Love never shatters you completely. It simply shatters you a little, a little bit. It shatters the crust of your ego, but the centre of the ego remains intact.
Then there is a deeper pain, deeper than love, and that is of prayer — it shatters you utterly.
It is a death. When you have learnt how to love, and you have learnt that the pain that love brings is a blessing in disguise, it is beautiful, it is tremendously beautiful, then you become able and you take another step — that step is prayer.
With a human lover you can exist, but with God as your love you cannot exist. That passion is so great, it simply burns you utterly. No residue is left.
In love you are simply burnt, but you are there. Lovers remain, overlapping each other, burning each other a little in their fire, but not burnt completely.
That is the beauty of love, and that is its misery too. Unless you are completely shattered, no residue remains, the ego is gone, totally gone, there will remain a little misery.
All lovers feel a little miserable. They would like to disappear completely, but it is not possible in human relationship. Human relationship is limited. But one learns from it, that there is a possibility: if it can happen so much in a human relationship, how much more can happen in a relationship with the Divine?
Love makes you ready to take the final jump, the quantum leap. That's what I call prayer, or you can call it meditation. If you use Buddhist terminology, it is meditation; if you use Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian terminology, it is prayer. But the meaning is the same.
You have to disappear for God to be. Love is a training ground, a school, to learn first lessons — of the beauty, of the blessing and benediction of disappearance; to learn that pain is blessed.
And then a desire arises to feel the ultimate pain. The Hindu devotees have called it VIRAH — ultimate pain; the pain that will remain unless one is consumed by God, consumed in God.
So when you are in love, or when love arises, cooperate with it, don't try resisting. People come to a compromise. Lovers — I have watched thousands of lovers.
Every day they come to me; they bring their problems.
But the basic problem that I have been looking at is that lovers by and by come to a compromise. The compromise is: You don't hurt me, I will not hurt you. That's what marriage is.
Then people become settled. They become so afraid of pain that they say, "Don't hurt me and I will not hurt you." But then when pain disappears, love also disappears. They exist together.
OSHO
