Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms; love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean.
The mind can function only with the old; with the new, the mind is utterly useless. Hence, fear arises, and leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. It is the same pain that the child feels when he comes out of the mother’s womb. It is the same pain that the bird feels when he comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when he tries to be on the wing for the first time. The fear and unpredictability of the unknown make one very frightened.
And because the transformation is going to be from the self toward a state of no-self, the agony is very deep. But you cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire. Love is fire.
It is because of the pain of love that millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative, it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste; it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle.
The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other? Because only the other can function as a mirror. You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is fundamental for self-knowledge, too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is because he will not have a mirror to see his own reflection.
Relationship is a mirror, and the purer, higher the love is, the better, cleaner the mirror. But higher love needs you to be open, vulnerable. You have to drop your armour; that is painful. You have to drop the calculating mind, live dangerously. The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love.
The reflection that you find of your own self in the other may be ugly; that is the anxiety. Avoid the mirror – but by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation, you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken.
To drop the ego is very painful, because we have been continuously polishing it. And when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego. It is certainly painful. It is all that you have created – this ugly ego, this idea that ‘I am separate from existence’.
Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego.
Abridged from The Secret, courtesy: Osho Times International, www.osho.com
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