Love: The bridge to reach God

Jesus and many enlightened masters have proclaimed that God is love. And for thousands of years people have been searching God, without being in love, without paying attention to this profound teaching. The search for God did not make them a loving people; instead, they became against love, as if it was their love which was a hindrance to their search for God. For this, they rejected and renounced love. They became lonely in their life as it was bound to happen. Due to this fallacious thinking their life got dried out, they became lifeless. And they could not find God either.

Love is the essence that nourishes life — makes life worth living, otherwise we don’t have any real purpose to be in this world. And if we wish to search God, love is actually the bridge. And a bridge has always to points which really make it a bridge. Love is essentially a bridge between the mundane and the sacred, the earth and the heaven, and a bridge between all forms of life to relate. Even if one has to go across anywhere or to transcend, one has to use a bridge. Destroying a bridge is really idiotic.

The real problem is not love but the way we look at it. We do not approach love with understanding and sensitivity. When we fall in love, it really becomes falling, not rising or growing.

In our unawareness, love starts becoming impure. A point comes when it is nothing else but impurities. Attachments, possessiveness, bondage and jealousy are the main impurities which bring a real fall.

One becomes confined to some suffocating relationship and feels imprisoned. This is not conducive to a human soul that needs an open sky to grow.

Any type of restrictions and boundaries are against the nature of the soul, which is something godly, something divine, in the heart of all beings. We are all made of godliness, but when we cannot see and feel this within us, we become loveless. This is a real fall and this way we do fall in love.

Osho, shows us the way to rise in love. He says: “Love knows no boundaries. Love cannot be jealous, because love cannot possess. It is ugly, the very idea that you possess somebody because you love.”

“You possess somebody — it means you have killed somebody and turned him into a commodity. Only things can be possessed. Love gives freedom. Love is freedom.”

Osho is not against man-woman relationships, as some mahatmas have been preaching. He wants qualitative transformation of relationships to make them divine.

Osho lays emphasis on loving. The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is, because he will not have the mirror to see his own reflection.

Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror.

But the higher love needs that you should be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armour that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you’ that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you’ that is the fear in being in love.”

Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other.

And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, “I have known her”, or, “I have known him”.

At the most you can say, “I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery”. In fact, the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.

Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance