14 Osho Quotes on Love For Valentine's Day!
14 Osho quotes on Love for Valentine’s Day
As an Osho Sannyasin, I am always bemused when people who don’t know Osho ask me about him and his “status” as the “sex guru”. There is an insinuation that there is something amiss with Osho and his teachings – sex after all is not about spirituality and meditation — is it? My response varies depending on who I’m talking too and how interested they really are in Osho, an enlightened Master who is all about Love – really!
Last Saturday, at lunch with my fellow kundalini yoga teachers this came up again. I was asked (very kindly, by a dear friend), “Osho, I don’t know about him, isn’t he the sex guru?” I responded passionately about how Osho was not about sex, he was about love. When we repress our sexuality which is our life-force energy it becomes perverted and seeps out in dysfunctional ways that do not allow us to step into our higher possibilities. Think of it this way, our sex chakra is at the root of our spine and is our lowest chakra. When we repress that energy and it doesn’t flow freely we are putting a choke hold on our authentic beings: our personal power, our creativity, our natural ability to feel and receive pleasure and love, our voice, our authenticity all rise from this root center. When we repress our energy at this level we become easily controlled and manipulated and spend our lives trying to please others, always seeking input from the outside for who we are and what we should do, what we should say - how we should be. Its unnatural and stymies us on all levels. It also leads to harm and perversion (look at all the religious and spiritual leaders caught up in sex scandals and the tragic betrayal and resulting injury caused to the victims).
So in celebration of Valentine’s Day this year here are 14 Osho quotes on Love (and some on sex too).
1. Healthy love.
"The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you.
It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one's body, one has to love one's soul, one has to love one's totality.
And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself.”
2. Love Yourself.
“Yes, I would like you to love yourself, because unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody else. You don't know what love is if you have not loved yourself. But before you can love yourself you have to know yourself; hence love is secondary, meditation is primary.
3. Love Your Own Temple.
“Love is a spiritual experience – nothing to do with sexes and nothing to do with bodies, but something to do with the innermost being. But you have not even entered into your own temple. You don't know at all who you are and you are asking about love. First be thyself; first know thyself – and love will come as a reward. It is a reward from the beyond. It showers on you like flowers, fills your being. And it goes on showering on you, and it brings with it a tremendous longing to share. That sharing can only be indicated in human language as ‘love’ It does not say much, but it indicates the right direction. Love is a shadow of alertness, of consciousness.
4. Love is a Byproduct of Meditation
“Discover your consciousness and you will find what love is. It is an experience, and there is no way to say anything about it, more than that which I have said. The meeting of two consciousnesses merging into each other brings the greatest orgasm the universe allows.
But before that, you have to move away from the body and the mind and the heart, and reach to the very center of your being.
Once you have reached to the center of your being, you will find love radiating from you. It is not something to be done by you. It will be just as if the sun has risen and the flowers have opened, and the air has become filled with their fragrance. Love is a by-product of meditation. Only meditators know what love is.”
5. Love is a State of Being.
"The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love but one is love. Whenever I talk about love remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension, because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is – and you don't know. Love basically is a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.
And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling but by rising, soaring upwards, higher than you. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A Buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.”
6. Love and Being Alone
"One can be in deep love and yet be alone. In fact, one can be alone only when one is in deep love. The depth of love creates an ocean around you, a deep ocean, and you become an island, utterly alone. Yes, the ocean goes on throwing its waves on your shore, but the more the ocean crashes with its waves on your shore, the more integrated you are, the more rooted, the more centered you are. Love has value only because it gives you aloneness. It gives you space enough to be on your own.
7. Sex and Transcendence
“Sex is raw energy. It has to be transformed, and through transformation there is transcendence. Rather than transforming it, religions have been repressing it. And if you repress it the natural outcome is a perverted human being. He becomes obsessed with sex.
“The people who call me ‘sex guru’ are obsessed with sex. I have not talked about sex more than I have talked about meditation, love, God, prayer, but nobody seems to be interested in God, love, meditation, prayer. If I say anything about sex, immediately they jump upon it.
"Create meditation out of sex; make sex an object of meditation. Treat it as a temple and you will transcend it and be transformed. Then sex will not be there, but there will not be any suppression, any sublimation. Sex will just become irrelevant, meaningless. You have grown beyond it. It makes no sense to you now….In the same way, the more you meditate, the less sex will have an appeal to you. And by and by, spontaneously, without a conscious effort to sublimate sex, energy will have a new source to flow to. The same energy that has flowed through sex will now flow through meditation. And when it flows through meditation, the divine door is being opened."
8. Sex and Path of Oneness
"I am not against sex and I am not for love. You still have to transcend it. Meditate on it; transcend it. By meditation I mean you have to pass through it fully alert, aware. You must not pass through it blindly, unconsciously. Great bliss is there, but you can pass by blindly and miss it. This blindness has to be transformed; you must become open-eyed. With open eyes, sex can take you on the path of oneness."
9. Enter the Presence of the Other Through Love
"Holding the hand of your woman or man, why not sit silently? Why not close your eyes and feel? Feel the presence of the other, enter into the presence of the other, let the other's presence enter into you; vibrate together, sway together; if suddenly a great energy possesses you, dance together – and you will reach to such orgasmic peaks of joy as you have never known before. Those orgasmic peaks have nothing to do with sex, in fact they have much to do with silence.
And if you can also manage to become meditative in your sex life, if you can be silent while making love, in a kind of dance, you will be surprised. You have a built-in process to take you to the farthest shore."
10. Let Love be Your Message
“MY BELOVED ONES: I love you. Love is my message -- let it be your message too. Love is my color and my climate. To me, love is the only religion. All else is just rubbish, all else is nothing but mind-churning dreams. Love is the only substantial thing in life, all else is illusion. Let love grow in you and God will be growing on its own accord. If you miss love you will miss God and all. There is no way to God without love...."
11. You are Love
“Love has to be cherished, tasted very slowly, so that it suffuses your being and becomes such a possessing experience that you are no more. It is not that you are making love — you are love.”
12. Love the Other With No Judgment
Only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core into the other person -- without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without creating "the other," reducing the other into a thing, and without becoming addicted with the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other."
How can you know the other? You can love and through love this miracle happens. If you love the other, great understanding arises on its own. Not that you try to understand the other: you simply love the other as he is, with no judgment."
13. Love is a Byproduct of Meditation.
“And the miracle is, if you meditate and slowly, slowly get out of the ego and out of your personality and realize your real self, love will come on its own. You don't have to do anything, it is a spontaneous flowering. But it blossoms only in a certain climate, and that climate I call meditation. In the climate of silence – no-mind, no disturbance inside, absolute clarity, peace and silence – suddenly, you will see thousands of flowers have opened within you, and their fragrance is love.
14. Love is a Guest that Comes
“I teach you to be more conscious. And love will come as you become more conscious: it is a guest that comes, that comes inevitably to those who are ready and prepared to receive it.”