In love, drop the object

Question 1:

Purna, the experience has been immensely valuable.

On the path of mystery, all objects are nothing but excuses - because you cannot wait without an object, without it being for something.

The moment waiting is for something, it is desire; it is not waiting. And by its very nature, desire goes on becoming narrower.

You love - the beginning of love is a wider experience, because love has not become desire yet.

You have not started to take your beloved for granted. The calamity of marriage has not happened yet, you are still free to move in any direction. The other is not yet binding. The other is not yet a hell because there is no relationship yet. No promises are yet given, no decisions for tomorrow are yet taken. You are entirely satisfied with the moment.

When you are in love, who cares about the future, about a life beyond death? When you are in love, life is here at the very center of your love, but only before you commit the common fallacy of humanity. You love somebody but the love is not defined yet, is not reduced to law - you have not been to the marriage registrar's office, you have not been to any priest to destroy your love and give you a guarantee.

You have not asked for the guarantee yet - that's why you are free.

You have not asked the other person to be a certain way and only then you will love. Your love is still unconditional, you love the person as he or she is. Your love is not yet possessive.

But soon that moment will come, and out of this beautiful experience of expansion of consciousness you will start being afraid to lose it.

Who knows about tomorrow?

The woman may turn away, the man may not recognize you.

Basically, we are strangers. And all that we know about each other is arbitrary - the name, the address, the face, the beauty - because all these will be changing.

Your beloved may have the most beautiful eyes and tomorrow, blindness is possible. Unless you have learned to love as the other is, the beautiful beginning, the beautiful sunrise in your consciousness, will turn soon into a dark night of the soul.

The same things that you used to love now create anger, now create hatred. The same things that you used to appreciate are now nothing but nagging.... The reception room was beautiful, and because of the beauty of the reception room you have entered a jail.

But this is not the only possibility, of lovingness turning into a narrow, ugly desire to dominate, to possess, to be jealous of. If this were all, no intelligent person would have tolerated life for a single moment. For the intelligent person, suicide would have been the only way out.

But it is not so - because there is an alternative.

Love can become too much concentrated on the object, the beloved. And this is the misery; then you become dependent and nobody loves dependence.

The alternative is that love does not become addressed to a single person or a single object, but takes a diametrically opposite dimension - not towards the object but towards one's own subjectivity.

One becomes love.

It is not a question of loving someone, of being in love with someone. It is simply a transformation of your consciousness: love is your fragrance. It has nothing to do with anybody else in the world.

That's what happened, Purna, when you were waiting and waiting for me.

A moment is bound to come - if you are silent, joyous, trusting - when waiting can become a depth in your soul. And because you are not waiting for something or someone, you are the waiting - a silent watchfulness. And because you are not concerned with anything particular, objective, then everything that happens feels as if you were waiting for this.

All the flowers bloom for you and all the stars shine for you. Because you have not attached yourself to a particular flower, you have simply become an opening, a loving, a waiting consciousness.

This is not only true about waiting; it is true about all spiritual qualities. Either the quality can move towards an object or it can move towards one's own being. When there is no object, the energy is bound to move inwards - energy cannot remain without movement.

Energy is movement.

When there is nothing outside, your own life forces turn inwards to the very source of your being.

And this is what I call enlightenment.

You cannot desire enlightenment; you can only wait.

You are asking me if I love you in the same way, with the same intensity, with the same totality as you love me.

It will be difficult for you to understand: there is a love which is not the love that you have known.

Your love, howsoever pure, carries something of biological unconsciousness in it. You are not totally free to love anybody.

Suddenly one day you fall in love with a person.

It is not your action. It is something unconscious in you - your chemistry, your biology, your physiology. They are all conspiring and giving you the idea of love.

I cannot love you in that sense.

My love cannot become a bondage to you in any way.

And my love is qualitatively different: I love not because you are lovable; I love because I cannot help it. And it is not a question of loving someone. Just the way I breathe in and out, and my heart beats, love radiates on its own accord.

It is possible that you will see that I love someone more, someone less.... Because you always think in terms of quantity: more or less. And your conclusion has a certain validity, too. But you are not looking at things right side up; you are looking at things upside down.

My love is just like the light - it is neither more for somebody nor less for somebody. But still, for the blind man it will not exist. For the one who cannot see properly, it will be dim. And for one who can see with a clarity it will have a different intensity.

It is the same light, but it will depend how much you can receive.

