Remember this beautiful song from the seventies?
“Love is in the air, everywhere I look around
Love is in the air, every sight and every sound
And I don’t know if I’m being foolish, don’t know if I’m being wise...”
The crooning voice of John Paul Young is the voice of everybody’s yearning for this kind of gorgeous feeling in the heart. Then why is it so that there is this appalling dearth of love in human beings? What has happened? The way society is built up there is no place for such an impractical, non-essential feeling like love. You cannot earn a living through love, you cannot win elections or build an empire with love. On the contrary, you may lose it completely. So love has no practical value and yet, it is the food for the soul so everyone is hungry for it.
Osho has some beautiful insights into how to allow love to flourish. First thing, he says that you have an idea of love; that idea is creating trouble — not love itself, but the idea. All romance emerges out of these ideas. Love ends up in conflict because love has become a relationship. That’s a great misunderstanding about love. Actually, love is the quality of your being, it grows in the heart like a plant and blooms over there spreading its beauty and perfume all over your body and being. Love is universal energy. Love need not be only with a person. It can be heard in the whisper of the tree, in the thunder of the sea, in the rising sun or when the day is done. Basically, love is a positive energy which has great potential for encircling life if you allow it to grow.
Try this dance of love: be alone and together. Osho says that one can be in deep love and yet be alone. In fact, one can be alone only when one is in deep love. The depth of love creates an ocean around you, a deep ocean, and you become an island, utterly alone. Yes, the ocean goes on throwing its waves on your shore, but the more the ocean crashes with its waves on your shore, the more integrated you are, the more rooted, the more centred you are. Love has value only because it gives you aloneness. It gives you space enough to be on your own.
“All relationships come to an end because they are dependent on each other, clinging, possessive. If they don’t allow each other to be alone, if they don’t allow each other space enough to grow, they are enemies, not lovers; they are destructive to each other, they are not helping each other to find their souls, their beings. What kind of love is this? It may be just fear of being alone; hence they are clinging to each other. But real love knows no fear. Real love is capable of being alone, utterly alone, and out of that aloneness grows a togetherness.”
