If you love, you will know that everything begins 

and everything ends,

and there is a time for beginning 

and there is a time for ending, 

and there is no wound in it. 

One is not wounded, one simply knows the season is over. 

One is not in despair, one simply understands, 

and one thanks the other: "You gave me so many beautiful gifts. You gave me new visions of life, 

you opened a few windows I might never have opened on my own. 

Now the time has come that we separate and our ways part." 

Not in anger, not in rage, not with a grudge, 

not with any complaint, but with tremendous gratitude, 

with great love, with thankfulness in the heart.

If you know how to love, you will know how to separate.

Osho

The art of remaining a child forever is to never collect. When the moment is gone, leave it. Don't collect the past and then you are never old. You are born every second again and again and again. It is a constant rebirth... a riverlike flow of rebirth. You are renewed, resurrected. Die to the past every moment so it is no more a hangup and is not a burden on your head and on your heart, so that it does not hang like a rock around your neck. Go on dying to the past so you become more and more available to the present. Childhood is a state of consciousness, of purity, of uncorruption, of uncontamination.

Osho

Life is an open secret. Everything is available, nothing is hidden.

 All that you need is just eyes to see.

Osho

With the secure, with the familiar you are bored; you start becoming dull. With the insecure, with the unknown, the uncharted, you feel ecstatic, beautiful, again a child — again those eyes of wonder, again that heart which can feel the awe of things is there.

Osho

A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love. A man who loves himself finds that there is no ego in him. It is by loving others without loving yourself, trying to love others, that the ego arises.

Osho

You cannot frustrate real love, because there is no expectation in the first place. And you cannot fulfill unreal love because it is so rooted in expectation that whatsoever is done always falls short. Its expectation is too great, nobody can fulfill it. So the unreal love always brings frustration, and the real love always brings fulfillment.

Osho

Meditation is not a solution of any problem in particular; it solves nothing. 

It simply helps you to get rid of the mind, the problem-creator. 

It simply helps you to slip out of the mind like a snake slips out of the old skin.

Once you know you are not the mind the great transcendence has happened.

Suddenly all problems become insignificant; slowly, slowly they evaporate.

You are left with a profound peace; a great silence prevails. 

This silence is the solution. This peace is the answer, the answer of all answers.

Osho

Man is already where he needs to be, where he is meant to be. Man is in paradise. The garden of Eden has never been left, nobody can expel you from it. But you can fall asleep, you can start dreaming a thousand and one things. Then those dreams become your reality, and the reality fades far away, becomes unreal.

Osho

Boredom and Restlessness

Boredom is the consciousness of repetition. Whenever you feel bored, you feel restless, a by-product of boredom.

Try to understand the mechanism. Whenever you feel bored you want to move away from that situation. If somebody is saying something and you are getting bored, you start becoming fidgety. This is a subtle indication that you want to move from this place, from this man, from this nonsense-talk. Your body starts moving. Of course, because of politeness, you suppress it, but the body is already on the move – because, the body is more authentic than the mind, the body is more honest and sincere than the mind. The mind is trying to be polite, smiling. You say, “How beautiful,” but inside you are saying, “How horrible! I have listened to this story so many times and he is telling it again!”

Whenever you feel bored you will feel restless. Restlessness is an indication of the body; the body is saying, “Move away from here. Go anywhere, but don’t be here.” But, the mind goes on smiling and the eyes go on sparkling, and you go on saying that you are listening and you have never heard such a beautiful thing. The mind is civilised; the body is still wild. The mind is human; the body is still animal. The mind is false; the body is true. The mind knows the rules and regulations – how to behave and how to behave rightly – so even if you meet a bore you say, “I am so happy, so glad to see you!” And, deep down, if you were allowed, you would kill this man. He tempts you to murder. Then you become fidgety; then you feel restlessness.

