Conscious Love

This is a drug your body hormones create within you; it is a biological drug. Nature has to use it because nature cannot rely on you. Just think: if there is nothing like love, the world will cease – because sex is so ridiculous. If there is no love, then sex seems to be just ridiculous! Who will move into sex if there is no intoxicant around it?

Love is just like a bait. The real desire of nature is to reproduce. But you cannot be relied upon; if you don’t fall in love, then you will not reproduce. You fall in love – nature is playing a trick. Nature is giving some drug, releasing some drug into your body. It has drug glands inside the body from where it releases the drug. It is a natural, biological, hormonal drug. That’s why whenever someone is in love, see, he walks differently. He is no more here – absent completely, lives in the imagination and the desire and the dream, does not live in the reality. He has drugged himself unknowingly. And after a few days, when the love is gone – because no drug can last for ever – by the time the honeymoon is over, it is also over. Then you start facing reality.

Then there is trouble because whatsoever you promised, you promised when you were not conscious. Now you have to fulfill promises given in a moist state, given in a state of unconsciousness. Now you have to fulfill those promises; now the burden grows. Every love affair, in the end, becomes ugly. Why? Every marriage comes to the rocks. Why? – because it is not a conscious phenomenon. If you love consciously then love can be eternal, because with consciousness everything is eternal. With unconsciousness everything is momentary.

If you can love consciously, not a victim of biological tricks, not a victim of nature, but a conscious love, then you don’t fall in love, you rise in love. Then love itself becomes an integrating force, not a disintegration. Then love itself becomes an awareness. Then in relationship you become more and more aware. You care for the other, but you don’t use the other. You care and share, but you don’t possess. You liberate the other, and through the other’s liberation you liberate yourself. You become two partners in an ultimate journey. You help each other, because there are pitfalls; the path is long and the journey is eternal. And it is very good to be with someone who can share every anguish, who can share every pain, who can share every suffering, who can share every bliss, who can share every moment of silence; with whom you can communicate, with whom you can say what is happening to you, and on whom you can rely that he will be helpful whatsoever happens to you, on whom you can rely that he will love you in whatsoever situation you are – good or bad, angry or happy, sad or blissful. You need not hide anything with someone you love: you can remain open and vulnerable. And whatsoever the situation, the love is unconditional; it doesn’t depend on conditions.

A conscious love is a totally different phenomenon. Rarely it happens, but whenever it happens it is one of the most beautiful things that is possible in this world.

But ordinarily your love is just a drug. I observe it every day: a couple comes and they say they are deeply in love, and just a week has not passed and they come again – they say everything is falling apart. Just a week! And just a week before you could not have imagined – their eyes, their faces were radiant with love, their bodies were filled with something unknown, they were intoxicated. And just a week and everything is finished! What type of love is this? It is not love at all. You have been doped by nature; nature played a trick.

Nature wants you to move into sex. It creates the dreamworld around sex, because sex in itself is ugly. It is really ridiculous! Just think: without love, you are in a sexual relationship with someone. It is simply ugly. That’s why prostitutes are ugly. Howsoever beautiful the bodies they have, they cannot be beautiful because the very act, without love, makes their whole life ugly, dirty. You can tolerate sex only because of love. Because of love, the sex also looks beautiful; otherwise, the postures, the gestures of sex, are all ridiculous. But when you are drugged you are not aware of what is happening. When you are drugged you never look at yourself. The whole world looks ridiculous, not you.

Osho, The Hidden Harmony, Ch 7