Love: the conscious path of the ego

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Love: the conscious path of the ego

Love is almost like a death. When you die your physical body dies and you don’t experience it, because most of the times you die after you have gone into unconsciousness, so you don’t feel your death. Only people whose meditation has become complete can see their death, because they don’t go into unconsciousness.

The fear is, if you replace the word love with death... Love is a conscious death, not of the body but of the ego. The ego has been dominating you for many births, for many lives. Its domination has become almost permanent. Love is the only experience that can dethrone it.

If in love you cannot lose your ego, then you can never lose it. And you are not the ego, remember; it is a false idea of yourself, accepted and acquired in ignorance. In love you need humbleness, in love a trust arises on its own. The person you love, you can expose yourself to in total vulnerability. But you don’t know that with love this shadow is always there, that it is a kind of death.

Particularly your personality feels immensely troubled that you are in such deep love.

So as far as I can see there is no division in you; it is just that you don’t understand the relationship between love and fear. It is absolutely natural for every person who loves to feel fear, because he does not know that love is nothing but a graveyard for your ego, and because you are identified with the ego you think it is going to be your death.

All this may not be on the conscious level; it may be going on underneath, in the darkness, in the unconscious part of your psychology.

On the conscious level you think perhaps you are split into two opposing camps. They are not opposing camps; they are two branches of the same tree, but the tree is hidden in the unconscious and you see only the branches in the conscious. Naturally, they look like two separate things.

So the first thing is to understand exactly that 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.

Everybody is afraid of love; that’s why even lovers keep a little distance, and even lovers go on fighting so that the distance remains. They never come too close, where they can become one, because becoming one means you have lost yourself. That is your ego influencing you. Unless love is big enough that you can become one with the beloved, your love will remain absolutely incomplete, and you will remain in this split between love and fear.

Now move your energy more towards love and leave the fear without energy. It will die by itself. It is only a shadow.