Don’t fall in love, rise in love
In the beginning there was Love and then came the Relationship. Love was born in the human heart as an existential gift. The relationship was born in some kind of practical understanding of life; that love needs grounding, some expression, a sharing in some way on a solid ground. This sharing and commitment gave birth to a bonding with others and formation of various relationships. In these defined relationships, gift- love got transformed into need- love in the forms of husband and wife, the parents and their children, brothers- sisters and cousins, far away cousins, gurus and disciples, and friends and strangers. This was a real grounding for love, and with it came not just the sense of natural belonging, but the loss of freedom, suffocating attachments and clinging, leading to all kind of emotional sufferings and psychological violence. This can be called falling in love — in the real meaning of word.
Often we have been using this expression of falling in love in various romantic terms also — Laila and Majnu, Romeo and Juliet.. there are so many such examples. These stories seem to be other- worldly, but in reality, they are very worldly. The really divine stories happen in mystic unions of Uma and Shiva, Sita and Rama, Radha and Krishna and so many other divine beings. These mystics existed in human forms, but they attained to enlightenment through meditation and transformation of love. For them it was certainly a rising in love, and not falling in love.
In the ordinary life, when people fall in love, very soon they start exploiting each other, using the others for themselves, all in the name of love. They become calculative and their love becomes very conditional and full of expectations. The real love has to be an unconditional sharing to blossom in its absolute manifestation, like a rose flower that shares its fragrance without any expectation. This rarely happens in our ordinary relationships. It does happen wherever the relationship is based on meditation. It happens between the enlightened mystics and their close disciples. It is unconditional love without any attachment and expectation. It is pure freedom. This could happen between ordinary individuals also if they evolve into this understanding of bringing a flame of meditation in their life and radiate in love. Osho suggests: Love should come out of your silence, awareness, meditativeness. It is soft, it is unbinding – because how can love create fetters for the one who is loved? It is giving freedom to each other, more and more. The enlightened mystic adds: “Falling in love you remain a child; Rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love – now you are love.”
The writer, editor of Osho World, is the author of Mindfulness: The Master Key