The season of celebrating love is around the corner.
The air is charged with romance and romantic expectations; red roses, pink hearts and all kinds of pretty gifts flood the market. The young brigade may have forgotten that Valentine’s Day is in memory of St. Valentine who became a martyr a millennium ago because he wanted young couples to unite in love.
Love was forbidden then, and love is forbidden now because love is perceived as anti-social or anti-establishment — the wild flower of the heart, utterly unpredictable and unmanageable. So when the caretakers of society and morality smell love, they try to crush it as soon as possible.
But they lack the very basic understanding of human mind otherwise they would not be so terrified of the phenomenon of love. The basic understanding is, what people call love is actually romance, which is sheer imagination, poetry and fantasy.
Osho points out that all the stories of immortal love are of those lovers who could never meet! Romeo and Juliet, Laila and Majnu, Heer and Ranjha, and numerous other lovers who were never allowed to meet but died for each other; there is no immortal love story of a couple who lived with each other.
Because once a man and woman start living together their romance melts away by the heat of reality. The ordinary things of life become more important than love. Paying the bills is imperative, paying attention to each other not so much. Reality crushes the fiction of romance and kills it.
Here are some Osho mantras for lovers who want to have a successful love story: l Be in love but don’t start thinking of settling. Settling is very unsettling, because once you start settling the romance is over.
l If you decide to settle don’t take the other for granted. Being in love means you have to seduce the other person every day. You don’t possess each other, you will have to persuade the other, so the cooing continues. And that’s how love remains fresh.
l Romance is not permanent. It is just like the wind: it breezes in, you feel the coolness, and then it is gone. It is like the flowers blossoming in the morning sun — so beautiful, so magical that even dewdrops on their petals look like pearls. But by the evening the flower disappears. Learn to stay with the impermanent and you can always be in love.
l If you really want to love a woman, never get married to her. If you really want to adore a man, escape from him as far away as possible. Then you will be in love forever.
Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.