Without love everyone is a lone entity, lacking any connection with others of his kind

When I roam the lofty mountains I feel like my soul is raised on high and covered like the peaks in never melting caps of snow. And when I descend into the valleys I feel deep and profound like them and my heart fills with mysterious shadows. The same thing happens at the edge of the sea. There I merge with the surging waves; they pound and roar within me. When I gaze at the sky I expand. I become boundless, unlimited. When I look at the stars, silence permeates me; when I see a flower the ecstasy of beauty overwhelms me. When I hear a bird singing, it’s song is an echo of my own inner voice, and when I look into the eyes of an animal I see no difference between them and my own. Gradually my separate existence has been effaced and only God remains. So where shall I look for God now? How shall I seek him? Only he is; I am not. I was in the hills, and what they wanted to tell me was transmitted through their silence. The trees, the lakes, the rivers, the brooks, the moon and the stars were all speaking to me in the language of silence. And I understood. The words of God were clear to me, I could only hear him when I became silent. Not before. What shall I say to you? Listen to the stars in the sky. I wish to say the same thing their silent, dancing lights are saying. I wish to say that whatever is, is beyond the power of speech, beyond the reach of hearing. Creation springs from love. It is nourished by love. It moves towards love and eventually merges with love. And you ask me why I say love is God! This is why. I watch mankind moving from one perversion to another. It is as if some fiber essential to life has been destroyed within him – and within his civilization as well. Not only the individual, all the society is living within a framework that has become perverted and twisted. Its discordant notes echo throughout the world and the harmony that a sound culture creates is nowhere to be heard. No instrument is as out of tune as man. And just as a stone causes ripples across the surface of a lake, the perversity of one man can agitate the whole of humanity. A man may be an individual but his roots are in the corporate body of mankind. Each man’s infection is tremendously contagious. What is the diseases that afflicts our century? Many diseases have been isolated, but I wish to point to one in particular that, in my opinion, is at the root of all other afflictions. Whenever a man is overcome by this fundamental illness he turns to suicidal destruction. What name shall I give this disease? It is not easy to name it. The best I can do is to call it the drying up of the well of love in the human heart. Everyone is afflicted with this absence of love. Our hearts are not functioning at all. There can be no greater misfortune in a man’s life than the absence of love, because without love his relationship with life is severed. It is love that connects us to the whole. Without love a man stands alone, separated from the core of existence.

Without love everyone is a lone entity, lacking any connection with others of his kind. Today, man finds himself totally alone. We are all shot off from each other, trapped within ourselves. This is like being in the grave. Even though he is alive, man is a corpse. Do you see the truth is what I am saying? Are you alive? Do you feel the flow of love in your veins? If you do not feel that flow, if the throbbing of love in your heart has ceased, then you should understand well that you are not really alive at all.

Once I was on a journey and someone asked me which word in a man’s vocabulary was the most valuable. My reply was, ”Love”. The man was surprised. He said he had expected me to answer ”soul” or ”God”. I laughed and said ”Love is God.” Raising on the ray of love one can enter the enlightened kingdom of God. It is better to say that love is God than to say that truth is God, because the harmony, the beauty, the vitality and the bliss that are part of love are not part of truth. Truth is to be known; love is to be felt as well as known. The growth and perfection of love lead to the ultimate merger with God. The greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven. You can look at man as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison. If a man lives by hate he reaps a harvest of poison; if he lives by love he gathers blossoms laden with nectar.

If I mold my life and live it with the well-being of all men in mind, that is love. Love results from the awareness that you are not separate, not different from anything else in existence. I am in you; you are in me. This love is religious. The doors of love only open for the person who is prepared to let his ego go. To surrender one’s ego for someone else is love; to surrender one’s ego for all is divine love. 

Source: The Long, the Short and the All - Osho