Listen to your body

If you listen to the body and run away, the restlessness will disappear. Try it. Try it. If somebody is boring you simply start jumping and running around. See. Restlessness will disappear because restlessness simply shows that the energy does not want to be here. The energy is already on the move; the energy has already left this place. Now, you follow energy.

So, the real thing is to understand boredom, not restlessness. Boredom is a very, very significant phenomenon. Only man feels bored, no other animal. You cannot make a buffalo bored. Impossible. Only man gets bored because only man is conscious. Consciousness is the cause. The more sensitive you are, the more alert you are, the more conscious you are, the more you will feel bored. In more situations you will feel bored. A mediocre mind does not feel so bored. He goes on; he accepts, whatsoever is okay; he is not so alert. The more alert you become, the more fresh, the more you will feel as if some situation is just a repetition, as if some situation is just getting hard on you, as if some situation is just stale. The more sensitive you are, the more bored you will become.

Boredom is an indication of sensitivity. Trees are not bored, animals are not bored, rocks are not bored – because, they are not sensitive enough. This has to be one of the basic understandings about your boredom – that you are sensitive.

But Buddhas also are not bored. You cannot bore a Buddha. Animals are not bored and Buddhas are not bored, so boredom exists as a middle phenomenon between the animal and the Buddha. For boredom a little more sensitivity is needed than is given to the animal. And, if you want to get beyond it then you have to become totally sensitive. Then, again the boredom disappears. But, in the middle the boredom is there. If you become animal-like, then boredom disappears. So, you will find that people who live a very animalistic life are less bored. Eating, drinking, marrying – they are not very bored, but they are not sensitive. They live at the minimum. They live only with that much consciousness as is needed for a day-to-day routine life.

Bored rigid

You will find that intellectuals, people who think too much, are more bored, because they think. And, because of their thinking they can see that something is just repetition. Your life is repetition. Every morning you get up almost the same way as you have been getting up all your life. You take your breakfast almost the same way. Then you go to the office – the same office, the same people, the same work. Then you come home – the same wife. If you get bored it is natural. It is very difficult for you to see any newness here; everything seems to be old, dust-covered.

Watch people walking on the street and you will see them completely bored. Everybody is bored, bored to death. Look at their faces – no aura of delight. Look at their eyes — dust-covered, no glimmer of inner happiness. By and by, the whole life becomes a mechanical routine, a constant repetition. And, one day they die… almost always people die without ever having been alive.

Bertrand Russell is reported to have said, “When I remember, I cannot find more than a few moments in my life when I was really alive, aflame.” Can you remember? How many moments in your life were you really aflame? Rarely it happens. One dreams about those moments, one imagines those moments, one hopes for those moments – but, they never happen. Even if they happen, sooner or later, they also become repetitive.

Repetition syndrome

When you fall in love with a woman, or a man, you feel a miracle, but by and by the miracle disappears and everything settles into a routine. Boredom is the consciousness of repetition.

Hence, people try to change. They move into a new house, they bring a new car home, they divorce the old husband, they find a new love affair, but again that thing is going to become repetitive, sooner or later. Changing places, changing persons, changing partners, changing houses, is not going to do anything. And, whenever a society becomes very bored, people start moving from one town to another: from one job to another, from one wife to another, but sooner or later they realise that this is all nonsense because the same thing is going to happen again and again with every woman, with every man, with every house, with every car.

What to do then? Become more conscious. It is not a question of changing situations; transform your being, become more conscious. If you become more conscious you will be able to see that each moment is new; but for that, tremendous energy of consciousness is needed.

Existence is available for those who are available to existence. And, then I tell you, there is no boredom. Life is infinite delight.

****

Get Aware

Boredom is one of the most important things in human life. Boredom is the first indication that a great understanding is arising in you about the futility, meaninglessness of life and its ways. A man becomes human when he starts feeling bored. You can see it: the most intelligent child will be the most bored child, because nothing can keep his interest for long. Sooner or later, he stumbles upon the fact and asks, “Now what? What next? This is finished. I have seen this toy, I have looked into it, I have opened it, and I have analysed it, what is next?” By the time he becomes young, he’s already bored.

