Once Bhagwān Rajneesh, Osho, was asked, “What is God?” In response, Osho stated that religions have described God as love. For example, when you see Jesus or Krishna, what do you notice? You see love in them. Religions have taught us to recognise love in God. On the contrary, says Osho, we have to see God in Love, rather than Love in God. Hence the question, what is love? Jiddu Krishnamurti, another brilliant thinker on a comparable level as Osho, helps us understand love.1
It is said that logical simples are difficult to describe with the help of language, they can only be experience. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to describe the meaning of love.
To address this challenge, we will attempt to describe love by first defining what is not love, such as Neti-Neti, and then determining what is love. In Hindu philosophy, “Neti-Neti” means “it is not this, and it is not that”.
Love And The Time Dimension
We never say “I will love you” or “I have loved you,” but always say “I love you.” Love is about the present moment, not the past or the future.
Love and Belongingness
Love is not the same as belonging. For example, a person loves his wife as long as she does what he says and lives with him. If she leaves him for someone else, he feels anger, hate, pain, and anxiety. This is more about belonging than love.
Love is seeing things as they are. It is neither based on nor tied to conditions, which is the state we should all try to attain.
Love and Responsibility
Can we love without hate, jealousy, anger, getting in the way, comparing, feeling responsible, or feeling like we have to? Can it be called love when we do what we need to do to make sure our kids have the best? With our duty, we try to shape them according to how our minds have been shaped and what we think is best for them and how they can fit into a shaped society. Is this love? This is more of a care, than love.
Love and Religion
When we lose someone, we shed tears for ourselves because we will miss that person. We can’t call this love. Love and sadness don’t go together. Religions have done this for hundreds of years by putting Jesus on the cross and praising his pain. It is not just about Christianity, every faith and religion has tried to shape us by telling how to think about love in its own way2.
Love and Relationship
The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. We invite insecurity by seeking security. Most of us wants the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his or her own security, a specific path?
We seek for the true love, and we are not loved because we dont know how to love, announces Krishnamurti.
So what is love?
The word “love” is so loaded, corrupted, abused, diluted, and utilised in every context that it causes so much misunderstanding, e.g. I love ice-cream!
Krishnamurti says that one should not try and learn “what love is” from anyone else because that will be another “conditioning”.
To understand love, one has to get rid of things like jealousy, anger, ego, greed, etc. It is also conditioning to rebel against an idea, an ideology, an establishment. So, these can’t be washed away by a rebellion or a force.
They have to be washed away the way rainwater cleans a dusty leaf, which is to say, effortless and easily. Love should help get rid of these. This is the experience every human should strive for.
It is necessary to have passion to achieve this state, but a passion that is without any motive.
A flower blooms and shares the fragrance to everyone. It does not need an observer for it to be observed. It spreads the fragrance irrespective of thinking about who it will benefit. The passion of doing something without any thought and purpose, and by not seeking it is the way to come upon love.
Love has to be new, fresh and alive, everyday without any boundaries of time. Where there is no conflict in the duality, that is when love is experienced. If one doesn’t know what love is then another way to experience is to stop seeking, pursuing and looking for it. This is when the mind stops thinking and goes quiet.
When love is felt, silence is the state.
To Summarise
Love is about giving up the idea of “me” and avoiding thoughts; it is about “being” in the now without the baggage of the past or future. It is about being that flower that is ready to be smelled by anyone, whether they are nearby or far away. Its job is to bloom without a purpose and to be loving rather than being loved.
My spiritual guru, Pujya Morari Bapu, calls his followers as flowers. I wonder if this is the reason behind he calling the katha listeners as flowers. He wants them to bloom and live free (आज़ादी), without any fear (अभय).
We cannot force ourselves to love, practise, and develop the will to love since this is another sort of conditioning that is not love, because the taught behavior is from the past knowledge and we are not living in the present.
This perspective on love that extends beyond belongingness might be concerning because it has the potential to disrupt family, relationships, and relationships, particularly in a culture full of rules and set frameworks. For instance, it’s socially unacceptable to fall in love with someone else when you’re married, but it’s acceptable to fall in love with a pet or a piece of art. The love described by J. Krishnamurti transcends time, people, relationships and objects; it has the capacity to connect us to oneness, union, and the total.
We need to stop becoming analytical about the fragments of life and observe things in their entirety, at one glance. A mind that is afraid and preoccupied with its own ambitions, greed, fears, guilt, and suffering is incapable of loving. Love cannot exist in a mentality that is divided: you and me, they and us, black, brown, and white.
When we say, “I love you,” we are essentially saying that the image of myself that I have developed over time loves the image of that person that I have built within myself based on my experiences. This is a manifestation of an image made during various interactions over the years, which is a collection of insults, worry, ambitions, pleasures, nagging, domination, and so on. The relationship exists between images created in the past. Love, on the other hand, is a relationship that occurs in the present moment and involves complete self-abandonment. Total abandonment can only be achieved by self-awareness and knowing one-self.
Love exists only when one truly understands oneself.
According to Osho, you may forget about God if you understand Love, which is Godliness; more religion is unnecessary. God is the quantity, and godliness is the quality.
If you’re still reading this, let me tell you that I am or am genuinely attempting to be the flower who only wants to be loving and not be loved. You can have my fragrance if you like, and I will not know. I’m trying to live my life to the fullest, which means being spontaneous and totally conscious, i.e. I want to bloom instinctively when spring arrives. This can be summarised by the famous poetries written by the Gujarati poets, “Shu Puchho Chho Mujne” (શું પૂછો છો મુજને કે હૂં શું કરું છું, મને જ્યાં ગમે તયાં હારું છું ફરું છું)3 and “Mauj Ma Rehvu” (મૌજ માં રહેવું)4.
If I were to sum up love in one line, it would be this. If I say “I love you” , that means “I am yours, I do not want anything from you, and I am here to make you happy and help you grow” .
Astu (अस्तु)
Do you think Osho and J. Krishnamurti accurately define love? What do you think love is? I would “love” to hear your thoughts in the comments area!
References
- Freedom from the Known, J. Krishnamurti ↩︎
- Bhagwān Rajnish (Osho) on What is God?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xggTJCCxFss&t=320s ↩︎
- Shu Puchho Chho Mujne: https://youtu.be/0qwxwobsKvo?si=hsBd0_zGAQ7quOsC ↩︎
- Mauj Ma Rahevu: https://youtu.be/pjNlNONkW50?si=0_w4egHF4jYE-mQk ↩︎
Bhavin Shukla has been working as an IT Consultant in the data space for more than 25 Years. As a Data and Analytics professional, he has worked extensively for years on complex IT Transformation Programmes within Healthcare, Finance, Insurance and Telco domains.
Bhavin is driven by a sincere desire to embrace a spiritual existence rooted in values, while genuinely striving to enhance societal culture by fostering a supportive community where we stand by each other.
Bhavin Shukla 
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