The Paradox of Love
If’s it a paradox, it must be true.
“Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all types of bondage. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.
A mature person does not fall in love, he or she rises in love. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall; they stumble and fall in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. Now they cannot manage and they cannot stand. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have the integrity to stand alone.
A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love.”
~Osho
I have always been fascinated by Osho, or Rajneesh, who was a guru, philosopher and leader of the Rajneesh movement. It is said that he studied every book on philosophy, basically devouring collections of sources and research throughout his entire life. So who else to turn to about the lessons of life, love, meditation, spirituality and pretty much anything we mortals can think of. This quote is one of my favorite teachings from Osho. If you google Osho and Love, you will find millions of results from his teachings about everything possible on the subject.
There is something so beautiful about love being a paradox.The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person — without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, or an addiction.
“In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment… people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating, not a relationship.” -Osho”
Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Osho taught that Love is like a river, always flowing, moving, and never ending. A relationship is something that is closed, something finished, sealed by law, marriage and a court. But why do we bring law into Love? And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to love to just a relationship?
Because relationships are secure, a relationship has certainty. But to relate is insecure. Relating means you are always starting, you are always trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other’s person. You are trying to penetrate into the deep recesses of their being. To unravel something that can not be unraveled.
If you relate, and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. You will explore each other, unaware you are also exploring yourself. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you become aware of your deeper stirrings too. That is love: the exploration of consciousness. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation.
And meditation is to Osho what breathing is to us humans and my next post will cover my exploration and experience into meditation by studying Osho’s teachings.
Namaste