Buddha was utterly bored. He left his kingdom when he was only 29, at the peak of his youth. He was utterly bored, with wine, wealth, kingdom, with everything. He had seen all; he had seen through and through. Traditionally, it is said he renounced the world because the world is bad; that is absolutely nonsense. He renounced the world because he became so bored with it. And, what was he doing then for six years sitting in those forests? He was getting more and more bored. What can you do, sitting in a forest? Watching your breath, day-in, day-out, year in, year out. He created that boredom to its ultimate peak, and one night it disappeared. It disappears of its own accord.

Osho

Happiness

What are you seeking? Happiness, bliss, joy – that’s what you are seeking. You have been seeking for millennia, and you have not yet found it. It is time, the right time to think again, to meditate again. You have been seeking so hard, you have been trying so hard – perhaps you are missing just because you are trying? Maybe it is trying that keeps you away from happiness? Let us think over it, brood over it. Give a little pause to your search – recapitulate.

You have been searching for many lives. You don’t remember other lives, no need – but in this life you have been searching, that will do. And you have not found it: nobody has ever found by searching, something is wrong in the very search. In the search naturally you forget yourself; you start looking everywhere, everywhere else. You look to the north and to the east and to the west and to the south, and in the sky and underneath the seas, and go on searching everywhere. The search becomes more and more desperate, because the more you search and don’t find, great anxiety arises – “Am I going to make it this time, or am I again going to miss it?”

More and more desperation, more and more misery, more and more madness – you go nuts. And happiness remains as far away as ever, in fact it recedes farther away from you. The more you search the less is the possibility to get it, because it is inside you.

Happiness is the function of your consciousness when it is awake, unhappiness is the function of your consciousness when it is asleep. Unconsciousness is your mirror burdened with much dust and luggage and the past. 

Happiness is when the burden has been dropped and the mirror is found again; your mirror can again reflect the trees and the sun and the sand and the sea and the stars. When you have again become innocent, when you again have the eyes of a child – in that clarity you are happy.

I was reading a few beautiful lines of Michael Adam:

“Perhaps trying even makes for unhappiness. Perhaps all the din of my desiring has kept the strange bird from my shoulder. I have tried so long and so loud after happiness. I have looked so far and wide. I have always imagined that happiness is an island in the river. Perhaps it is the river. I have thought happiness to be the name of an inn at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the road. I have believed that happiness was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps it is now. I have looked everywhere else.

“So: here and now.

“But here and now is clearly unhappiness. Perhaps then, no such thing as happiness. Perhaps happiness exists not, it is just a dream created by an unhappy mind. Certainly it cannot be as I unhappily imagine it. Here and now there is not happiness. So happiness is not. I need not therefore waste myself on what is not. I can forget about happiness then; I can cease to care and instead concern myself with something that I do know, can feel and fully experience. Happiness is an idle dream: now it is morning. I can awaken and stay with unhappiness, with what is real under the sun this moment. And now I see how much of my unhappiness came from trying to be happy; even I can see that trying is unhappiness. Happiness does not try….

“At last I am here and now. At last I am what I am. I am unpretending, at ease. I am unhappy – so what? But is this what I ran from? Is this really unhappiness?”

Think over it, meditate over it.

“And when I cease to try to be happy or anything else, when I do not seek anymore, when I do not care to go anywhere, get anything, then it seems I am already arrived in a strange place: I am here and now. When I see that I can do nothing, that all my doing is the same dream, in the moment that I see this, my mind the old dreamer and wanderer is for the moment still and present.”

Naturally. If you are not searching, not seeking, not desiring, not dreaming, for a moment the mind falls into a silence, is still. There is nothing to hanker about, nothing to make a fuss about, nothing to expect and nothing to be frustrated about. For a moment the mind stops its constant chasing. In that moment of stillness you are in a strange place, you are in a strange unknown space, never known before. A new door has opened and for the moment the mind is still and present.

