I want your life to be a garden...

-  LOVE AND MEDITATION SEEM TO BE OPPOSITE POLARITIES. CAN YOU PLEASE TALK TO US ON HOW TO GROW IN MEDITATION AND IN INTIMACY WITH THE BELOVED?



-  You neither know what love is, nor do you know what meditation is. Still, you are disturbed by the question. To you, love and meditation seem to be opposite polarities -- I wonder where you got that idea? If love and meditation are opposite polarities, then nothing in this world can be close to any other thing. But I know all the old religions have also been under the same fallacy.


The meditators have been escaping to the mountains to avoid love, and the lovers never bothered about meditation because they knew that if they meditated their love life would be finished. It has been one of the longest fallacies humanity has lived with. Love is a silence, a joy, a peace, a blissfulness between two persons. But because there are two persons, sometimes they don't match.


Meditation is the same experience of silence and peace and bliss -- but alone. But if two meditators are in love, then things come to the highest peak. If one meditator can reach to a certain peak in his blissfulness, in his silence, two meditators who love each other can become an immense support to each other's flight into the unknown. Their love can become a nourishment to their meditation, and vice-versa, their meditation can become a nourishment to their love.


This is the point where I differ from all the religions of the past. They have made love and meditation polarities, parallel lines which meet nowhere.


To me a man of meditation is bound to be immensely loving. All his anger is gone, all his hate is gone, all his possessiveness is gone. If he cannot love then who else can love? And a man of love can go deepest in meditation because love is our highest quality, our purest self, our perfect song. If two singing hearts cannot meet in deep meditation then no other meeting is possible.


In fact, the people who have escaped to the mountains to meditate, think only of women in their meditation. They hallucinate. Their hallucinations can become so real that they start talking to those women. And in the whole world, people without meditation are loving each other, but their love does not bring a paradise to their life; on the contrary, it creates hell. They are known as intimate enemies -- enemies who have decided to live together.


My own understanding is that unless love and meditation are almost two sides of the same coin, we cannot create the new man, the new humanity, the new world.


Last night I told you the story of Jesus on the cross telling Peter, "Peter, from my height I can see, far away, my house." From my height of consciousness I can also see the faraway house where love and meditation will dwell together. We have to create that house.


Azima, don't say love and meditation are opposite polarities. That is a lie propagated by the priests down the ages. It has destroyed lovers into miserable lives and meditators into juiceless deserts. I want your life to be a garden full of flowers -- full of fruits, full of juice.


There is no question of how to create a loving, meditative relationship. Here, the people who have gathered around me are already living -- at least making an effort for the first time in the whole history of man -- to bring love and meditation as two sides of the same experience. Why should love disturb your meditation?


In fact, love should give you the right atmosphere, the right soil to meditate. And meditation should give you the right fragrance for love to become a treasure, a glory, a benediction.


Osho