Osho – Love has no motive, love simply is. Love is absurd, meaning- less, purposeless

Question – Osho, I have fallen in love with you. Why?

Osho – Larry Obenfeld, I AM SORRY, YOUR QUESTION IS UNANSWERABLE. This is the only question which cannot be answered — hence the beauty of it. Whenever you come across a question which is unanswerable you are very close to God. Love is a mystery, not a problem. It can be lived but it cannot be solved. In fact it is not a question, that’s why it cannot be answered. You can make a question out of it, but your question remains just a linguistic formulation of something which can never be reduced to a question.

Love has no motive, love simply is. Love is absurd, meaning- less, purposeless. And that’s why it is so beautiful. It is not a commodity, it is not a thing of the world. It is something from the beyond, it is a visitor from the beyond. So we cannot find any reason for it.

If you can find any reason for your love then it is not love; then it must be something else. If you can answer why, that will simply mean it was something else, not love. Love is the purpose of all, hence love itself cannot have any purpose. Love is the end of all; everything else is a means towards love, hence love cannot be a means to something else. It is the ultimate value.

But the question arises because the mind knows only how to create questions. It can’t accept something which is a mystery. The mysterious creates fear in the mind, because the mind cannot manipulate it. The mind starts raising questions, a thousand and one, and the mind will not feel at ease unless those questions are answered. If those questions are not answered then the mind has the tendency to deny the whole phenomenon itself. Then the mind will say, “If the why cannot be known, then love cannot be.”

Mind believes only if it is capable of manipulating some thing. That’s why mind goes on denying God — because God is nothing but the very essence of love. And mind goes on denying love, and mind goes on denying beauty, and mind goes on denying everything that comes as a mystery. Either the mind has to reduce it to knowledge… and if the mind feels impotent to reduce it to knowledge it starts denying it: “There is no God, there is no love, there is no mystery.”

The mysterious is frightening, because the mysterious is vast. And the mind feels lost in the mysterious. That’s why in all the languages the expression exists: “falling in love.” It is a condemnation from the mind. The mind is saying, “You are falling. You are going lower than yourself. You are moving into something which is not true, because it cannot be formulated in clearcut concepts. You are falling into something vague, something cloudy; you are becoming a chaos. Avoid it.”

Mind always says, “Avoid love.” And that’s why in the world you find so little love — because the world is full of mind. We teach mind. From the very childhood, from the kindergarten to the university, we go on teaching mind, and we avoid the heart. We have learnt the ways to bypass the heart completely — because the heart is the door of the mysterious where whys cannot be answered.

And if a man has avoided the heart he has avoided all the joys of life. He has avoided his own interiormost core, his interiority. He has avoided his subjectivity. He has avoided the greatest experience that life makes possible: the experience of love.

Obenfeld, please drop the why. If you have fallen in love, go on falling more and more. There is no end to it; it is a bottom- less abyss — the more you fall, the more you become able to fall further. And the deeper you have gone into the abyss, the greater and greater the mysteries that become available. Then life is a poetry, not a prose. Then life is not a noise but a melody. Then life is not matter but God.

But slowly slowly all whys, all hows will disappear. You will live in the is-ness of the moment. Your life will have a tremendous presence, but no answers. You will know what life is but you will not have any knowledge at all. Knowing is one thing, knowledge another. Love is a phenomenon which can be experienced — knowing is possible but knowledge is not possible. It cannot be communicated in words. It remains such a deep taste in you, you cannot bring it into any verbal communication.

If somebody asks you why, you will be at a loss. But you can ask — there are so many lovers here. Each of my sannyasins is a lover. It is not the relationship between a teacher and a student: it is a love affair between a Master, and D stands for the it “the mad game”. M stands for Master, and D stands for the disciple: Master And Disciple game. k is a mad game, utterly mad.

You ask my mad people. You can ask Vivek — for two lives she has been falling in love; this is her second life with me. You ask her why, and it will be impossible to answer. She can cry or she can laugh or she can dance, but she cannot answer why — because there is no why in it.

Love simply happens, it is a happening. If you do it, you can answer the why. But you are not the doer. You are just a host to something from the beyond — a guest comes from the beyond and knocks on your doors: how can you answer why? You have never known him before. And even if you know now, it is so overwhelming that all words are inadequate. Tears can say something, maybe, perhaps — or a dance or a song or a hug. But words are very inadequate.

Words are meant to be for the mundane life of the market- place. You cannot use them in love and you cannot use them in prayer, and you cannot use them whenever and wherever the unknown is felt. When you come to the boundary of the known and the unknown, words start disappearing from you like dead leaves falling from the tree. And a totally new experience evolves — a wordless experience.

You are asking the question because you must be feeling a little frightened. It is frightening — because in love you will not be in control any more. k is frightening, because in love the ego will disappear. It is frightening because you will have to die. Love requires that much sacrifice. But it is worth it, be- cause through death is resurrection.

Die in love, and you will be born as love. And you will never again be the same, and the world will be totally different. The same world will be so full of God if you are full of love. I teach love: love is my message. But the way to teach it is not by talking about it. I exist here as love, and that becomes a catalytic agent and something is triggered in you and some- thing starts growing in you: you become pregnant.

And when a woman for the first time becomes pregnant she is very afraid, and she feels many pains and many agonies and the weight. And something so totally new is happening… she does not know where she is going and what is going to happen. A new life is being born.

In love you become pregnant. A new spirit is being born, and in the beginning it is heavy. And in the beginning it is so new that you would like to escape from it. But never escape love, because love is the temple of God. When it happens, let it happen — help it to happen. Even if you have to die and disappear into it, die and disappear. Accept the challenge, rise to the challenge. And for the first time you will have something valuable in your life, something of the divine fragrance.

But I cannot answer why you have fallen in love. I am in love with existence, I am in the state of love. It must have created some parallel phenomenon in you. It must be something not like cause and effect, but what Carl Gustav Jung has called “the law of synchronicity”.

It is said that if in a small room you play on one sitar and another sitar is just put in the corner of the room, when you start playing on one sitar the other sitar will start responding. It will vibrate, its strings will start dancing. You are playing on one sitar, the other is not even touched, but your playing on the sitar… and something has moved in the other sitar. It is not a cause and effect relationship, it is synchronicity.

I am love: if you come close to me, something will start dancing in your heart. Allow it. Your society is against it, your education is against it, your very life up to now has been against it. It will be difficult to take the first steps — but those steps HAVE to be taken, otherwise you will miss the glory of existence, the splendour of existence.
Splendours are revealed only to lovers. A real disciple is in love.

Rather than asking why, Obenfeld, take a jump. Be coloured in my colour, become part of this growing commune, become part of this tidal wave, and it will be very easy for you to reach God. Alone, it is difficult. When many are moving, it becomes easy — they support each other.

Sannyas is nothing but an effort to create a mystery school where people can Support each other on the way. The journey is arduous and long, and the goal is far away and there are a thousand and one hazards on the way and pitfalls, and one can go astray any moment. And the higher you move, the more difficult it becomes. Even breathing becomes difficult. And the higher you move, the greater is the danger of falling.

But if many are moving they can hold each other, they can support each other. You have fallen in love with me: rather than asking why, go deeper into it. Know its depths — they will not answer your question but they will dissolve your question. That experience will not become knowledge, but that experience will make you more innocent. Real experiences always make you more innocent rather than making you more knowledgeable. Problems are not solved here but dissolved.

Source – Osho Book “Philosophia Perennis, Vol1”