“For the moment, here and now, the real world shows, and see: here and now is already and always all that I had sought and striven after elsewhere and apart. More than that: I have hunted after shadows; the reality is here in this sunlit place, in this birdcall now. It was my seeking after reality that took me from it; desire deafened me. The bird was singing here all the while.

“If I am still and careless to find happiness, then happiness it seems is able to find me. It is, if I am truly still, as still as death – if I am thoroughly dead, here and now.”

Happiness suddenly jumps upon you. When desire disappears, happiness appears. When the striving is no more, for the first time you see who you are. That knowing is what Buddha means: Come and see: Ihi passika. Where is he calling you: Come and see? He is calling you from your desires. You have gone far away from your home, you have lost your home base and are not where you appear to be. Your dream has taken you to faraway worlds: imaginary, illusory, your own creation.

Osho, This Very Body the Buddha

Forget the past, forget the future, this moment is all.

This moment has to become your prayer, your love, your life, your death, your everything. This is it. And live courageously, don't be cowards. Don't think of consequences; only cowards think of consequences.

Osho

There is no home, unless we find it in ourselves.

Osho

Anything that is connected with fear, a mature person should disconnect himself from. That´s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately without a second thought. It is your armor.

Osho

Life is its own purpose; it is not a means to some end, it is an end unto itself. The bird on the wing, the rose in the wind, the sun rising in the morning, the stars in the night, a man falling in love with a woman, a child playing on the street...there is no purpose. Life simply enjoying itself, delighting in itself. Energy overflowing, dancing, for no purpose at all.

Osho

Compromise is one of the most ugly words in our language. It means, I give half, you give half; I settle for half, you settle for half. But why? When you can have the whole, when you can eat the cake and have it too, then why compromise! Just a little courage, just a little daring...

Osho

COURAGE

In the beginning there is no big difference between the coward and the courageous person. Both have fear. The difference is, the coward listens to his fears and follows them. The courageous person puts them aside and goes ahead. The fears are there, he knows them, but the courageous person goes into the unknown in spite of all the fears. Courage does not mean fearlessness, but going into the unknown in spite of all the fears.

When you go into the uncharted sea, like Columbus did, there is fear, immense fear, because one never knows what is going to happen and you are leaving the shore of safety. You were perfectly okay, in a way; only one thing was missing - adventure. Going into the unknown gives you a thrill. The heart starts pulsating; again you are alive, fully alive. Every fiber of your being is alive because you have accepted the challenge of the unknown.

To accept the challenge of the unknown is courage. The fears are there, but if you go on accepting the challenge again and again, slowly, slowly those fears disappear. The joy that the unknown brings, the great ecstasy that starts happening with the unknown, makes you strong enough, gives you a certain integrity, makes your intelligence sharp. You start feeling that life is not just a boredom. Life is an adventure. Slowly, slowly fears disappear and you go on seeking and searching for new adventures.

Courage is risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the unfamiliar, the comfortable for the uncomfortable arduous pilgrimage to some unknown destination. One never knows whether one will be able to make it or not. It is a gambling, but only the gamblers know what life is.

Osho

Stop judging yourself. Instead of judging, start accepting yourself with all the imperfections, all the frailties, all the mistakes, all the failures. Don't ask yourself to be perfect. That is simply asking for something impossible, and then you will feel frustrated. You are a human being after all.

Osho

Question - Osho, I feel Life is very boring. What should I Do?

Brij Mohan, AS IT IS, YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE ENOUGH. You have made life boring -- some achievement! Life is such a dance of ecstasy and you have reduced it to boredom. You have done a miracle! What else do you want to do? You can't do anything bigger than this. Life and boring? You must have a tremendous capacity to IGNORE life.

Just the other day I was telling you that ignorance means the capacity to ignore. You must be ignoring the birds, the trees, the flowers, the people. Otherwise, life is so tremendously beautiful, so ABSURDLY beautiful, that if you can see it as it is you will never stop laughing. You will go on giggling -- at least inside.

