Reading of the Day: Overwhelming Love

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From Osho Times Online: Your Answers Quetioned on Emotions (Feb 26, 2006 Issue)

On Overwhelm?

Often a feeling that I can’t describe fills my heart and my whole being. It is there in deep love — but a similar feeling also comes up in fear, anguish, pain, helplessness and frustration.

There is certainly something very similar in very different emotions: the overwhelmingness. It may be love, it may be hate, it may be anger — it can be anything. If it is too much then it gives you a sense of being overwhelmed by something. Even pain and suffering can create the same experience, but overwhelmingness has no value in itself. It simply shows you are an emotional being.

This is typically the indication of an emotional personality. When it is anger, it is all anger. And when it is love, it is all love. It almost becomes drunk with the emotion, blind. And whatever action comes out of it is wrong. Even if it is overwhelming love, the action that will come out of it is not going to be right.

Reduced to its base, whenever you are overwhelmed by any emotion you lose all reason, you lose all sensitivity, you lose your heart in it.

It becomes almost like a dark cloud in which you are lost. Then whatever you do is going to be wrong.

Love is not to be a part of your emotions. Ordinarily that’s what people think and experience, but anything overwhelming is very unstable. It comes like a wind and passes by, leaving you behind, empty, shattered, in sadness and in sorrow.

According to those who know man’s whole being — his mind, his heart and his being — love has to be an expression of your being, not an emotion.

Emotion is very fragile, very changing. One moment it seems that is all. Another moment you are simply empty.

So the first thing to do is to take love out of this crowd of overwhelming emotions. Love is not overwhelming.

On the contrary, love is a tremendous insight, clarity, sensitivity, awareness.

But that kind of love rarely exists, because very few people ever reach to their being.

There are people who love their cars…. That love is of the mind. And then you love your wife, your husband and your children — that love is of the heart. But because it needs change to remain alive, and you cannot allow it its changeability, it becomes stale. The same husband every day — it is such a boring experience. It dulls your sensitivity, it dulls every possibility of joy. You slowly start forgetting the language of laughter. Life becomes simply work without any joy. And one has to work because one has a wife and one has children.

You have to take your love out from the emotional grip where it has been since your birth, and you have to find a route to your being. Unless your love becomes part of your being, it is not much different from pain, suffering, sadness.

Osho: Om Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, #17

Copyright © 2006 Osho International Foundation