Once you have tasted the eternity of love, the timelessness of love, you are transformed. Then you are no more part of the mundane world; you enter into the world of the holy, the sacred. Of course you go on living in the same ordinary way, in fact you become more ordinary than you ever were before. You lose all pretensions, all egoistic trips. You forget all about your being somebody, you become utterly ordinary. But in that ordinariness there is a glow, a grace, a beauty, a great splendour. You are full of light because you are full of love, you are full of joy because you are full of love. You are always ready to share because you have stumbled upon an inexhaustible source. You cannot be miserly any more.
The love I am talking about has nothing to do with our so-called relationships. Our relationships are arbitrary. The love which is eternal relates but it never creates relationships. It relates -- it relate-q to trees, to the sun, to the moon, to the wind, to people, to the animals, to the earth, to the rocks -- it is a twenty-four-hour-a-day relating, but it does not create any relationship.
Relating is like a rivers it is a flow, it is a movement, it is dynamic, alive, it is a dance. Relationship is something stagnant, something that has gone stale, something that has stopped growing, something stunted. And whenever there is something which has stopped growing you start feeling bored, you start feeling sad. A despair surrounds you and a great anguish arises in you because you start losing contact with life.
Life is always riverlike and now you are tethered to something -- a wife, a husband, a friend. Whenever one is tethered one becomes angry because nobody wants to lose his freedom. Man's greatest joy is in being free. And the stupidity of the human mind ;s such that it goes on continuously creating situations in which that freedom is lost again and again. Then you are like a bird whose wings have been cut: you look like a bird but your soul suffers because you cannot fly -- and what is a bird which cannot fly? And what is a being who is not in a flow, who is not growing?
Being is alive when it is becoming. Being is becoming. If you stop becoming, your being becomes like a dead rock, and if you go on moving then you are like a lotus which goes on opening.
My sannyasins have to know the great difference between relating and relationship. And it is not only about love that I am talking, it has to be your very style of life.
Never, never for a single moment lose your freedom. And never destroy anybody else's freedom. That's what religion means to me. A really religious person remains free and helps the people who come in contact with him to be free. He never possesses anybody and he never allows anybody to possess him.
It needs constant vigilance because our minds always want to cling and in clinging we lose. In clinging we start committing suicide. Then a very strange situation arises: we hate the person we love, we want to destroy the person we cling to. A very strange situation, but if you understand it, it is perfectly clear and logical. You hate the person because he has destroyed your freedom. You hate the situation because you are imprisoned in it, you are a prisoner. And you are a clinger because the known, the familiar, gives you a certain comfort and you are afraid of the unknown, the beyond.
So you go on doing something which is self-contradictory: on the one hand you cling, on the other hand you want freedom. And that is what all the people of the world are struggling with. They cling to the very cage of which they want to be free and their whole life remains just a futile exercise. They cannot be free because they cling, and they cannot destroy the cage because then there is nothing else to cling to. And they cannot drop the idea of being free because that is our intrinsic nature. It is impossible to drop it; there is no way to do it.
Not a single human being has been able to do it up to now and nobody is ever going to succeed in doing it, because it is not that we love freedom, in fact we are freedom and only in freedom can we grow.
So this is true about love, this is true about everything else in your life too.
My suggestion to all of my sannyasins is don't trust in nouns, trust in verbs. Become a verb rather than becoming a noun. Rather than love, think of loving. Rather than being, think of becoming. Rather than of a flower, think of flowering. Always think in terms of verbs and you will never be frustrated. Your life will become a constant growth from one peak to another peak, and those peaks go on becoming higher and higher.
The search for god, truth, bliss, or whatsoever one likes to call it, is really a search for a union with the whole.
We are brought up by every society, civilisation, religion, in such a way that we are given a false identity. We are all deceived and cheated. And the people who cheat us are very powerful; in fact their power depends on cheating and they have been cheating for centuries. They have accumulated great power -- the politicians, the priests -- and they are afraid of allowing anybody to know the truth. Their whole business depends on people who are gullible, ready to be deceived, very willing to be deceived, in fact asking to be deceived, hankering to be deceived.
-Osho, “The Golden Wind, #29”