Life is not boring, but MIND is boring. And we create such a mind, such a strong mind, like a China Wall around ourselves, that it does not allow life to enter into us. It disconnects us from life. We become isolated, encapsulated, windowless. Living behind a prison wall you don't see the morning sun, you don't see the birds on the wing, you don't see the sky in the night full of stars. And, of course, you start thinking that life is boring. Your conclusion is wrong. YOU are in a wrong space; you are living in a wrong context.

You must be a religious person, Brij Mohan, because to make life boring one has to be religious; one has to be very scholarly. One has to know Christianity, Hinduism, Islam. One has to learn much from the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible. You must be very well-informed. A man who is too well-informed, too knowledgeable, creates such a thick wall of words -- futile words, empty words -- around himself that he becomes incapable of seeing life.

Knowledge is a barrier to life. Put aside your knowledge! And then look with empty eyes...and life is a CONSTANT surprise. And I am not talking about some divine life -- the ORDINARY life is so extraordinary. In small incidents you will find the presence of God -- a child giggling, a dog barking, a peacock dancing. But you can't see if your eyes are covered with knowledge. The poorest man in the world is the man who lives behind a curtain of knowledge. The poorest are those who live through the mind. The richest are those who have opened the windows of no-mind and approached life with the no-mind.

Brij Mohan, this is not only YOUR experience; you are not alone in it. In fact, the majority of people will agree with you. They don't find any surprise anywhere. And each moment there are surprises and surprises because life is never the same; it is constantly changing, and it takes such unpredictable turns. How can you remain unaffected by the very wonder of it? The only way to remain unaffected is to cling to your past, to your experience, to your knowledge, to your memories, to your mind. Then you cannot see that which is; you go on missing the present.

Miss the present and you live in boredom. BE in the present and you will be surprised that there is no boredom at all. Start by looking around a little more like a child. Be a child again! That's what meditation is all about: being a child again -- a rebirth, being innocent again, not-knowing. That's what we were saying the other day. The Master said: NOT-KNOWING IS THE MOST INTIMATE.

Yes, you must have become very alienated from life, hence boredom. You have forgotten the intimacy, the immediacy You are no longer bridged. Knowledge functions as a wall: innocence functions as a bridge.

Start looking like a child again. Go to the seashore and again start collecting seashells. See a child collecting seashells -- as if he has found a mine of diamonds. So thrilled he is! See a child making sandcastles and how absorbed he is, utterly lost, as if there is nothing more important than making sandcastles. See a child running after a butterfly...and be a child again. Start running after butterflies again. Make sandcastles, collect seashells.

Don't live as if you know. You know nothing! All that you know is about and about. The moment you KNOW something, boredom disappears. Knowing is such an adventure that boredom cannot exist. With knowledge of course it can exist; with knowing it cannot exist.

And let me remind you: I am not talking about some divine knowledge, some esoteric knowledge; I am simply talking about THIS life. Just look around with a little more clarity, with a little more transparency...and life is hilarious!

Osho_"Ah, This!"

Many great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, “I have found myself.” They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience. However beautiful and however enchanting an experience you come across, you are not it. You are the one who is witnessing it. If you go on and on and on, the ultimate in the journey is the point when there is no experience left - neither silence, nor blissfulness, nor nothingness. There is nothing as an object for you, but only your subjectivity. The mirror is empty; it is not reflecting anything.

Osho

The ordinary man is living a very abnormal life, because his values are upside down. Money is more important than meditation; logic is more important than love; mind is more important than heart; power over others is more important than power over one’s own being. Mundane things are more important than finding some treasures which death cannot destroy.

Osho

’The truth’ is only a way of saying; there is not something labeled ´Truth,´ that one day you will find and open the box and see the contents and say, ’Great! I have found the truth.’ There is no such box. Your existence is the truth, and when you are silent you are in truth. And if the silence is absolute then you are the ultimate truth. But don´t think of the truth as an object; it is not an object. It is not there, it is here.