If you are totally open, you can receive it all.

And because it is not a quantity - it is pure quality; hence indivisible - I can give you my whole heart without having any trouble in giving my whole heart to many other people. Because it is not mathematics, such that I have given the whole heart to one person and now what am I doing? - I am finished!

That is not my experience.

I have always given my whole heart, because I am lazy. Who bothers to cut one's own heart into pieces? And then to give in a miserly way, pieces... and those pieces will be dead.

The heart is alive only in its totality, in its organic unity.

But the trouble is in your wrong conditioning.

I can give to the whole world, to each single individual, my whole heart - and still my whole heart remains with me to be given to any newcomer. Because newcomers are always coming!

You may not be able to understand many things about what the situation is when you are love. For example, when you are love, your love cannot be hot. And in this world, people want hot love. Hot dogs to eat and hot love to enjoy, and their paradise is complete!

My love is neither hot nor cold. It is cool.

Unless you become very calm and cool, you will not be able to understand it. You have known only the hot love - and remember, the danger with the hot love is that sooner or later it is going to become cool. Everything hot is bound to become cool sooner or later, and the final end is that it will become cold. You cannot prevent it, it is a natural process.

So each hot love turns into hot hate. But you are accustomed to hot - either friendship or enmity, but it has to be hot. You are so insensitive that unless something is very hot you cannot feel it. Hence, your question.

My love is cool.

To understand it, you will have come to the same temperature.

And cool love is not only love, it is much more. Because of its coolness, it is meditation, it is silence, it is serenity, it is tranquillity, it is centering. It is not a small phenomenon.

I love you more than you can ever be loved.

But my love and your experience of love are so different that you will have to change gear. This is what happened while you were waiting. You waited one day, two days, three days.... And I was sending messages: "Within one or two days I will be starting...." You know I am crazy, I have my own ways of working.

I would not have started speaking. It is because of Darshan, Bhadra and Hansa. I was not seeing people for the simple reason that I find it impossible to say no to anything. And when Hansa recited a small piece of Urdu poetry, which means "I don't have any complaint. As it is, I am happy; I don't have any complaint. But life without you is not life at all...."

It was impossible to say no.

So I said to them, "Inform my people that I will start speaking today. Rather than saying no to you, I can stop again!" I have my ways - and this time I will not allow Bhadra, Hansa and Darshan to see me!

But this is significant to understand: whether I am speaking or not speaking, whether I am seeing you or not seeing you, if you can be here feeling the invisible presence, that is more than can be expected of human beings. And that is the golden key.

And in what situation you will wake up nobody knows. Everybody is asleep for different reasons and needs different situations to wake up.

Perhaps it helped Purna greatly. She was waiting one day, the next day.... Naturally when you have to wait too long, waiting becomes not an excitement but a settled state. She settled with waiting.

She forgot even what she was waiting for. This is the moment when energy starts turning inwards.

And to shower in your own energy is the greatest ecstatic experience available to man.

But the second part of her question... she will have to learn a little more, to experience a little more about love - object-less love; love not as a relationship but as a state of being. Then she will be surprised: it is cool, not hot. It is non-possessive, it is non-jealous, it has no conscious or unconscious desire to dominate the other.

True love is not a beggar; it does not ask you to "love me."

True love shares its whole being, its whole joy, all the songs, all the flowers, all the stars. It is a celebration. And you are not obliged - true love is always obliged that you participated in the celebration, that "You allowed my love an entry into your being," that "You trusted me so much that I am grateful."

I know you love me.

But I would like you to rise higher, because right now you are just walking on the ground, the lowest rung of the ladder. And you have the capacity to take off into the sky - sky beyond skies. You can reach to the very climax of existence and its beauty, its truth, its eternity, its deathlessness.

What has happened to you, Purna, continue it in other realms, in other directions.

In love, drop the object.

In meditation, don't meditate upon somebody or something - drop the object.

All over the world, whenever you tell people to meditate, they immediately ask, "On what?" because verbally, meditation is action, activity.

On what has one to meditate?

Meditation begins only when there is nothing to meditate upon, when there is simply consciousness - you are aware - but you are not concentrating on anything.

Concentration is a kind of imprisonment. And all our educational programs around the world are teaching people to concentrate.

