Come Valentine’s Day, everybody’s heart starts fluttering with romance and love. Flowers, chocolates and gifts start pouring all around for one day. This love, however sweet, is symbolic of contemporary lifestyle which has more fizz than essence. But what people are looking for is authentic, fulfilling love in which your heart becomes so full, it starts overflowing with love. It seems it is time love should be taught in schools and colleges, at all levels of life. Not the personal, selfish, needy love, but love as a flowering of mature human beings.
Osho has talked extensively about numerous aspects of love. So I thought, instead of offering conventional roses to celebrate love, it will be more useful to offer a bouquet of his rosy fragrant insights.
First, when you say to somebody, “I need you, I love you,” it is not beautiful because it is based on need. It means you want to use the other. You are not yet able to be alone. Without the other, you become afraid of your own aloneness. This is the wrong kind of love. But this is the love that exists in the world.
Everybody is afraid of his/her loneliness and clings to the other. And when you use the other, the other is reduced to a thing. He is no longer a person, he becomes a husband or a wife. Freedom is lost. You cannot allow the other to be free, because if you allow freedom then you will have to face your loneliness and that you don’t want to do.
Love as a need creates a “tunnel vision”. You become focused on one person and you are afraid that if the other person leaves, you will not be able to live at all. The very idea of the other leaving you gives you immediate thoughts of committing suicide. Your life will have no meaning without him or her. This signifies that you are allowing only a narrow range of sensations; everything else is regarded as insignificant. This kind of love is pathological, and unfortunately, it is the only kind that exists and is available in the world.
But this can be changed into real love, not as a need but as a state of being. Then one can love and yet allow the other freedom. Then love is non-possessive. But that love is possible only when you have learned how to live with your aloneness. When you can be alone and perfectly happy and you don’t miss the other at all, only then you can love.
This is true love, this is creative love, when you can say, “I don’t need you, I simply love you.” Just meditate over it. Repeat it silently within yourself, “I don’t need you, I love you,” and a totally different dimension opens up. Now there is no need to possess; now there is no need to reduce the other to a thing; now there is no need to destroy his or her freedom. Now love can exist with freedom.
