Marriage is a decision of the intellect. Love is an entirely different matter. It has no relation whatsoever to the intellect; it is quite unconnected to thought. Just as meditation is thoughtlessness, so is love. And just as meditation cannot be managed by the intellect, so it is with love.
In fact, meditation and love are two names of almost the same experience. When meditation happens through contact with another person, we call it love; and when love happens in a person without any contact with anybody else, we call it meditation. Love and meditation are two sides of the same coin.
Meditation and love are names of the same door seen from two different places. Seen from the outside, the door is called love. Seen from the inside it is called meditation. It is just like a door labeled entrance on one side and exit on the other; the same door serves both purposes. So if you arrive at the door from the outside, the label is love, if you arrive from the inside, the label is meditation.
Meditation is becoming filled with love in your own aloneness, and love is the art of slipping into meditation with the other. In either case it is only rarely that someone reaches, because meditators are rare, and lovers are equally rare. The world is not run according to the laws of meditators, nor according to the laws of lovers.
In fact, in the eyes of the world the meditator and the lover are both insane - blind fools who understand nothing. Only intellect is considered to have eyes; the intellect thinks that it alone has eyes. It is quite oblivious to the fact that the heart can also have eyes, and even if it comes to know this it cannot trust the information, because the heart lives from moment to moment.
The heart is a spontaneous stream, maintaining no record of the happenings of yesterday and the day before. The intellect keeps track of all that has happened in the past, and every decision it takes in the present is based on the past. In deciding what is to be done today, it refers to the whole record of what it has come to know up until now in life.
The heart has no such accumulated wealth; it is weightless, without past, without memory, so that whatever it decides is born impulsively, in this very moment. It does not think things out, it does not refer to the past, it does not seek advice from the voice of experience, it does not search though memory. Its response is fresh and new, born in this very moment. The heart is as fresh as the morning dew.
The intellect is always stale, and the heart is always fresh, like a new shoot on a tree in springtime.
Intellect is always old and rotten - just rubbish, just the ruins of the past. Heart is always here and now. So in the eyes of the intellect, the heart is mad and blind.
Lovers and meditators are not found in abundance, they cannot be. We agree that meditators are rare, but we are less inclined to agree that lovers are also few and far between - we are all under the impression that we are lovers. But I am telling you that this is an illusion. Lovers are as rare as meditators, because love is also a meditational experience. Just as Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna and Christ were meditators who can be counted on the fingers, so Sita, Meera and Radha were lovers to be counted on the fingers.
You have mistaken sex for love, but it is not love; and the sex act to which you attribute such profound importance has no importance at all. It is simply a natural instinct, an impulse forced on you by
nature to ensure that you are a good vehicle for reproduction. Seeds break open and grow into trees which again scatter their seeds. Birds sing their courting songs, attract mates, have intercourse, lay eggs and from them produce young ones. This is all that you too are doing! You are no different in this respect from the birds, the fish, the trees; in your sexual activity there is no difference at all.
Sex is a natural event. Love is not natural, it is not of this world, it is a supernatural phenomenon.
Love lies far beyond nature.
– Osho, “Nowhere to Go but In, #7’