Osho

Whenever you follow your potential, you always become the best. 

Whenever you go astray from the potential, you remain mediocre.

The whole society consists of mediocre people for the simple reason that nobody is what he was destined to be — he is something else.

Osho

It is only through intensity that one arrives. When all your desires, when all your passions become one flame, it is intensity. When there is only one desire left inside you and your total being supports that one, it is intensity. It is exactly what the word says: in-tensity. The opposite word is ex-tensity. You are spread out, you have a thousand and one desires, many fragmentary desires - one going to the north, one going to the south. You are being pulled apart. You are not one, you are a crowd. And if you are a crowd you will be miserable. If you are a crowd you will never feel any fulfillment. You don´t have any center. Intensity means creating a center in yourself.

When all the arrows are coming towards the center, when all the fragments are joined together, integration arises. Becoming centered, concentrated inwards, that is the meaning of intensity. Sometimes you have known moments, in some danger when all your thought disappear, the crowd will become one. In that moment you will be one single individual, indivisible. You will be undivided, one unity. The death facing you has created the intensity. Or in love sometimes there is intensity. All else becomes irrelevant, peripheral. Only the love is all and the whole of your heart.

When such intensity arises in meditation, it brings you to the ultimate. You arrive home.

Osho

Watch the mind and see where it is, what it is. You will feel thoughts floating and there will be intervals. And if you watch long, you will see that intervals are more than the thoughts, because each thought has to be separate from another thought; in fact, each word has to be separate from another word. The deeper you go, you will find more and more gaps, bigger and bigger gaps. A thought floats, then comes a gap where no thought exists; then another thought comes, another gap follows.

If you are unconscious you cannot see the gaps; you jump from one thought to another, you never see the gap. If you become aware you will see more and more gaps. If you become perfectly aware, then miles of gaps will be revealed to you. And in those gaps, satoris happens. In those gaps the truth knocks at your door.

Osho

The mundane life is the circumference. It has to be enjoyed so deeply, that you start finding in it the sacred, the divine. The divine is nothing but the depth of diving into this moment, into this world, into this life, into this body.

Osho

Any man who has any sense of his individuality lives by his own love, by his own work, without caring at all what others think of it.

Osho

People keep each other at a distance. Even friends, even lovers, keep each other at a distance; too much closeness will be dangerous, they may see your reality.

Osho

What is needed is not something in which you can forget your loneliness; what is needed is that you become aware of your aloneness — which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.

Osho

There are only two types of people: one, who escape from their loneliness the majority, the ninety-nine point nine percent, who escape from themselves; and the remaining point one percent is the meditator, who says, "If loneliness is a truth, then it is a truth; then there is no point in running away from it. It is better to go into it, encounter it, see it face to face, what it is." Meditation means going into your loneliness wholeheartedly, to discover it, to investigate into it, to inquire into it. That´s what meditation is all about.

Osho

If the child sees that the parents are very happy because he has become knowledgeable, he starts gathering more and more knowledge. He starts forgetting the knack that he had brought with his life, that was inborn. By the time he comes out of the university he has completely forgotten one of the most beautiful things that was given by God to him: the capacity to wonder, the capacity to see without thinking, the capacity to contact reality without the mind continuously interfering, distorting.

Osho

I say unto you, there is no evil and there are no evil forces in the world. There are only people of awareness, and there are people who are fast asleep and sleep has no force. The whole energy is in the hands of the awakened people. And one awakened person can awaken the whole world. One lighted candle can make millions of candles lighted without losing its light.

Osho

The body belongs to the earth, you belong to the sky. The body belongs to matter, you belong to God. The body is gross, you are not. The body has limits, is born and will die; you are never born and you will never die.

