can go deeper and deeper and deeper, and the mystery deepens more and more. You cannot de-mystify it. Love cannot be explained away, it cannot be defined either. It is so vast, so infinite, that no word is capable of containing it. all definitions fall short.

If you allow love to happen to you, you are allowing the mysterious to happen to you. And it is through this mysteriousness that one becomes connected to God. Love is the beginning of God, it is entering into his territory. That's why Jesus says that God is love. It's absolutely true.

For man, God is far away, just a word. It means nothing. We have to approach God through something more concrete, something more tangible, something more human. That's what love is. It is god manifested.

God is love in its unmanifest state. Love is the closest possibility of reaching towards God, the nearest door.

So never go into the definitions, don't bothered about the philosophies of love, experience it. There is no other way to know it except existential experience. Unless you experience it, you don't know it. And there is no need to know about it without experiencing it. That's what people go on doing: they accumulate information about love, they become very knowledgeable, but they are deceived. Their own knowledge becomes a barrier to experiencing it.

No knowledge is of any help, it is always a barrier. If you want to know love unlearn whatsoever you have learnt about it. If you want to experience truth forget all the theories that have been taught to you. If you want to meet God then beware of all the priests and all the theologians.

Existence needs no mediators. You are fully capable of coming directly to it. You have the intrinsic capacity to know, to see, to feel, to be.

Become a friend to all that is -- to human beings, to animals, to trees, to rocks. Create the quality of friendliness. Don't make any distinctions. Let it flow to everyone irrespective of caste and creed and nation.

Forget all distinctions and then slowly slowly you consciousness will start becoming universal.

Friendship is a sure step in dropping the ego and becoming egoless. Ego exists by creating enemies, because ego exists through fight. The moment all fight disappears from your mind ego has no more support.

And with that all you boundaries disappear, you become one with the universe. Friendship is the pure essence of love.

Love is godly. Hate is evil. Love is divine and people live in hatred. Even when they think that they love it is not love, it is something else.

Adolf Hitler in his autobiography MEIN KAMPF says that a country can remain united only if there are enemies on the outside, because people feel united if there is a common enemy. If they can hate somebody together they feel great love for each other. If the common enemy is there then they are very friendly with each other. If there is no common enemy they hate each other.

This is a very fundamental truth. Of course he exploited it in his own ways. He was not concerned with the truth, he was concerned with how to make it a base for his exploitation. But this is the experience of the centuries.

In India, before freedom came, Hindus and Mohammedans were fighting continuously. So it was decided to divide the country in two; hence Pakistan came into existence, and it was thought that now there would be no problem: Mohammedans would be in Pakistan, Hindus would be in Hindustan and there

would be no problem. But Hindus started fighting amongst themselves. Then the South started fighting against the 1/08/07

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North and the Maharastrians started fighting against the Gujaratis, and Hindi- speaking people started fighting against the non-Hindi-speaking people.

It seems that we are united only through hate, never through love. We call it love

-- deep down is hate.

That's why everybody thinks that he loves buth the world is so loveless. It can't be more loveless than it is, it can't fall any further.

Sannyas means becoming aware of this calamity, that we have forgotten how to love. Even hate is labelled love, and we believe in the labels. We are great believers in labels, in words, in slogans, and we never look inside, behind the label into reality.

Husbands and wives go on pretending that they love each other and they hate, from their very guts they hate each other. Parents go on saying that they love their children, and it is not true. They love them only if the children are obedient, they love them only if the children are fulfilling their ambitions, their egos.

Otherwise the whole of their love disappears. And children think they love their parents, that is nonsense. It is just a question of survival, they can't survive without the parents. so they moment They are ready to stand on their own they forget all about the parents. They don't care a bit.

The reality is ugly but it can be transformed if we see it. First the wound has to be seen, only then can it be cured and healed.

Love has to become the only religion on earth. Hate is the only sin, the original sin, and love is the only ladder to God.