A man like Adolf Hitler creates concentration camps to kill people - his concentration camps are crude and primitive. All the religions have created concentration camps for you, but they are psychological. They have created a certain prison inside your mind. You cannot go out of it because wherever you go, it is always within you. You cannot run; howsoever fast you run, it is always with you.

A Sufi story is....

A man was very much afraid of darkness; he had a paranoia. He was also afraid of aloneness - these two things are always found together. The man who is afraid of darkness will necessarily be afraid of aloneness, and vice-versa. Because darkness gives you a feeling of aloneness in a vast universe. It may be populated with nine hundred billion people, but in darkness you are alone.

As you start a revolution in you, transforming love from objects and pouring it into your own source, you will be absolutely mystified - coming to know that you have so much love that you can bless the whole world.

But your love will be more like compassion, cool, more like friendliness. Your love will be free from its biological, hormonal, chemical past. For the first time it will be beyond matter. For the first time you will not be forced by some blind forces in nature - you will decide.

And when you have so much to give, and when you discover that the more you give, the more you have it, then love is no longer a relationship but a pure sharing, with no desire of gaining anything in return.

Love has gone beyond the world of the marketplace; it is no longer business. It is for the first time pure play, leela.

But about the second part of your question: your love is certainly hotter. And you know, I don't like heat! You can see... two air conditioners!

You will have to experience a higher and more refined, more purified energy. Only then you can understand whether I love you more or you love me more. Right now it can be said that you love me more. My love is simply love - neither more nor less. I cannot figure out how to love less. I have tried! - but I am ashamed to say to you that I have failed continuously for my whole life. I have not been able to love less and neither can I love more. 'More' and 'less' are words that don't belong to the spiritual realm. They belong to the world of matter.

The English word 'matter' is from a Sanskrit root, matra. It means "that which can be measured."

From the same root, matra comes the French word metre.

That which can be measured is not my love.

That which cannot be measured, that which cannot be more or less, that which is just for you to share.... Because this whole existence is made of the stuff called love. As you understand your reality, you have understood in miniature the reality of the whole existence - it is made of the matter called love.

We are living in an ocean of love, unaware.

But there are ways to grow and become aware of the tremendous ecstasies that are possible to you. Just loving a single person you feel so happy... just think of yourself becoming love. The whole existence becomes your beloved - the trees dancing in the wind and the sun, the clouds moving in the sky, a beautiful sunset.... Once you understand that you are part, an intrinsic part of this loving existence, this constantly rejoicing existence, you will drop all boundaries and all limitations on your love, on your intelligence.

You will be reborn - reborn as a Gautam Buddha, a fully awakened consciousness.

Your experience has directed you towards a right source.

Just follow it - with ease, with relaxedness. And much more, so much more that you cannot imagine, is going to shower on you... roses and roses and roses.

Question 2:

Meditation is a transformation of your whole being. You are no more part of a crowd, no more a cog in the wheel. You have taken your responsibility on your own shoulders; you have become a free individual.

Nationality will disappear, because these are all arbitrary lines, man-made - and their existence is ugly, because their existence shows that man is not mature yet. Otherwise, what is the need to have so many nations, and every nation having great armies.... People are dying in poverty and seventy percent of the national income all over the world goes to the military. Humanity is living on only thirty percent, and the army gets everything better - naturally, because they have sold their lives and they are being prepared for death, either to kill or to be killed.

This seems so useless. Why should there be wars? Why should there be violence? And why should nations continue after five thousand years of experience shows that they are cancerous, destructive?

The man of meditation is bound to be a citizen of the world.

He is not going to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Because he can contact existence himself; there is no need of any mediator, no need of any priest, holy book, church. All these religions have been creating nothing but bloodshed, burning living human beings and doing all kinds of ugly acts against innocent humanity.

As you become more silent, as your eyes become more clear, as the smoke that surrounds you disappears, then religions, nations, discriminations between black and white, discriminations between men and women - all are going to disappear.

And it is right that you are feeling ageless. Meditation starts taking you beyond time because it is going to take you beyond death.

You will be surprised that in Sanskrit there is only one word for both death and time. It is kal. Kal also means tomorrow - tomorrow there is only death and nothing else; life is today.

As you become peaceful.... Your tensions are your weight. When the tensions are not there, you become weightless.

And the consciousness which is your reality has no time-space limitation. Your body grows from childhood to youth to old age to death - these changes are happening only to the body. These are the changes of the furniture in the house... painting the house, changing its architecture. But the man who lives in the house - the master of the house - is unaffected by all these things.

