When love exists with freedom

Aloneness is beautiful. It is only the person who is alone who becomes capable of love. Those who cannot be alone, they cannot be in love at all, because their love remains a kind of need.

Love can be of two types. One is when you say to somebody, “I need you, I really love you.” This is ugly love, because it is based in need. You say, “I need you”: you want to use the other. You are not yet able to be alone; you want to be together with somebody, you want to cling to the other. The other keeps you occupied – without the other you become afraid of your own aloneness.

And this is what people say, and lovers enjoy it very much. When somebody says to you, “I need you, I really love you,” you feel you are entering into something beautiful. You are not; you are entering into something destructive. This is the wrong kind of love.

And this is the love that exists in the world. Everybody is afraid of his loneliness and clings to the outer, uses the other as a means, someone to cling to. 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.

So you cling. You hold the other, you possess the other. Even if it means being possessed by the other, you are ready to lose your freedom. You become mutual slaves, mutual imprisonments to each other.

Love-as-need creates what the other day I was calling “tunnel vision.” You become focussed on one person and you are afraid that if the other person leaves you, 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 not have meaning.

This is tunnel vision. One is willing to admit only a narrow range of sensations; all else is regarded as insignificant. And when such expectations fail, then one feels life is not wroth living. And they always fail, because nobody can really be possessed. How can you possess a presence, a person? He is not a thing, you can never be the master. The other will go on asserting his freedom, the other will go on sabotaging your efforts to possess him. The other is trying to possess you, and you are trying to possess the other. Nobody wants to be possessed, and everybody wants to be the possessor. Now, this is doomed to fail.

Sooner or later, you will start feeling life has no meaning. This kind of love is pathological, and this is the only kind that exists and is available in the world. It drives people neurotic and psychotic. It should be changed into love which is not a need but a state. Then one can love life in more richness. Then one can love and yet allow the other freedom. Then love is nonpossessive.

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 can you love. But now a totally different kind of love arrives – even to think of it will shock you.

Then the lover says, “I don’t need you, I love you.” It will be almost incomprehensible, a lover saying to somebody, “I don’t need you, I love you.” It will look contradictory, because you have always heard, “I need you, I love you very much” – you are acquainted with that approach.

But this is true love, the other is destructive. It destroys both the people, it destroys all the possibilities of growing. 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 there is no need to allow the other to destroy your freedom. Now love can exist with freedom.

When love exists with freedom it has tremendous beauty; it has something of the ultimate in it. But now it is pure sharing. Now it is a luxury, it is no more a need.

I teach you love-as-luxury, not love-as-need. It is just an overflowing. You have so much that you cannot bear it any more, you have to give it to somebody. And from where are you getting so much? It comes if you learn how to live in your aloneness.

If you learn how to live in your aloneness, enjoy it and celebrate it, if you learn how to be empty without any desire to fill yourself up, to stuff yourself with anything – food, love, money, power – when you are not in any way interested in stuffing your emptiness, then suddenly emptiness changes its color, its quality is transformed. You relax into it.

Osho, Unio Mystica, Vol 1, Ch 6, Q 4 (excerpt) – read another excerpt: Laugh a little, live a little and be playful