Being Love

Quotes excerpted from Osho books.
  Being love. Bit of a tall order when you think of the trouble love causes. And loving with awareness and relating without fear sounds great, but where to start with it?

"Love should be a reality in your life, not just a poem, not just a dream. It has to be actualized. It is never too late to experience love for the first time.

“Learn to love. Very few people know how to love. They all know that love is needed, they all know that without love life is meaningless, but they don't know how to love."

Well yes, that’s what I want, but I’m scared of getting hurt again.

“Love is risky. To love is to move into danger – because you cannot control it, it is not safe. It is not within your hands. It is unpredictable: where it will lead nobody knows. Whether it will lead anywhere, that too nobody knows.”

And why is it so hard to find “the one”?

"First you have to understand the love that is a natural phenomenon. Even that has not happened. First you have to understand the natural, and then the transcendental. So the second thing to remember is, never be in search for a perfect man or a perfect woman. That idea too has been put into your mind – that unless you find a perfect man or a perfect woman you will not be happy. So you go on looking for the perfect, and you don’t find it, so you are unhappy.

"To flow and grow in love needs no perfection."

"Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, ‘Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you.’ Love is like breathing: when it happens you are simply love. It does not matter who comes close to you, the sinner or the saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, is rejoiced. Love is unconditional giving – but only those are capable of giving who have."

Maybe so, but when yet another relationship ends in disaster I just shut down.

"Relationship is a structure, and love is unstructured. So love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship.

Loving people need not have any relationship – love is enough.

"Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship – because relationships happen one day and disappear another day. They are flowers; in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone.”

OK but if love is enough why do I sometimes feel lonely even when I’m with someone?

“It is something very deep to be understood, something of great significance. Love always brings aloneness. Aloneness always brings love. They are never separate.

“People think just the opposite. People think, ‘When you are in love, how can you be alone?’ They don’t make any distinction between two words: loneliness and aloneness. Hence the confusion.

“When you are in love, you cannot be lonely; that is true. But when you are in love, you are bound to be alone – that is even far truer. Loneliness is a negative state. Loneliness means you are hankering for the other. Loneliness means you are dark, dismal, in despair. Loneliness means you are frightened. Loneliness means you are feeling left behind. Loneliness means nobody needs you. It hurts. Loneliness is like a wound.

“Aloneness is like a flower. I know your dictionaries will say that loneliness and aloneness are synonyms – they are not. They are totally different phenomena.”

"The greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven. You can look at man as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison. If a man lives by hate he reaps a harvest of poison; if he lives by love he gathers blossoms laden with nectar."