“Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved. ”
In this quote by Osho, the concept of love for God is compared to romantic love. Osho describes the intense feelings and emotions that lovers experience, using it as a metaphor for the spiritual longing and desire to connect with the divine. This comparison illustrates the depth of passion and devotion that can be felt when one chooses to love God, emphasizing the intense emotional and spiritual journey that comes with this kind of love.
In today's fast-paced world, Osho's message about love and longing for God can still resonate deeply with individuals seeking spiritual fulfillment and connection. The idea of being consumed by a burning desire for something impossible is a reminder of the depth of emotion and dedication required in any meaningful pursuit, whether it be love, career, or personal growth. In a world filled with distractions and superficial connections, Osho's words serve as a powerful call to prioritize what truly matters and invest fully in what brings genuine fulfillment.
"Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved."
In this quote by Osho, he speaks about the intense burning and longing felt by lovers for their beloved, comparing this to the love and yearning one may feel for God. Reflect on the following questions to deepen your understanding of this concept:
How do you interpret the idea of having a "burning" in your heart for God? Have you ever experienced a similar feeling in your own spiritual journey?
Osho mentions that loving God can create a great fire within you because it is an impossible love object. What do you think makes loving God feel impossible to some people? How can this sense of impossibility impact one's faith and devotion?
The quote mentions that we may have to weep, cry, pray, fast, and continually remember the beloved in order to love God. How do these practices help strengthen one's love and connection to God? Have you found any of these practices helpful in your own spiritual life?
Reflect on a time when you felt a deep longing or desire to connect with God. What was that experience like for you? How did it shape your understanding of love and devotion in a spiritual context?
“I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process. It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”
“Light is shallow; darkness is infinitely deep. Light is always bounded, it has boundaries. Darkness has no boundaries, it is unbounded. Light comes and goes; darkness always is. When there is light you cannot see it. When light is not there you can see it. But it is always there; you cannot cause it. Light has a cause. You burn the fire, you put on wood. When the wood is finished the light will be gone. It is caused, hence it is an effect. But darkness is not caused by anything, it is not an effect. It is uncaused eternity.”
“It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead – I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly – seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth – not a belief – is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me”
“The natural desire of the human mind is to become special - to become special in the ways of the world, to have many degrees, to have much political power, to have money, wealth - to be special. The mind is always ready to go on some ego trip. And if you are fed up with the world, then again the ego starts finding new ways and new means to enhance itself - it becomes spiritual. You become a great mahatma, a great sage, a great scholar, a man of knowledge, a man of renunciation; again you are special. Unless the desire to be special disappears, you will never be special. Unless you relax into your ordinariness, you will never relax.”
“You have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems. They will be part of another world. Don´t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.”
“If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose — the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That’s how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.”