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Overview
Explore the emotional sensations of the many facets of love and affection that bring people together with one of the twentieth century’s greatest spiritual teachers.
One of the most important life events is falling in love, yet we never learn about it in school. Societies and religions force us into models and thought-forms that are often in opposition to an organic model of love, which is instead institutionalized by marriage, religious affiliations, and nationalism. This results in love that is, for most people, a painful challenge in one form or another throughout life.
In these modern days, where the focus shifts more and more to realizing one’s individual potential, Osho’s The Power of Love: What Does It Take for Love to Last a Lifetime? helps us to direct our search for love by widening our view—showing us that love has many manifestations and is not limited to the “other”. One manifestation of love is meditation, a life-changing experience that allows the flowering of real love within oneself and toward others.
Osho challenges readers to examine and break free of the conditioned belief systems and prejudices that limit their capacity to enjoy life in all its richness. He has been described by the Sunday Times of London as one of the “1000 Makers of the 20th Century” and by Sunday Mid-Day (India) as one of the ten people—along with Gandhi, Nehru, and Buddha—who have changed the destiny of India. Since his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466877115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2016 |
| Series: | Osho Life Essentials |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Osho is one of the most provocative and inspiring spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. Known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, the influence of his teachings continues to grow, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world. He is the author of many books, including Love, Freedom, Aloneness; The Book of Secrets; and Innocence, Knowledge, and Wonder.
Read an Excerpt
The Power Of Love
By Osho
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 OSHO International FoundationAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7711-5
CHAPTER 1
First Sight of Love, Last Sight of Wisdom
Love should be unaddressed. Love need not be oriented toward the other. Love oriented toward the other is not true love; love as a relationship is not true love. Love as a state of being is true love. One can love a woman, one can love a man, one can love one's children, one can love one's parents, one can love roses and one can love other flowers, one can love a thousand and one things — but these are all relationships.
Learn how to be love. So it is not a question of to whom your love is addressed, it is simply a question of your being loving. Sitting alone, still love goes on flowing. Absolutely alone, still, what can you do? Just as you breathe ... you don't breathe for your wife; it is not a relationship. You don't breathe for your children; it is not a relationship. You simply breathe — it is life. Just as breathing is life for the body, love is the life of the soul — one is simply love. And then only does one know that love is "God."
Jesus says, "God is love." I say to you, "Love is God." The words are the same, but the significance is very different. Jesus says, "God is love." Then love becomes only one of the qualities of God; he is wise also, powerful also, a judge also, and many things more. Amid all those qualities, he is love too. Jesus's statement was very revolutionary in those days, but not anymore.
I say, "Love is God." Then it is not a question of God having many other qualities. In fact, God disappears — love itself becomes God. Love is the real thing. God is the name given by the theologians to something they know nothing about. There is no God; the whole existence is made of the stuff called love.
Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why? "First sight of love, last sight of wisdom." Is it true?
Love is prayerfulness groping toward godliness. Love is poetry born out of the sheer joy of being. Love is song, dance, celebration: a song of gratitude, a dance of thankfulness, celebration for no reason at all, for this tremendous gift that goes on showering on us, for this whole universe, from the dust to the divine. Love is not what you understand it to be, hence the question.
You ask, "Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why?" — because love is religion at its highest; love is the supreme-most religion. Love is the search for godliness — of course, an unconscious search in the beginning, stumbling, groping in the dark. The direction may not be right, but the intention is absolutely right.
Love is not the ordinary thing that you understand by it; it is not just a biological attraction between a man and a woman. It is that, too, but that is only the beginning, just the first step. Even there, if you look deep down, it is not really an attraction between man and woman; it is an attraction between masculine energy and feminine energy. It is not an attraction between A and B; far deeper mysteries are involved, even in ordinary love affairs.
Hence nobody can define love. Thousands of definitions have been tried; all have failed. Love remains indefinable, very elusive, mercurial. The more you want to grasp it, the more difficult it becomes, the further away it goes. You cannot catch hold of it. You cannot manage to know what exactly it is. You cannot control it. Love remains unknowable. Man wants to know, because knowledge gives power. You would like to be powerful over love, but that is impossible; love is far bigger than you. You cannot possess it; you can only be possessed by it. Hence those people who want to possess love never come to know anything of it.
Only those who are courageous enough — only those who are gamblers, who can risk their very lives and be possessed by some unknown energy — are able to know what love is.
Love is the first step toward godliness. Hence it appears mad to those who are hung up in their heads, who don't understand the whole mystery of love, who try to understand it through the mind. ... It can be understood only through the heart. Remember: all that is great is available to the heart. The heart is the door to all great values of life, to all ultimate values, and the head is only a useful mechanism, a gadget — good in the marketplace but utterly useless in a temple. And love is a temple; it is not a marketplace. If you drive love into the marketplace, it is reduced to ugly sexuality.
That's what people have done: rather than raising love to godliness, they have reduced love into ugly, animalistic sexuality. And the strange thing is, the same people who have reduced love to an ugly phenomenon — the priests, the politicians, the puritans — are against sex, are enemies of sex. And they are the people who have destroyed a power with tremendous potential!
