Love Is The Only Hope Of The World

The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love but one is love. Whenever I talk about love remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained to the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension, because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is, and you don’t know. Love basically is a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.

 

And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling but by rising, soaring upwards, higher than you. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A Buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a Buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.

 

Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, “Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you.” Love is like breathing: when it happens you are simply love. It does not matter who comes close to you, the sinner or the saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, is rejoiced. Love is unconditional giving – but only those are capable of giving who have.

 

One of the most mysterious things about man is that he goes on giving things which he doesn’t have. You go on giving love and you don’t have it in the first place, and you go on asking love from others who don’t have it in the first place. Beggars begging from beggars.

 

Love first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. It is the quality of being alone, happily alone, joyously alone. It is the quality of being a no-mind, of being silent. Contentless consciousness is the space, the context in which love arises in you.

 

And when it arises in you it is so much, it is unbearable. Its pleasure is so unbearable that it becomes almost pain. It is heavy like the clouds which are full of rain; they have to shower, they have to rain, they have to unburden themselves. When love arises in the silent heart, it has to be shared, it has to be given; you are helpless.

 

And the person you give your love to is not obliged to you in any way. In fact, you are obliged to the person because he helped you unburden, he shared something that was too much in you. And the economics of love is: the more you give, the more you have, because in your silent being you are joined with the oceanic, the divine source of all. And you can go on sharing…more and more goes on flowing in you, it goes on welling up.

 

Yes, you are right, love is the only hope of the world. And we are coming close to that turning point: either total war or total love. And this is a question of either/or, there is no third alternative. There is nothing like a compromise now, you cannot be in the middle. Man has to choose. And it is a question of life and death: war is death, love is life. -OSHO 

 

Be Happy. God Bless.

Famous Love Letter

Victor Hugo to Adele Foucher (1821)
“Since the soul is superior to the body, to which it is united, it would remain on earth in painful loneliness were it not for the fact that among other human souls it may choose a companion – a partner in the trials of life and in the joys of the hereafter. When two souls, which have sought each other amid the crowd, find they have met, realize that they belong to each other, and comprehend this affinity, then it is that a union has been brought about, as pure and aspiring as themselves – a union which begun on earth will be consummated in heaven.”
 ***
 “This union is love – genuine, complete love, such as few men can imagine. It is a love which is a religion, since the object of love is regarded as a divinity, with all the devotion and affection which turn the greatest sacrifices into the sublimest joys. Such a love you inspire in me, and such a love you will someday feel for me, although to my sorrow you do not feel it now. Your soul is incapable of an angelic love. It may be, therefore, that only an angel can inspire such a love.”

Be Happy. God Bless.

The Art Of Loving

At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor:
 If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore.
We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. “We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.

When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of his suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if she doesn’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief.

The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.

 From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, 'Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don't want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy." If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry.
 That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.
 Maybe a father does not have time or is not brave enough to ask his son such a question. Then the love between them will not be as full as it could be. We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don't ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.”

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering. ― Thích Nhất Hạnh
Be Happy. God Bless.

This Journey

This Journey - Author Unknown
Having you in my life
Has made everyday special,
I smile when I have you close
And treasure each and every moment.
 just take my hand
So we can walk together
This journey that we are on
May climb hills, valleys and mountains
But once we’re home
We’re safe and sound
And together we’ll be forever.

Be Happy. God Bless.

How Do I Love Thee

                                                     image source : http://theprovidencegroup.com/
"Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end." - Author Unknown

 
How Do I Love Thee? 
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

How do I love thee? 
Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 
I love thee freely, as men strive for right; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 
I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints - I love thee with the breath, 
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, 
I shall but love thee better after death.


"Many are the starrs I see, 
but in my eye no starr like thee." 
 

Be Happy. God Bless.