Osho

Meditation is looking into your emptiness, welcoming it, enjoying it, being one with it, with no desire to fill it. There is no need, because it is already full. It looks empty because you don´t have the right way of seeing it. You see it through the mind; that is the wrong way. If you put the mind aside and look into your emptiness, it has tremendous beauty, it is divine, it is overflowing with joy. Nothing else is needed.

Osho

I teach you clearly an unprincipled life, a life of intelligence which changes with every change around you. You don´t have a principle that creates a difficulty in changing. Be absolutely unprincipled and just follow life, and there will be no misery in your life.

Osho

Devotion is the highest form of love. It is possible you may love one person, and love becomes so deep that slowly slowly the very quality of love changes into devotion. Then that person becomes only a window for you to take a jump into existence.

Osho

If you ask my vision of love...it is no more a question of dialectics, opposition. Men and women are different and complimentary. Man alone is half, so is woman. Only together, in a deep feeling of oneness, they feel for the first time totality, perfection.

Osho

Without Love, Life Has no Poetry in it

"A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That's why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin: you have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning; it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. Without love, temples are just ordinary houses; with love an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love you remain just possibilities – empty gestures. With love, for the first time you become substantial. With love, for the first time, the soul arises in you. The ego drops but the soul arises... 

"Moving towards love is moving towards an abyss. One starts wavering, one feels dizzy. Go to a height in the Himalayas and look down at the valley; that valley is no-thing. When you look down at the valley of love, a tremendous fear grips you. You are almost paralyzed: you cannot run away, you cannot take the jump. You simply tremble in infinite fear. What to do? Going back is not possible because love attracts: love calls your depth, love calls your future, love calls your potentiality; love gives you a glimpse of what you can be. You cannot run away from it, and you cannot jump because the cost is too high. You will have to drop yourself – all that you have been thinking yourself to be – the image, the past, the identity. 

"But I tell you, the cost only seems to be too much before the jump. Once you take the jump…then you will know that whatsoever you have given up is nothing, and what you have attained is infinitely valuable. Let me tell you a paradox: love demands that you drop that which you don't have, and love offers you that which you already have. Love wants you to get rid of that which you don't have."

Osho, Come Follow to You

Love is our deepest longing. Just as the body needs food the soul needs love — it is nourishment, spiritual nourishment. Without the food, air and water, the body will deteriorate; without love the soul starts shrinking. And everybody is living with a very small soul for the simple reason that they have not loved.

And why have they not loved? If you enquire into the question you will be surprised, because for the whole of their life everybody is trying to get love. But people are trying to get, not to give, and the law of love is that you get only when you give. Giving comes first, getting is only a consequence.

And people are asking the impossible; they want first: “Give me love.” Everybody, in a thousand and one ways, is saying “Give me love”, but love comes only when you give; you cannot demand it. Hence the whole world is suffering; everybody is full of love, the world can become a very loving place, but it is just the opposite of it — full of hatred, anger, rage, violence, destruction, for the simple reason that everybody is full of love and nobody is giving. They are asking and demanding and trying to force and snatch away.

Now, love is not a thing that you can force, love is not a thing that you can possess, love is not a thing that can be snatched away in any way. It is beautiful only, alive only, when it is given without any demand on your part, when it comes of its own accord. And it comes on its own accord whenever you give; in fact it comes a thousandfold.

So give as much love as possible and you will get so much in return that you will not be able to believe it in the beginning. It is absolutely unbelievable that the whole existence starts pouring love towards you.

You just show the gesture of giving, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, no expectations, let your joy be in the giving itself — love for love’s sake — and you will be in for a great surprise: thousands of windows suddenly open and the sun and the wind and the rain and the whole existence starts flowing towards you. It floods you, and that flooded life is the life of a buddha, that life is the goal of a sannyasin.

Osho

The First Ripple of Love Has to Be Around Yourself

"The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you. 

"It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one's body, one has to love one's soul, one has to love one's totality. 

"And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself. 

"If you don't love your house you will not clean it; if you don't love your house you will not paint it; if you don't love you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself. 

"And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality." 

Osho, The Secret