Remember, if you cannot love a person you cannot love humanity. That may be a trick.
Those who cannot love persons — because it is very dangerous to love a person — they always think they love humanity. Where is humanity? Can you find it anywhere?
It is just a word. Humanity exists nowhere. Wherever you go you will find a person existing. Life is persons, not humanity. Life is always personified, it exists as an individual. Society, country, humanity, are just words. Where is society? Where is the country, the motherland?
You cannot love a mother, and you love a motherland? You must be deceiving somewhere. But the word is good, beautiful: motherland. You need not bother about the motherland, because the motherland is not a person, it is a fiction in your mind. It is your own ego.
You can love humanity, you can love the motherland, you can love society, and you are not capable of loving a person — because a person creates difficulties. Society will never create a difficulty because it is just a word. You need not surrender to it. You can dominate the word, the fiction, but you cannot dominate a person.
Even with a small child it is impossible, you cannot dominate him because he has his own ego, he has his own mind, he has his own ways. It is almost impossible to dominate life but words can be easily dominated — because you are alone there.
People who cannot love a person start loving God. They don't know what they are doing. To talk to a person, to communicate to a person, is a difficult matter. It needs skill, it needs a very loving heart, it needs a very KNOWING heart, understanding heart. Only then can you touch a person, because to touch a person is to move in a dangerous arena — life is throbbing there also. And each person is so unique that you cannot be mechanical about it.
You have to be very alert and watchful. You have to become more sensitive if you love a person; only then does understanding arise.
But to love a god who is somewhere sitting in the sky, it is a monologue. Go to the churches — people are talking to no one. They are as crazy as people you will find in the madhouses, but that madness is accepted by the society and this madness is not accepted, that is the only difference.
Go to a madhouse; you will find people talking alone, nobody is there. They talk, and not only do they say something, they answer also. They make it LOOK like a dialogue; it is a monologue. Then go to the churches and the temples; there people are talking to God. That too is a monologue, and if they really go mad they start doing both things: they say something and they answer also, and they feel that God has answered.
You cannot do that unless you have learned how to love a person. If you love a person, by and by the person becomes the door to the whole. But one has to start with the person, with the small, with the atomic. You cannot take the jump. The Ganges cannot simply jump into the ocean, it has to start in the Gangotri, just a small stream; then wider and wider and bigger and bigger it goes, and then finally it merges with the ocean.
The Ganga, the Ganges of love, also has to start just like a small stream, with persons, then it goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Once you know the beauty of it, the beauty of surrender, the beauty of insecurity, the beauty of being open to all that life gives — bliss and suffering both — then you get bigger and bigger and bigger and expand, and the consciousness finally becomes an ocean. Then you fall into God, into the divine. But because of fear you create insensitivity — and the society respects it.
Society does not want you to be very alive because alive people are rebellious.
OSHO
