The fourth is ANAHATA: it goes beyond sexuality, becomes pure love. When you see a flower, a roseflower, and your heart throbs with it, there is no sexuality. There is no question of man and woman, there is no polarity — you are simply thrilled by the beauty. The beauty has no reference to man and woman, the beauty is beyond man and woman. You look into the night, the whole sky full of stars, and suddenly you are thrilled to your very core of being. A tremendous joy arises… you start meeting with the stars. There is no question of man and woman, there is no yin and yang — it is not a question of polarity at all.
Love goes beyond polarity, sex remains below polarity. Sex needs the opposite, love does not need the opposite. Hence, in sex there is always a subtle conflict, because with the opposite the harmony can never be total. For moments maybe… again the conflict comes in. Lovers go on fighting. In fact, psychologists say, when two lovers stop fighting, it simply shows love has disappeared. Lovers are intimate enemies. They go on quarreling, nagging. Yes, there are moments when they completely dissolve into each other but those are rare moments, few and far between.
With love, polarity disappears. Love is more like friendship. You can love a tree, you can love a rock, you can love the stars, you can love the grass, you can love anything. Love has nothing to do with the male-female polarity. Love is beyond opposites — hence, the unity is deeper. This is the fourth chakra — ANAHATA — the heart chakra. And with this fourth you really become human. Up to the third you were part of the animal kingdom, one of the animals — nothing more, nothing special. With the fourth you become special, unique: humanity is born, you have become a human being.
Remember, just to look like human beings does not mean that you are a human being. Only with the fourth center starting functioning, you become a human being. Many people die as animals; they never rise above sexuality. They never come to know that there is a kind of love which is beyond opposites and which is tremendously fulfilling because there is no conflict in it. Love is unconditional, sex is conditional. In sex there is a give and take. In love, you simply pour. You don't ask, there is no demand. Not that you don't get — you get a thousandfold — but that is not asked for. That simply comes on its own accord: the whole existence showers back, echoes back.
At the fourth center there is again a unity: the lower and the higher meet. Remember these unities, because by and by we are moving towards becoming one. First plane, matter meets with matter. Second plane, vital meets with the vital. Third plane, opposites meet: the male meets the female, yin meets yang. Fourth — ANAHATA — the lower meets the higher. Three centers are lower than the ANAHATA and three centers are higher than the ANAHATA: ANAHATA is the door in between — the bridge.
At your heart center God meets the world, the unmanifest meets the manifest, the unknown meets the known, the host meets the guest, mind meets the no-mind. The heart is the most mysterious center in man. And unless your heart starts functioning, you will not know what is the purpose of life. With the heart, the first beginning of the higher. Vast spaces open… you are getting out of the tunnel.
ANAHATA is a great window; it makes you available to the sky and makes the sky available to you. Or in another way you can say: at ANAHATA, in love, unconscious and superconscious meet. Or in still another way you can say: in ANAHATA, in love, sex and prayer meet. Sex is lower than love, prayer is higher than love. And love is a great mystery. Something in it is of sex, certainly, and something in it is of prayer. Hence, there is no mystery comparable to love. There is something of sex: if you go and love a tree, you would like to hug it; you would like to touch it in the same way as you would like to touch your beloved's face. If you love a rock, you would like to kiss it in the same way as you would like to kiss your beloved's lips — something of sex, something lingering from the past. And still, when you kiss a rock there is reverence, great awe, great wonder. You are full of respect, you are prayerful: it is a sort of worship.
In love, prayer and sex meet. If you are not alert, love can fall down and become sexual. If you are aware enough, love can rise high and become prayerful. That has to be remembered. Love is very fragile. There is more possibility that love will descend into the lower realm and become sex. When for the first time you fall in love with a woman or with a man, there may be nothing of sex. Sooner or later, sex enters. When first you look at a beautiful woman, there may be reverence, a great awe — as if you have seen God's face in her face. When you look into the eyes of a woman, suddenly a door opens to the mysterious. You are not thinking in terms of sex and body and the physical; you are not concerned at all. Something of the higher has challenged you. But then you fall in love, and by and by you forget the higher and you enter into the lower.
Love almost always falls into the lower because we are not conscious. And that's why, in all the languages, whenever a person moves into love we say of him, "He has fallen in love." People fall in love; very rarely do people rise in love. Remember, the formulation is very correct. Love starts as something very high, romantic, poetic, divine, and then by and by settles on something very ordinary, physical, rotten.
Love starts as a prayer, love's beginning is religious — but love ends in a nightmare. Remember it: if you are alert you can help yourself not to fall, you can help and discipline yourself to rise. Then love can become prayer.
At ANAHATA — the heart center — the lower and the higher meet. It is a great experience of oneness: very fragile of course, trembling, shaking, not very certain; like a process — moving forward, going backward — but if you are alert you can use it as a stepping-stone for still higher possibilities.
OSHO