Unconditional Love
by Osho
November 19th, 2008
Enjoy!
Kypris 
Excerpted from "Courage, The Joy of Living Dangerously", by Osho
"Ordinarily people love only when their conditions are fulfilled. They say, "You should be like this, only then will I love". A mother says to the child, "I’ll love you only if you behave". A wife says to the husband, "You have to be this way, only then can I love you". Everybody creates conditions: love disappears.
Love is an infinite sky! You cannot force it into narrow spaces, conditioned, limited. If you bring fresh air into your house and close it off from everywhere–all the windows closed, all the doors closed–soon it becomes stale. Whenever love happens it is a part of freedom; then soon you bring that fresh air into your house and everything goes stale, dirty.
This is a deep problem for the whole of humanity–it has been a problem. When you fall in love everything looks beautiful, because in those moments you don’t put conditions. Two persons move near each other unconditionally. Once they have settled, once they have started taking each other for granted, then conditions are being imposed: "You should be like this, you should behave like that, only then will I love"–as if love is a bargain.
When you don’t love out of your fullness of heart, you are bargaining. You want to force the other person to do something for you, only then will you love; otherwise you will betray your love. Now you are using your love as a punishment, or as an enforcement, but you are not loving. Either you are trying to withhold your love or you are giving your love, but in both cases love in itself is not the end, something else is.
People come to me, they always say, "The other is not loving me." Nobody comes and says, "I am not loving the other." Love has become a demand: "The other is not loving me." Forget about the other! Love is such a beautiful phenomenon, if you love you will enjoy.
And the more you love, the more you become lovable. The less you love and the more you demand that others should love you, the less and less you are lovable, the more and more you become closed, confined to your ego. And you become touchy–even if somebody approaches you to love you, you become afraid, because in every love there is a possibility of rejection, withdrawal.
Nobody loves you–this has become an ingrained thought within you. How is this man trying to change your mind? He is trying to love you? Must be something false, is he trying to deceive you? Must be a cunning man, tricky. You protect yourself. You don’t allow anybody to love you and you don’t love others. Then there is fear. Then you are alone in the world, so alone, so lonely, not connected.
…………….
If you understand me well, drop all fears and love more–and love unconditionally. Don’t think that you are doing something for the other when you love; you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don’t wait; don’t say that when others love, you will love–that is not the point at all.
Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people–you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it. And when love goes deeper, fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness.
November 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
November 23, 2008
Dear Kypris:
What comfort and simple beauty in those words. Namaste for sharing this with the world–we need words like this now more than ever.
November 28th, 2008 at 5:22 am
It doesn’t matter if we love one or we love many at the same time, as long as we’re not using loving the many as a way to avoid the deep inner sense of being unlovable that we inevitably run into within a relationship. We usually want to do everything we can to avoid that, including running to the next new lover or relationship or using spiritual ideas or language to temporarily avoid and bypass the challenging work of personal transformation. In the end, however, loving one another means gradually freeing oneself from old conditioned patterns: dropping all our agendas, our movies, our hopes and our fears so that we see the raw and sacred other just as he or she is. If one or the other is unable to do that, the relationship dies either as a physical entity or as a spiritual one.
December 1st, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Love is an experience and one has to have experienced it to know what it really is. If its Love , the way the Creator created it , it will last beyond Space and Time, all else is “Self love”
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:30 am
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