Osho on commitment and non-attachment in love - A commitment is eternal

Question - You seem to advocate Commitment and Non-Attachment in Love, Whether with master or lover. I don't understand how one can be committed and unattached at the same time.

Osho - In fact, they always happen together, they cannot happen separately. It is impossible to separate them, because they are two aspects of the same coin: commitment and unattachment. If you are attached, then it is not a commitment. Then you are using the other for yourself because it is an attachment.

You love a person and you say, 'I am committed and attached.' What does attachment mean? It means that you are using the other person for yourself, you are using the other person as a means. How can one be committed to a means?

Commitment is possible only towards an end, not towards a means. You cannot be committed to a car, you cannot be committed to a house. They are means; they have to be used. You can only Be committed to an alive person, because each person is the goal.

Love is not using the person for your own pleasure. Much pleasure comes through it, but that is a by-product. You love the person as an end; you are committed. You can give your very life to the person, but there is no attachment, because attachment means that you are using the person for yourself.

Commitment with nonattachment means that now the other has become the goal, the end, the very end. They always happen together, and if they cannot happen together then you are missing something. If commitment is with attachment, then you are just deceiving yourself that it is a commitment. Sooner or later, if the person dies, you will find another person -- because you were using the person. Now that he is not available, you will find another person.

A commitment is eternal. Your wife dies: on that day, all women disappear from the world for you. You loved her as a goal. Now it is even impossible to conceive that you can love another. It was so total that nothing is left behind. And it was so total that only the body can die, not the soul of that being. Death cannot part two lovers. If they really loved, they had conquered death already. Love is immortal.

But if there was only an attachment, then after a few weeks or a few days the wound is healed. You loved the person because of you, for your own pleasure. Now you will find another person. In fact, you love your husband, you say that you love, and he's dying -- or your wife -- and when the wife is dying, on the deathbed, if somebody could open a window in your head and look, you are already planning and trying to find a new woman.

The mind, at the most, exploits. It can never become a deep commitment. Deep commitment is of being. It knows no time, it knows no death. I am not saying that it is permanent, because permanence is part of time. It is eternal. It has the fragrance of divineness.

Let me tell you one anecdote: A politician named Strange lay dying. A friend asked him what he would like inscribed on his tombstone,'Just put,' said the politician: Here lies an honest politician.

'But,' said the friend,'that doesn't tell who it is.'

'Oh yes, replied the politician,'the passer-by will say,'That is strange -- a politician, and honest?' -- no need to say the name. Passers-by will by themselves say,'That is strange.'

Attachment and love never go together; commitment and attachment never go together. Love goes with unattachment. Then love has a purity of the other world. Then love is absolute essence, absolute pureness, innocence. And then there is a commitment. That commitment is eternal.

Source - Osho Book "Come Follow to You