What is Love?

There are as many loves as there are people. Love is a hierarchy, from the lowest rung to the highest, from sex to super-consciousness. At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics... you want to dominate the other, you enjoy domination....

Hence, so much possessiveness and so much jealousy become an intrinsic part of your love. That's why love creates more misery than joy. Nothing is wrong with it if you can use it as a stepping stone, if you can use it as a meditation.

Only at the highest peak, when love is not a relationship any more, when love becomes a state of your being, the lotus opens totally and great perfume is released. At the lowest, love is just a political relationship. At the highest, love is a religious state of consciousness.


The Buddha loves, Jesus loves, but their love is given for the sheer joy of giving it; it is not a bargain. Hence the radiant beauty of it.... It surpasses all the joys that you have known.

Love as you know it is a kind of disease: it needs the medicine of meditation. Passed through meditation, it is purified. The more purified it is, the more ecstatic.

Abridged from Unio Mystica, Vol. 2, Talk #4, courtesy: Osho International Foundation, www.osho.com