Consciousness is the master.

Your body is only the house.

So the moment you enter meditation you have touched within yourself something of the universal - which has no age, which has no limitation either of time or space.

This is not only happening to you. I receive many letters from older sannyasins saying that they are feeling so young, and they don't see any generation gap. They mix with sannyasins and not for a moment does the idea come that they are eighty years old and these are twenty year-old kids. But they communicate and nobody thinks that it is a little strange.

One woman sannyasin from Scotland wrote to me, "Now, Osho it is going too far!" She is seventy- eight, and now she is running after butterflies! And the whole village thinks she has gone mad because she is continuously laughing and enjoying and the village cannot believe it. Because they have seen her, always miserable... they cannot believe what has happened to her. She is behaving like a small child.

She asked me, "What to do? Should I try to behave in the old way?"

I said, "You can try, but you cannot succeed. So don't waste your time, just go after the butterflies.

And why bother about the idiots of the village? You enjoy yourself."

Meditation is not something mental.

Meditation is something concerned with your being.

Just plugging into it a little... and suddenly everything is different. The body will go in its own way, but you will know that you are not the body. People will die, but you will know that death is impossible.

Your own death will come - but meditation prepares you for death so that you can go dancing and singing into the ultimate silence, leaving the form behind and disappearing into the formless.

Question 3:

Ecstasy can create a chemical change for the time being. It can make you feel a great well-being, more intensity in life, more color in the world. But this is only going to last for few hours and then you will again be back with a thump on the ground, and now life will look even more miserable, because now you have something to compare it with.

Drugs like Ecstasy cannot reach your consciousness. They can only reach your mind. They have nothing parallel to meditation.

Meditation reaches your consciousness. It is a state of no-mind. And drugs like Ecstasy reach only to the mind, and give you a euphoria, beautiful dreams, fantasies which appear to be real. So when people tell you that they have experienced so many beautiful things, you feel sad. You have been meditating and you have not felt anything and these people are feeling things through an ordinary, chemical drug.

Their experiences will not happen to you.

The path of the drug and the path of meditation are totally different.

On the path of meditation, you will experience silence; you will experience a joy without any reason; you will experience immense light, a luminosity arising from your very center - as if you have become a star. But these things only happen in the beginning part of meditation. As meditation grows, all experiences start going.

The ultimate in meditation is a state of no experience.

Just pure nothingness - because that is the source of existence and that is the place where existence goes again and again to renew itself.

Now we have on experimental grounds the conclusion that has been reached in the East by many mystics, that just as everything in existence moves in a circle - stars, sun, the moon, the earth, everything moves in a circle - everything that is born, dies. Earths are born and then they die. Of course, they have a long life. This earth has been here for four million years. But this is not a long life; it is still a child. Four million years means nothing because the sun is almost ten million years old and our sun is not very old; it is one of the youngest in the universe.

There are suns which are so old and so far away that when I came to know about it, it was really shocking. There are suns so far away that they will never know that the earth existed - for the simple reason that when the earth was born four million years ago, the rays that started moving towards the earth from those faraway suns have not yet reached. The distance is so great. By the time they reach, the earth will be finished.

So if somebody from that star were trying to find about the earth, he would miss it completely because it would be lost between two rays. If he were taking a photograph, no image would appear on his film - just emptiness.

In this vast universe, the Eastern mystics have come to realize that even the whole universe goes into death once in a while. Planets die, suns die, stars die - every day new stars are born, new planets are born. Whole solar systems have disappeared, not leaving even a trace behind, and new solar systems have appeared. They say, and I agree with them, that the whole universe dies. Then there is darkness; everything has gone to sleep. And again there will be dawn; again planets will be born, stars will be born - a new cycle of creation. Millions of cycles of creation have happened and they will go on happening.

Your consciousness belongs to the eternal which never dies. At the most, it goes into sleep when the whole universe dies, and comes back in the morning awake, fresh - a new world is beginning.

Just remember one thing: that for all the secrets of life, meditation is the only key. So go deeper into meditation and don't be bothered about experiences. Just look at those people who are taking Ecstasy. I don't think it is a dangerous drug, but look at those people. Do you see the light of the eyes of Gautam Buddha? Do you see in their gestures the grace of a Krishna? Do you see something in their life that has changed because of their experiences?

Nothing has changed. They have become more sad, more miserable. Now the only hankering is to get the drug - they can remain hungry, but the drug is needed. They are deceiving themselves.

