Rising in Love

When I talk about love it has the meaning of consciousness in it. When you talk about love it has the darkness of unconsciousness in it. They are two worlds apart. You don't know what love is. If you know love you have known all that is worth knowing; then there is nothing left. If you have known love you have known the divine.

Love exists in three bodies. The physical love you know; it is sex. The infatuation of the body has no depth; it is as deep as the physical body. That's what you call love; that's what you call falling in love. Yes, it is a fall.

Then there is a second kind of love, the love of the bliss body. You don't know about it; it is a stillness. You don't fall - rather, you become rooted, grounded. You lose all wavering; you become a silent pool. That's what should be meant by love.

The third kind of love comes from the essential body. That love should be called prayer. You rise in it; you never fall in it. The first love is a fall. The second love is a stabilizer, a grounding, a centering. And the third love is a rising into the sky - it gives you wings.

When I am talking about love I mean both the second and the third, because for the third to happen the second will be needed. But I am not against the first. I am not against physical love because unless you fall many times you will not be able to be grounded. Hence I am all for it. Fall as many times as you can, so that you can learn how not to fall. That's the only way to learn - through errors and mistakes.

Millions of people have remained crippled because the society and the priests and the parents go on insisting that physical love has something of sin in it: Avoid it! Then of course you don't fall - but a man who cannot fall will not know how to stand without falling. A child that cannot afford to fall sometimes will not be able to walk at all - will remain crippled, will have to use crutches.

Marriage is a crutch - cripples are using it all over the world. Because they cannot fall in love, they settle for something synthetic, plastic. Fall as many times as you can, and enjoy falling. Learn the art of falling - because only through that will you be able to learn how to stand on your own without falling. A man who always tries to remain secure, safe, will not ever learn anything.

I am all for these three loves. Learn the ways of the first: the ways of the body. And then go beyond because there is much more. Don't remain confined to it. It is a passage to reach the second body, the bliss body. Sometimes when you are deeply in physical love, some bliss spills over you from the second body.

Making love to a woman or a man, when suddenly you feel ecstatic, remember it is not coming from the woman, it is not coming from the man. The woman has nothing to give to you, neither has the man anything to give to you. All that is possible between a man and woman is a kind of absorbent into each other. They forget themselves for a moment; the ego disappears.

In that disappearance something from the second body starts flowing within you. Because you are so absorbed by the woman or by the man, you have forgotten yourself. That's why you feel blissful. That's what is known as sexual orgasm. It has nothing to do with sex, actually.

Once you have understood the process you can have it without having sex. You can simply sit and sway and it starts spilling. You can attain to that orgasm without searching for a woman or a man. But you have to learn through the man and through the woman.

It's beautiful and it is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. You have to go beyond it. You have to find the real source of bliss. It does not come from the other; it comes from your innermost core.

Become more and more conscious while making love. Where is the bliss coming from, from what direction? - and move in that direction. Then lovemaking can become one of the greatest meditations. That is the whole approach of Tantra.
Once you have learned how to reach orgasm through your own bliss body, you are freed from your dependence on the other. Then your love becomes non-possessive; freedom remains intact. Once you know that bliss is coming from your own core, possessiveness disappears. Then you love and you don't demand; then you love and there are no conditions in it.

Once you have started enjoying your own bliss body, then one day you suddenly see something else, a far greater blessing than bliss itself. Rays of something more blissful than bliss itself are reaching you. And they are coming from your very inner shrine. Then you start searching for them and you start rising, growing toward the sky.
When you reach to the source of your being - the essential body, the Buddha body, the truth body - love is fulfilled. My word love has the ultimate meaning of that experience.

Excerpted from This Very Body the Buddha, Osho

POQ
Making love to a woman or a man, when suddenly you feel ecstatic, remember it is not coming from the woman, it is not coming from the man. Actually it has nothing to do with sex.