---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "POND"
dategiven: "19 January 1981 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #19"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8101195"
shorttitle: "POND19"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop: Chapter #19"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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> [!info]
> Note
>
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]


A life without love is life in name only, in form only; the content is missing. The container is there but utterly empty; and that emptiness creates darkness in life. It is absence of love that makes life a dark night. Then one can make a thousand and one efforts to have some meaning, but one is trying to do the impossible. Whatsoever one does is going to fail. It is doomed from the very beginning. And one cannot fight with darkness either, because darkness has no existence of its own. If you fight you will be defeated. If you don't fight you are in darkness.


The way out of darkness is not through fighting, but through bringing light. The moment you bring light in, darkness is sound no more. Exactly the same happens with loves love is the light of the inner world -- it makes your life luminous, resplendent, shining. And suddenly the emptiness is there no more. There is a kind of fullness, overfullness. One is so full of energy, of delight, of dance, that one can share it. There is no need to hoard it. It is overflowing. Even if one wants to be miserly about it, one cannot be. It has to be shared because it grows as you share. If you try to hoard it you cripple it, you destroy it.


Love is going to be god for the future humanity. The word 'god' is going to disappear. It has already disappeared from the really intelligent people's lives. It is only the ignorant, retarded, non-contemporaries, who are lagging far behind the times, who go on talking, about god; otherwise now it is absolutely irrelevant.


Jesus says god is love. Now that has to be changed, I say love is god. The emphasis has to be on love. In Jesus' time the emphasis was on god, and it is a great difference -- a difference that makes a difference -- because once love becomes the central focus of life, there cannot be Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. All these stupidities will disappear. They can exist only as shadows of the idea of god.


Love is an experience. You cannot make a statue out of it. Love has to be lived. You cannot worship it. Love is the act of loving. You cannot philosophise about it. Only fools will philosophise about it. It is a reality to be tasted, to be drunk.


My sannyasins have to understand that by becoming sannyasins they are dropping the past and entering into the real contemporariness. And the contemporariness contains the whole future.


Just the opposite has been the way in the past: the present has always contained the past. And when I talk about the present, my present contains not the past but the future. It is a radical change, it is a revolution. And the present moment can contain the future only if it is empty of the past.


God belongs to the past. Love belongs to the future. And we are passing through a transitory phase -- it is very significant. We are fortunate to live in this moment, at this phase of history. We are on the crossroads. Just the understanding that we are on the crossroads, that every act of ours is going to be decisive for the whole coming future, makes one feel significant. A great joy arises out of that understanding.


So my religion is not of the past but of the future. And the future has not to be contemplated. It has to be found through the present, through living now anc here. And there is no better way to be herenow than love. Only for those few moments when you are in love are you in the present. That's the beauty of love, that's its meditativeness, its ecstasy.


Life can either be a drag or a dance (laughter) ... and it all depends on you! People have chosen a non-dancing style of life. They have chosen a non-sensitive way of life. Their approach is anti-poetic, anti-aesthetic; and the reason is that they are brought up to learn cleverness, which is simply a beautiful name for cunningness. it is not intelligence. It is just pseudo intelligence.


We are brought up to be calculating arithmetic is our whole life, business our very approach.


In a small school the teacher asked the children 'Who is the greatest man of human history?' An American child said 'Abraham Lincoln,' an Indian said 'Mahatma Gandhi,' a Mohammedan said 'Hazrat Mohammed.' But the teacher was not satisfied. Then a little Jewish boy said 'Jesus Christ.' And she said 'You are right, but you are a Jew, so why do you say Jesus Christ?'


He said 'In the deepest core of my being I know it is Moses, but business is business!' (laughter)


But this is how we are all brought up. And when life becomes business it cannot be a dance, it cannot be a flowering. You can go on counting currency notes but that is not going to give you any experience of the beauty that surrounds us, of the truth of which we are an intrinsic part. Currency notes cannot give you any idea of the ultimate joy, and the ultimate joy is the very stuff existence is made of. To live life with intensity, with passion, with poetry, we have to learn a totally different approach. We have to become a little less mathematical and a little more musical, a little less calculating and a little more risking, a little more concerned about adventure, and a little less concerned about safety, security -- then life becomes a dance. And then only is there a possibility of love. Love and dance are two sides of the same coin. If you love, your life is a dance. If your life is a dance, there is the fragrance of love. They are inseparable.


Love is beautiful only when there is no attachment in it, but unfortunately we have been told for thousands of years that love means attachment. That is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity.


Love does not mean attachment. It means just the opposite of attachment, because attachment creates very unloving space. Attachment means you will be possessive and from the other side you will be possessed. And to possess somebody is ugly. To possess means tc reduce the other person into a thing, into a commodity. You can possess a car, you can possess a house, you can possess a painting but you cannot possess a woman or a man. You cannot possess a child. That is utterly destructive, inhuman. A child is not furniture, a woman is not a thing, a man is not a commodity. These are not economic objects. They are not objects at all. They are subjects, subjectivities.


The moment you possess somebody you are exploiting and love cannot exploit. You are oppressing -- and love cannot be oppressive. The moment you possess somebody you are dominating -- and love cannot dominate. You are playing an ego number and love is not an ego trip. It is egolessness.


And the moment you possess you are continuously afraid, anxious, worried, shaky, trembling deep down. There is always fear. It is bound to be there, because to possess somebody means you are creating a bondage for the other person, and nobody likes bondage; everybody resists it. Everybody wants to get out of the prison; hence the fear. The more you possess, the more you become afraid that the other will try to escape. And this is a vicious circle: when you feel that the other is trying to escape, you create more possessiveness, you make more arrangements so the other cannot escape. The more arrangements you make, the more you create the possibility for the other to escape. Hence the so-called lovers are continuously fighting -- the man in his own way, the woman in her own way -- but they are fighting. The woman has subtle ways of fighting, the man has gross ways of fighting. The man may beat the woman and the woman will continuously nag the man, but both are doing the same to each other: they are behaving like enemies, they are not friendly.


It is very rare to come across lovers who are friendly, because possessiveness does not allow friendship to grow.


Nobody wants basically to be dependent, unfree; hence anything that destroys freedom will be resisted. And remember, love and freedom are synonymous, so a love that is not capable of giving freedom is not love at all. It may be anything else -- lust, ego, greed, animality -- anything, but not love. This is the very criterion: that love gives freedom. The more you love, the more freedom you give.


And when love and freedom go together, hand in hand, they create the most beautiful space possible. And it is only in that space that one comes to know the ultimate. That space is the temple of the ultimate. That space is the most precious phenomenon in existence.
			

> [!info]
> Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
>