The only criterion for a right method is that it should transform your life. You will become more peaceful, more loving, more intelligent, more aware. Your life should show it - only then is what you are doing right. If by taking a drug you enjoy dreams, I will not say don't enjoy dreams because I am always for totality - enjoy totally! But you don't know anything about meditation. At least, don't disturb the meditators. You are disturbed.... Soon you will get fed up. Those same scenes which were psychedelic in the beginning will start becoming ordinary. And what are you going to gain?

Your ignorance remains the same, your cruelty remains the same, your anger, your violence, your jealousies remain the same.

Meditation is a science of transforming the qualities of life. It is not just to give you a little consolation or a little entertainment. It is to transform you so that you can become part of the universal circus.

It is so hilarious; you just have to be clear enough to see it. Just watch any man and you will be surprised: the world is full of hilarious people, but nobody is taking note. Otherwise you need not go and waste your money - just sit by the side of the road and watch the show.

Don't be bothered by any experiences that people who are taking drugs will tell you about. Meditation is not concerned with experiences but with the experiencer. Experiences are outside things.

Meditation is concerned with you, not what happens to you, not what you see.... A beautiful rose - certainly under the influence of a drug it will look more beautiful, more radiant but still, what is the use? You remain the same person. Your heart does not open its petals, you are as dead as before.

Except for meditation there is no way. Drugs can give you hallucinations, illusory experiences....

I am not in any way against anything. My whole approach is to use everything in such a way that it can become a nourishment to life, an evolution to consciousness. I am not against drugs either. It is such a foolishness on the part of governments all over the world that alcohol is not condemned, although alcohol is more dangerous than any of the drugs.

This is how you can see that you are being dominated by fools. Alcohol is allowed, and drugs....

Many of them are harmless, but thousands of people and particularly young men and women are in jails because they were taking drugs that the governments decided should not be taken.

It is strange that the government does not ask the medical colleges to investigate whether they are harmful or not, and if some drug is harmful, but gives a beautiful experience - illusory, hallucinatory, but at least something in this world which is just like a desert... If some drug has some harmful effects, medical science is advanced enough to remove those harmful effects. Drugs can be purified to such an extent that anybody can take them and have the experience. Because no government has the right to prevent anybody from having any experience. He is not harming anybody....

The function of the government should be to take care of people. There are so many medical colleges around the world - do research, find something which gives beautiful experiences to people, nourishment to the body, health to the mind. And you will be surprised at why I am saying this. I am saying this because if good, harmless drugs are made available and people are allowed to take them, these people are soon going to be fed up with the drugs and their experiences.

Sooner or later they are going to move towards meditation - there is no other way.

We will have used the drugs. Without harming the person we will have managed it so that the drug has given him some experience and now he wants something more which the drug cannot give.

And in fact, as you take a drug every day its impact goes on declining. Every day you have to add more quantity. But finally, every drug becomes useless, your body becomes immune to it.

I have been with people who have taken all sorts of drugs but they are not drug-addicted people; they are following an ancient path which has used drugs. And then the moment comes when drugs don't affect them at all. You can give them as much quantity as possible, and nothing happens to them.

In their monasteries they have dangerous serpents, particularly cobras. If you are bitten by a cobra you are finished. And these people allow the cobra to bite on their tongues! In the beginning they have psychedelic experiences, and now the cobra poison cannot kill them... they are full of poison.

The strangest thing is that the cobra dies because the poor cobra has never come across such a man - so full of poisons! The cobra has a small gland in his mouth, that is all - the rest of his body is without any poison. In China, the cobra is a delicacy - just cut the head and you have a beautiful vegetable.

The people I was talking about soon get immune to cobra poison too, and that is their test. Then their master allows them initiation. Now nothing can create hallucination in them.

So drugs have been used in the East for centuries as a help to meditation. Now they have destroyed all possibility in the man that any poison, any drug can create illusion. His consciousness is far stronger now. No poison can kill him, no poison can make him even unconscious - he remains alert and conscious.

As far as I am concerned these people were doing the right thing and it will be good if rather than behaving fascistically, we allow our people to have the experience if they want - but give it in such a way that soon it can indicate to them the path leading towards some meditation.

I am not against drugs. I am not against anything, because everything can be used in the right way and everything can be used in a wrong way. Poison can be medicine and medicine can be poison, it all depends.