Love can never possess. Love is giving freedom to the other. Love is an unconditional gift, it is not a bargain.
You become so intense that you are not there, because if you are there then the intensity cannot be total; then two are there. If you love and the lover is there, then love cannot be intense. Love so deeply, so totally, that the lover disappears. Then you are just an energy moving. Then you will know love, you will know life, you will know death.
When you love a woman don’t be bothered about what others have said about love, because that is going to be an interference. You love a woman, the love is there, forget all that you have learned about love. Forget all Kinseys, forget all Masters and Johnsons, forget all Freuds and Jungs. Please don’t become a language professor. Just love the woman and let love be there, and let love lead you and guide you into its innermost secrets, into its mysteries. Then you will be able to know what love is.
You can come to know the truth only when you are in love. But love never argues. There is no argument in love, because there is no aggression.
If you love, love totally; if you hate, hate totally. Don’t be fragmentary; suffer the consequences. Because of consequences you try to deceive.
If you love a woman, you can dominate her. That’s why lovers go on playing politics with each other, dominating, possessing; the fear is there that if you don’t dominate you will be lost and the other will dominate, so they continuously fight. Husbands and wives, lovers, go on fighting; the fight is for existence, to survive. The fear is there, “I may be lost in the other.”
Surrender is just like love. That’s why I say only lovers can become sannyasins — because they know a little of how to surrender. Love is the first step towards the divine, surrender is the last. And two steps is the whole journey.
Don’t allow the fear to overpower you, allow love to overpower you. Love comes from the center, fear always comes from the periphery; don’t allow this periphery to be dominant. And what have you got to lose?
A silence is needed before death, before life, before love. If you love a person you sit silently with the person. You would not like to chatter, you would like to just hold their hand and live and be silent in that moment. If you chatter, that means you are avoiding the person — love is not really there. If you love life, chattering will drop, because every moment is so filled with life that there is no way, no space to chatter. Each moment life is flooding you so vitally — where is the time to gossip and chatter?
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.
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.
Deep love creates deep fear. It looks like death because the I disappears, the you disappears — and it is a sort of death. And when you die, only then do you enter into the divine.
I have been continuously surprised by people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, ‘This is going to be a death. Beware!’
This is the case with millions of people. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a ‘heady’ thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown.
When you see love between two persons, something is flowing, moving, changing. When there is love between two persons they live in an aura, there is a constant sharing. Their vibrations are reaching to : each other; they are broadcasting their being to each other. There is no wall between them, they are two and yet not two — they are one also.
People have become afraid of love because in love also, death penetrates. If two lovers are sitting side by side in deep love and intimacy, not even talking…. Talking is an escape, an escape from love. When two lovers are talking that simply shows they are avoiding the intimacy. Words in-between give distance — with no words distance disappears, death appears. In silence there is death just lurking around — a beautiful phenomenon. But people are so afraid that they go on talking whether it is needed or not. They go on talking about anything, everything — but they cannot keep silent.
I am not talking against life. How can I talk against life? I am madly in love with life! I am so madly in love with life, that because of it I have fallen in love with death also. It is part of life. When you love life totally how can you avoid death? You have to love death also. When you love a flower deeply, you love its withering away also: When you love a woman deeply, you love her getting old also, you one day love her death also. That is part, part of the woman. The old age has not happened from the outside, it has come from the inside. The beautiful face has become wrinkled now — you love those wrinkles also. They are part of your woman. You love a man and his hair has grown white — you love those hairs also. They have not happened from the outside; they are not accidents. Life is unfolding. Now the black hair has disappeared and the grey hair has come. You don’t reject them, you love them, they are a part. Then your man becomes old, becomes weak — you love that too. Then one day the man is gone — you love that too. Love loves all. Love knows nothing else than love. Hence I say love death. If you can love death it will be very simple to love life. If you can love even death, there is no problem.