Love is the only truth. Everything else is theorising, speculation, philosophising.

Love is existential experience. You cannot think about love. what is there to think about love? You can love but you cannot think about love. That is the beauty of it, that it takes you into reality immediately. You can think about God. In fact how will you live God? You can think about a thousand and one things but they are all things which cannot be lived. and if a thing cannot be lived it is not worth paying any attention to it.

Love cannot be thought about, it can only be lived; hence it is a door to God, to reality. Lovers have known god, not philosophers. Poets sometimes come closer to knowing God than thinkers because poetry is closer to love than anything else. Musicians come very close, even closer than poets, because music is so close to love that there is only a difference of one step more and you will be in the ocean of love. But that one step has to be taken. Many musicians remain just musicians, technicians. they know the whole art but they have not yet taken the jump into the unknown. They have not yet loved existence, but they come very close; closer than scientists, closer than philosophers, closer than other experts.

Get deeper into poetry so that you can have a few glimpses of love. Get deeper into music so that you can come very close to the ocean of love. Dance! And when dancing, abandon yourself totally to it. Dance so deeply that you disappear in the dance. When in the dance the dancer disappears you will have some experience of love. And then you can use that experience as a foundation stone. And on that foundation you can build the whole temple of love.

The life of a sannyasin has to be a temple of love. When you have raised the whole temple, truth comes in to reside of its own accord. You become love and you become the host, and truth becomes the guest. But unless you are love truth cannot enter you.

Life is dark without love. It is hell without love. It is a nightmare without love. Bring love into your life and the darkness disappears and the nightmares turn into beautiful, creative acts. And hell is transformed into heaven.

Hell and heaven are not two different things. Hell is the same life as heaven, with only one difference: life plus love is heaven, life minus love is hell.

So love more and more, love for the sheer joy of loving, without asking for anything in return. Love without any motive, because the moment a motive enters love is destroyed, crippled, paralysed. The moment you ask for something

in return it is bargaining. It is no more love, it is business.

Love can only be given as a gift. Of course much comes back, a thousandfold, but that is another thing.

It comes on its own accord, you need not ask for it. Ask and it will never come. That fundamental law has to be remembered. If you ask anything in return for your love nothing will come. If you don't ask you will be showered with love.

Life loves not beggars but emperors.

John is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, and in the New Testament he is called the most beloved disciple. So John has become symbolic of the of the beloved disciple. Hence so many people around the 1/08/07

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world have the name John. In different languages maybe it is a little different; in Dutch Jan, and in some other languages a little different, but John seems to be one of the most common names, for the simple reason that it reminds one of a tremendous love affair between John the disciple and Jesus the master. It has to be remembered.

It can transpire again between me and you, and then your name will be fulfilled. and it is the most blissful relationship possible because it is love at its highest peak and not only love but understanding too.

Love alone brings both ecstasy and agony. Love plus understanding means only ecstasy, no agony.

Agony comes through ignorant love. One wants to do good, one intends to do good, but one cannot because one is so unconscious, so ignorant, that one does not really know what is good. So in trying to do good one creates a mess. In being helpful one becomes harmful.

When love is with understanding then there is no darkness in it. It is pure light.

Ordinary love is ignorant love, and the love that exists between the master and the disciple is love full of understanding. It is love out of understanding.

In ordinary love we hope that understanding will grow through love. Between a master and a disciple understanding is the first thing and love grows out of it. As you understand your master more and more, you come closer and closer, you imbibe his spirit. The more understanding happens between you and the master, the more love arises. And love and understanding can become two wings. They can take you to the other shore.

Yashodhara is the name of Gautam Buddha's wife. A very rare woman she was. Buddha renounced her.

Without telling her he escaped into the forest. For twelve years she waited for him. Never a single complaint was heard from her. She never said, never grumbled, that her husband had deceived her, betrayed her, or anything. On the contrary she would always say 'He has gone to seek and search for truth and I know that whenever he finds it, he will come to share it with me. That much is certain.'

