Love Needs no Reference

"Love needs no reference – that's the beauty of love and the freedom of love. Hate is a bondage. Hate is imprisonment – imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates hate, hate provokes hate. If you hate somebody you are creating hate in that person's heart for yourself. And the whole world exists in hate, in destructiveness, in violence, in jealousy, in competitiveness. That's why we have created a hell out of this beautiful earth – which could have become a paradise.

"Love, and the earth becomes a paradise again. And the immense beauty of love is that it has no reference. Love comes from you for no reason at all. It is your outpouring bliss, it is your sharing of your heart. It is the sharing of the song of your being. And sharing is so joyful – hence one shares. Sharing for sharing's sake, for no other motive.

"But the love you have known in the past is not the love Buddha is talking about or I am talking about. Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. Hence, your love has reference: somebody has been beautiful to you yesterday, he was so nice that you feel great love for him. This is not love; this is the other side of hate – the reference proves it. Or somebody is going to be nice to you tomorrow: the way he smiled at you, the way he talked to you, the way he invited you to his house tomorrow – he is going to be loving to you. And great love arises.

"This is not the love buddhas talk about. This is hate disguised as love – that's why your love can turn into hate any moment. Scratch a person just a little bit, and the love disappears and hate arises. It is not even skin-deep. Even so-called great lovers are continuously fighting, continuously at each other's throats – nagging, destructive. And people think this is love…

"Your love is not really love: it is its very opposite. It is hate disguised as love, camouflaged as love, parading as love. True love has no reference. It thinks not of the yesterdays, it thinks not of the tomorrows. True love is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it, and the showering of it – for no other reason, for no other motive, than just the joy of sharing it."

Reference - Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 1