Love, passion and attachment

If there is passion in love, then love will become hell. If there is attachment in love, then love will be a prison. 

If love is passionless it will become heaven. If love is without attachment, then love itself is the divine.

Love has both possibilities. You can have passion and attachment in love: then it is as if you have tied a stone around the neck of the bird of love so that it cannot fly. Or as if you have put the bird of love in a golden cage.

However precious the cage may be – it may be studded with diamonds and jewels – a cage is still a cage and it will destroy the bird's capacity to fly.

When you remove passion and attachment from love, when your love is pure, innocent, formless, when you give in love and don't demand, when love is only a giving, when love is an emperor, not a beggar; when you are happy because someone has accepted your love and you don't trade love, you ask nothing in return, then you are liberating this bird of love into the open sky.

Then you are strengthening its wings. Then this bird can set out on the journey to the infinite.

Love has made people fall and love has made people rise high. It all depends on what you have done with love.

Love is a very mysterious phenomenon. It is a door – on one side is suffering, on the other side is bliss; on one side is hell, on the other side is heaven; on one side is sansara, the wheel of life and death, on the other side is liberation.

Love is a door.

If you have only known a love full of passion and attachment, then when Jesus says, God is love," you will not be able to understand it. When Sahajo starts singing songs of love you will become very uneasy: This makes no sense! I have also loved but I got back only misery. In the name of love I reaped only a crop of thorns, no flowers ever blossomed for me.

The other love will seem to be imaginary. The love which becomes devotion, which becomes prayer, which becomes liberation, will look like just a play of words.

You have also known love – but whenever you knew love you knew only a love full of passion and attachment.

Your love was not really love. Your love was only a curtain to hide the passion, attachment and sex. On the outside you called it love, inside it was something else. What did you long for when you were in love with a woman or a man? – your longing was sexual and love was only the outside decoration.

Osho,
Showering without Clouds, Talk #2