I. I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.
II. How can love impose ideals on anyone? Love simply accepts you as you are; there is no need to be somebody else. I call a place holy only where love is unconditional, shared without asking anything in return, not even in a subtle way.
III. Everybody goes on thinking that he loves people and nobody returns the love, but it has never happened that way. It is against the law; it is against dharma, against the ultimate law of life. If you love, love comes in return. If it is not coming, go deeper; somewhere in the name of love you have done something else.
IV. Love will give you the secret key, the golden key, the master key.Love unconditionally, and flowers will be showering on you from all the directions. And once you have known the generosity of existence you will never feel miserable.
V. Love is death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both, love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love -- but make it a conscious thing.
VI. All growth needs love -- but unconditional love. If love has conditions then growth cannot be total, because those conditions will come in the way. Love unconditionally. Don't ask anything in return. Much comes on its own -- that's another thing. Don't be a beggar. In love be an emperor. Just give it and see what happens... a thousandfold it comes back. But one has to learn it. Otherwise one remains a miser; one gives a little and waits for much to come back, and your waiting, your expectation, destroys the whole beauty of it.
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VII. If you cannot love yourself, you don't know even the taste of love or what love means.
VIII. Love yourself, so that all your loving sources become open, all blocks are removed. And if you can love yourself -- with all your frailties, with all your weaknesses, with all your errors -- you can love anybody in the world. You will have tremendous compassion and understanding, because you commit the same mistakes; the same are your errors, the same are your frailties.
IX. If you are not in love, you are lonely. If you are in love, really in love, you become alone. Loneliness is sadness; aloneness is not sadness. Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness. You need someone and the needed one is not available. Loneliness is darkness, with no light in it. A dark house, waiting and waiting for someone to come and kindle the light. Aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete. Nobody is needed, you are enough. And this happens in love. Lovers become alone -- through love you touch your inner completeness. Love makes you complete. Lovers share each other, but that is not their need, that is their overflowing energy.
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X. Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love. It must be something else. Love and freedom go together, they are two wings of the same bird. Whenever you see that your love is going against your freedom, then you are doing something else in the name of love. Let this be your criterion: freedom is the criterion; love gives you freedom, makes you free, liberates you. And once you are totally yourself, you feel grateful to the person who has helped you. That gratefulness is almost religious. You feel in the other person something divine. He has made you free, or she has made you free, and love has not become a possessiveness.
XI. As sex disappears you will find authentic love growing in you. Sex is not love; it is just a fallacy, a blindness. You are tricked by biology into believing that this is love. But once sex has disappeared your whole life energy is redeemed from its animal past. And just as sex was reproducing more and more children, sex-freed energy starts giving you every moment a new birth. Your whole life becomes fresh, growing in a new direction. Sex is horizontal; love is vertical, it takes you upwards to higher realms of being. And the higher you are in your love, the closer you are to the ultimate truth. The day your love has reached to its climax, you will experience what I have been defining as satyam, shivam, sundram -- the truth, the godliness and the beauty.
XII. If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. A subtle quality of silence is entering in you. Thoughts are disappearing, gaps appearing -- silences. You are touching your own depth. Love makes you meditative if it is on the right lines. Meditation makes you loving if it is on the right lines.
XIII. Love is not surrender. Love does not ask you to surrender. Love does not ask for anything. Love simply gives. And the miracle is, that when you give out of love the whole existence returns it a thousandfold, as if, from all over around you, roses start showering on you. You cannot imagine, cannot conceive of it, unless you experience it. But give it a try. You will not be losing anything.
Love is not something like a commodity, that if you give it you will have less of it. It is not money, that you had ten dollars and five you have given; now you have only five dollars left. Love is not a commodity. It is not a quantity; it is a quality. Give it, and you will be surprised that from unknown sources, from everywhere, love is flowing towards you. Give it unconditionally, and once you have known the taste and the joy of giving unconditionally, you will also know that the existence is very generous.
XIV. Love, but not as a need -- as a sharing. Love, but don't expect -- give. Love, but remember your love should not become an imprisonment for the other. Love, but be very careful; you are moving on sacred ground. You are going into the highest, the purest and holiest temple. Be alert! Drop all impurities outside the temple. When you love a person, love the person as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man, because if you love a man as a man your love is going to be very, very ordinary. Your love is not going to be more than lust. If you love a woman as a woman, your love is not going to soar very high. Love a woman as a goddess, then love becomes worship.
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