Her trust and love were so infinite. It was difficult, it is really difficult to wait for twelve years. No message was received, nothing was known about his whereabouts. There were rumours, gossip, that he had become an ascetic, that he was doing this and that he was doing that. But nothing concrete, nothing reliable.

But she never wavered.

After twelve years Buddha came back. When he became enlightened, the first thing he did was to ask his disciples "Come with me. I have to go to my wife. I owe it to her. She has waited too long, and she has trusted.'

When Buddha came, she only said one thing. She said 'I have only one complaint to make to you: I could not have said it to anybody else, I can only say it to you. Why didn't you ask me? Could you not trust me? I would have allowed you to go. And if you had allowed me I may have come with you. If it would have been difficult to take me with you, that would have been okay, but at least you should have told me.

The only thing that hurts me is that you could not believe in me, that you could not trust me totally.'

It is said that Buddha had no answer for it. It was true, the woman was right. Buddha said 'Forgive me and forget the past. Now I have attained what I went to attain and I have come to share it with you. Be initiated and become a sannyasin.'

And she became a sannyasin immediately... not even a moment's hesitation. She didn't say 'I will think it over.' There was no question. A Buddha said 'Become a sannyasin.' She became a sannyasin.

And then she remains like an ordinary sannyasins amongst thousands of sannyasins. She loses all her claims that she is somehow special. Nothing is heard about her She goes and mixes in the crowd of sannyasins. She becomes an absolute nonentity. And Buddha's respect for her goes on growing. One he mentions her again saying 'This woman is rare. I was a little afraid that even though she became a sannysin she would try to say that she is special, that she has been my wife. But she has simply disappeared, melted.

No claim on Buddha, no claim for any special attention.'

Buddha said 'Her name is right, she has proved it. Yashodhara means the glorious one. she is a glorious woman.'

Love has not to be learned. It is our very nature, we are born with it. It is not something for which we need any education. It is something which is already there but hindered by many things. We have only to remove those hindrances and love starts flowing. And when love starts flowing you start moving into a totally new dimension. That dimension is God. and when you know how much has been given. Inestimable, 1/08/07

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immeasurable is this gift.

Love is the most precious of all his gifts -- but it dies. We never give it a chance to sprout, we never create the right space for it to grow. We never become the spring so that it can flower and bloom.

That's what sannyas is: creating a right space, the right soil for love to grow, for love to expand. As your love becomes bigger, you become bigger. When your love is perfect you are perfect. There is no other way to be perfect. Only the perfection of love can bring perfection to your being.

There are two ways to reach God: one is meditation, the other is love. A few people reach through meditation, a few people reach through love. Both are valid ways and both reach the same experience.

When the meditator reaches the ultimate peak he suddenly finds love arising in his being, and when the lover reaches the ultimate peak he finds meditation happening of its own accord. On the way they are different, at the peak they become one.

The path of meditation is arduous, it demands a little superhuman effort. It passes through deserts; it passes through rocky deserts where nothing grows.

The path of love is easier, natural, simple -- far more poetic too, far more human too. It passes through a different territory, full of greenery, with birds singing and flowers blooming, waterfalls and butterflies. It passes through a beautiful land. On the path of love only surrender is needed, nothing else; just a let-go, a deep relaxation. One stops pushing the river and starts flowing with the river. And the river is already going to the ocean; it will take you, it will carry you.

If one is incapable of love, then only do I suggest that one move through the path of meditation.

Otherwise, why bother going through a desert land when you could have passed through gardens and beautiful forest?

The first preference is love. But if somehow love has been so destroyed by your upbringing, has been so poisoned that the very word frightens you, scares you, then I suggest you go through the path of mediation.

Many more people reach through the path of love; almost ninety percent. of people will find it easier to move through love. And my feeling about you is that love will be easier for you.

Become a lover of existence.

Let sannyas be a love affair with the cosmos!

If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #10

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