Love and Meditation
Osho,The Last Testament, Volume 2, Discourse 21
How can
people turn the human phenomenon of falling in love into a
meditation?
IT IS
THE EASIEST WAY. In human life, love is the closest phenomenon to
meditation. The moment you fall in love with someone, what actually happens?
What transpires between those two who have fallen in love with each other?
They drop their egos -- at least for each other. They drop their
hypocrisies, their masks. They want to be together, almost one soul within
two bodies. That's the desire of love.
And this
is a beautiful moment to change it into a meditation. Just nobody has ever
told them. In fact, just the opposite has been told to them: that love is
against meditation, so people who are falling in love can never become
meditators.
THE SAME
PEOPLE who make celibacy spiritual make love unspiritual, something dirty,
condemned. But to me things are totally different. Love helps you to relax,
which is part of meditation. Love helps you to be joyous, which is part of
meditation. Love helps you, for a few moments at least, to be silent, which
is the essential part of meditation. And finally, making love, if you attain
to an orgasmic experience, gives you a glimpse of what meditation is, but it
is millions of times more than this.
So to
me, love is a basic experience which can help you to become meditators. The
old religions have been preventing it, and they have been preventing it for
a certain reason. If people can transform their love into meditation, then
the priests and the churches and the synagogues are no more needed, then
people are totally free. No spiritual leadership is needed. And there are
millions of priests around the world, like parasites on humanity. And
naturally they will give you wrong ideas, against love, and they will give
you ideas for meditation, but because you don't have the basic
experience....
LOVE IS
JUST LIKE when you enter into a swimming pool, step by step you are going
into deeper water. Then the floor of the swimming pool is divided in two
parts, one for those who cannot swim, so the water is up to your neck, and
then the second part for those who can swim.
But
those who want to learn swimming have to learn in the first part, which is
not for swimmers. They have to learn it there. Once they have learned, then
slowly they will gather courage and enter into deeper water, because for a
swimmer it does not matter how deep the water is; the swimmer is always on
the surface. The water may be a hundred feet deep, five hundred feet deep,
or five miles deep, it makes no difference to the swimmer. It makes a
difference only to the non-swimmer. Beyond five feet, everything is death.
But the swimming pool is one -- shallow, deep -- it is one. And the boundary
line is only a line until you learn to swim.
To me,
love and meditation are just like that. Love is the shallow space in a
swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn
meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same
kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been
made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and
you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.
So they
disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative
life by sheer strategy: because you don't know swimming, you cannot go so
deep. And you don't have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a
little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic -- these will give you the hints
how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the
same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.
WHAT
ACTUALLY HAPPENS when one couple moves into the realm of orgasmic
experience? What actually happens? Every point has to be understood. Time
stops. For a moment the pendulum does not move, and that single moment seems
to be almost eternity. The two persons are no more two -- for a moment. They
have melted into each other. There is no thought in the mind, for a moment.
It is all empty and silent, and these are the things which have to be
deepened in meditation.
And once
you have tasted them, you will be surprised that it does not depend on the
other person. Something happens within you. Something happens within the
other person. But it is not dependent. If you can sit silently, if you can
manage, by watching your thoughts, to bring a gap, a stop, you will suddenly
see time has stopped again. And now it is in your hands, not in the hands of
biology. You can keep this time stopped as long as you want. And once you
know the secret key....
The key
is: no thoughts, no ego, no time -- you just are.
That's
why I have never been against love. I have been much condemned for it,
naturally, because I was cutting the very roots of the business of all the
religions.
EVERY
RELIGION IS against me. Their profession depends on condemning love and
praising meditation. They know you cannot attain to meditation, and they
know now your love is condemned, it is a sin. You will never experience any
orgasmic phenomenon, so meditation will remain just a philosophy, and your
life will remain loveless, angry, full of rage, ready to explode at any
excuse. Because where will your energy go?
It could
have become peace, silence, joy, blissfulness. You did not allow it to
become that. That repressed energy turns into poison. That's why everybody
is irritable, annoyed, worried, tense. The simple reason is that they have
lost the natural source of relaxation.
No
animal looks irritated, annoyed, angry, because they don't understand the
language the priests speak.
They
have never heard that celibacy is spiritual. Of course they cannot attain to
meditation, but they are far better than those human beings who could have
attained meditative heights, but have lost even the simple biological
experience of orgasm.
THOSE
ARE SIMPLY indications of your possibilities, potentialities. And it is
easier to experiment with something natural in the beginning and then to try
something which is supernatural, which belongs to higher nature.
And once
you know how to be silent, how to be thoughtless, how to be in a state of no
time, no mind, you experience such orgasmic joy, which has nothing to do
with sex, it has such purity and such innocence.
A man
who has attained to that purity and innocence has no need of sex, it is no
longer a psychological problem for him. But there is no prohibition either.
He can enjoy sex too, and he will enjoy it more than anybody else, because
his orgasm will immediately become meditative.
Having
experienced the meditative orgasm -- such a greater phenomenon -- his sexual
orgasm will immediately trigger the bigger orgasm. He can play with sex.
There is no harm in it. There is no need, but there is no prohibition
either. It is up to him.
THE MEDITATIVE ORGASM absorbs your sexual energy, because you don't have any
other energy. Your whole energy is sexual energy, and that vast explosion of
joy simply absorbs all your energy. Hence, you need not become a pervert,
you need not make an effort to remain celibate. It is just your choice.
If you want to play old games once in a while, it is perfectly good. In
fact, perhaps it should be a part of every enlightened man's life to have
sex once in a while, because that will change the attitude of the whole
world about sex.
Without that, it is very difficult to change. Then they can see that even an
enlightened person can enjoy sex. There is nothing sin-like in it. And it
will join the enlightened man and unenlightened man in a bridge. At least on
one point, both experience the same thing....
Love is a natural kind of meditation. And meditation is a supernatural kind
of love.
SPREAD THE LOVE