Love is a lotus hidden in the mud. The lotus is born out of mud, but you don't condemn the lotus because it is born out of mud. You don't call the lotus "muddy"; you don't call the lotus "dirty." Love is born out of sex, and then prayerfulness is born out of love. And then godliness is born out of prayerfulness. Higher and higher and higher, one goes on soaring. But the priests and the puritans have reduced the whole phenomenon into sexuality. And once love becomes sex it becomes ugly; one starts feeling guilty about it. It is because of that guilt that this saying, this proverb, has arisen: "First sight of love, last sight of wisdom."
If you ask me, I will change it a little bit. I will say, "First sight of love, first sight of wisdom."
But it depends how you look at it. If you look at the potential of it, at the highest possibility that it can reach, then love becomes a ladder. If you look only at the mud and you are utterly blind to the future of the mud, then certainly love becomes something ugly, and great antagonism arises in you. But to be antagonistic to love is to be antagonistic to godliness.
On returning from his honeymoon, Michael phoned his father at the office.
"Good to hear from you, son. Tell me, how is married life?"
"Dad, I am really upset. I think I married a nun."
"A nun?" asked the startled father. "What do you mean?"
"Ah, you know, Dad — none in the morning and none at night."
"Oh, that!" groaned the older man. "Come for dinner Saturday, and I will introduce you to the mother superior."
Once love is reduced to sexuality only, of course, then the first sight of love is the last sight of wisdom. But it depends on you. Why reduce it to sexuality? Why not change the base metal into gold? Why not learn the alchemy of love? That's what I am teaching here. And the priests, who don't know anything about love — because they have never loved, they have renounced the world of love — go on making great systems of thought against it.
The priest stood before a hushed crowd of attentive villagers and spoke to them, "You must not use-a the pill."
A lovely signorina stepped forward and said, "Look, you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules!"
These are the people who don't play the game, but they make the rules. For centuries the priests have been making rules. It is the priesthood all over the world that has condemned a great potential source, in fact the only source, of energy. Once it is condemned, you are condemned; your whole life will become meaningless. Once sex energy is not allowed to grow to its natural heights, you are going to live a miserable life.
Love is the greatest gift of existence. Learn the art of it. Learn the song of it, the celebration of it. It is an absolute need: just as the body cannot survive without food, the soul cannot survive without love. Love is the nourishment of the soul. It is the beginning of all that is great. It is the door of the divine.
Help! I am falling apart! My head wants something, my heart something else, my being yet something different, and my body something else. While taking decisions in worldly matters, they are not in tune with each other. My head, mind, heart, being, and body never agree on one thing. So, when I cannot be in harmony with myself, how can I be in harmony with existence?
I can understand that your body, your mind, and your heart are not in harmony. But your being ... you have only heard the word; you don't know anything about it. If you had known your being, everything would have been harmonized immediately.
Being is such a great power that neither the heart can go against it nor the head nor the body. So leave the being apart — because that is the solution. You have to find your being, and the finding of the being will harmonize your existence.
Right now, when you find body, mind, and heart in disharmony, first listen to the body. None of the so-called saints will say this to you: first listen to the body. The body has a wisdom of its own, and the body is uncorrupted by the priests. The body is unpolluted by your teachers, by your education, by your parents. Begin with the body, because right now the body is the purest thing in you. So if the heart and the mind go against it, let them go. You follow the body. The body is the first harmony, and the being is the last.
The fight is always between the heart and the head. The body and being are never in conflict — they are both natural. The body is visible nature, and the being is invisible nature, but they are part of one phenomenon. Mind and heart are in conflict because the mind can be polluted, corrupted — and that's what all the religions and all the cultures have been doing: corrupting your mind. They cannot corrupt your heart. But they have managed a different technique for the heart: they have bypassed it; they have ignored it. They have not nourished it; they have tried in every way to weaken it, condemn it.
So what you have, in fact, is your head, which goes against your body — because all the cultures are against the body — and the body is your home. Your heart is part of the body, and your head is also part of the body — but the head is capable of being influenced, conditioned. The heart is beyond the reach of other people; only you can reach it.
So begin with the body — first follow the body. The body will never misguide you: you can trust it, and you can trust it absolutely. Anything that goes against the body is forced upon you by others. That is a good criterion to find out what has been forced on you. Whatever goes against the body is forced on you; it is foreign. You should throw it out. Your mind is full of foreign elements; your mind is not in its natural state. It can also come into a natural state, and then it will not be against the body; it will be in tune with it. So begin with the body and use it as a criterion.
It is a very simple process; follow the body. Slowly, slowly the mind starts dropping anything that is anti-body. It has to drop it. It is not its nature; it is carrying it in spite of itself. It is the load that dead humanity has left for you as a heritage. Following the body, you will be surprised that for the first time you see two things happening. First, the head starts dropping the conditioning. Second, as the head starts dropping the conditioning you hear for the first time the still, small voice of the heart, which was drowned by the noisy head. Because the head is becoming a little calmer, a little more silent, you can hear the heart.
First listen to the body so all that is gross in your mind will be dropped, and you will start listening to the heart. It is not against the body, because nobody can condition your heart; there is no approach from the outside to the heart. You will be amazed to see that your heart and your body are in harmony. And when this harmony happens, the head is completely finished; it has no power over you. Now you know a new power, purer, more natural, more authentic, and the head drops even its subtle conditioning.
The day the head also becomes silent and comes in tune with the heart and the body, that day you will discover your being — not before it. And once you have discovered your being, you need not try to harmonize anything. The very presence of the being harmonizes everything. The very experience is so vast that your body, your heart, your mind all lose their identities in the vastness of your being. But begin with the body.
All the religions are saying just the opposite. They say, "Oppose the body; don't follow the body. The body is the enemy." That is their strategy to destroy you, because they have taken away the basic element from where you could have grown toward harmony. You will remain always in discord, without harmony. You will never come to know your being, and your whole life will be just anguish, anxiety, tensions of thousands of kinds. The religions have already given you the clue as to how they have destroyed you. Making your mind work against the body has been their strategy.
I am saying to you: start with the body. It is your home. Love it, accept it, and in that very love, in that very acceptance, you are growing toward harmony. This harmony will lead you to being. And once the being is discovered, then you are relieved of all effort. Harmony becomes just your nature — one voice, one organic unity.
Why has sex been a taboo in all the societies down the ages?
It is a very complicated question, but very important too — worth going into. Sex is the most powerful instinct in man. The politician and the priest have understood from the very beginning that sex is the most driving energy in man. It has to be curtailed; it has to be cut. If man is allowed total freedom in sex, then there will be no possibility to dominate him; to make a slave out of him will be impossible.
Have you not seen it being done? When you want a bull to be yoked to a bullock cart, what do you do? You castrate him; you destroy his sex energy. And have you seen the difference between a bull and an ox? What a difference! An ox is a poor phenomenon, a slave. A bull is a beauty; a bull is a glorious phenomenon, a great splendor. See a bull walking, how he walks like an emperor! And see an ox pulling a bullock cart ... The same has been done to man: the sex instinct has been curtailed, cut, crippled. Man does not exist as the bull now; he exists like the ox. And each man is pulling a thousand and one bullock carts.
Look, and you will find behind you a thousand and one bullock carts, and you are yoked to them. Why can't you yoke a bull? The bull is too powerful. If he sees a cow passing by, he will throw both you and the bullock cart, and he will move to the cow. He will not bother a bit about who you are, and he will not listen. It will be impossible to control the bull.
Sex energy is life energy; it is uncontrollable. And the politician and the priest are not interested in you, they are interested in channelizing your energy into certain other directions. So there is a certain mechanism behind it; it has to be understood.
Sex repression, tabooing sex, is the very foundation of human slavery. And man cannot be free unless sex is free. Man cannot be really free unless his sex energy is allowed natural growth.
These are the five tricks through which man has been turned into a slave, into an ugly phenomenon, a cripple. The first: keep man as weak as possible if you want to dominate him. If the priest wants to dominate you or the politician wants to dominate you, you have to be kept as weak as possible. Yes, in certain cases exceptions are allowed — that is, when the services of fighting our enemy are needed; only then, otherwise not. The army is allowed many things that other people are not allowed. The army is in the service of death; it is allowed to be powerful. It is allowed to remain as powerful as possible; it is needed to kill the enemy.
Other people are destroyed; they are forced to remain weak in a thousand and one ways. And the best way to keep a man weak is not to give love total freedom. Love is nourishment. Now the psychologists have discovered that if a child is not given love, he shrivels up into himself and becomes weak. You can give him milk, you can give him medicine, you can give him everything ... just don't give love. Don't hug him, don't kiss him, don't hold him close to the warmth of your body, and the child will start becoming weaker and weaker and weaker, and there are more chances of dying than surviving. What happens? Why? Just hugging, kissing, giving warmth, somehow the child feels nourished, accepted, loved, needed. The child starts feeling worthy; the child starts feeling a certain meaning in his life.
Now from the very childhood we starve them. We don't give love as much as is needed. Then we force the young men and young women not to fall in love unless they get married. By the age of fourteen they become sexually mature. But their education may take more time — ten years more, until they are twenty-four, twenty-five, or more, then they will be getting their M.A.s, or Ph.D.s, or M.D.s, so we have to force them not to love.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Power Of Love by Osho. Copyright © 2016 OSHO International Foundation. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
1. First Sight of Love, Last Sight of Wisdom,
2. He Said / She Said: Love in a Relationship,
3. Imprisoned by the Mind,
4. The Way of the Heart,
5. Love: The Purest Power,
6. The Oceanic Experience of Being,
Epilogue,
OSHO International Meditation Resort,
For More Information,
Also by OSHO,
About the Author,
Copyright,