Existence is made out

Joy is the stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving towards becoming more existential, you will be becoming more and more full of joy and delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow, only attachments will drop because attachments bring misery, attachments bring bondage, attachments destroy your freedom. Indifference is a pseudo-coin — it looks like detachment, but it only looks like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and die.

Don’t try to achieve happiness

When you are trying to achieve happiness you will miss. The very effort to achieve happiness is absurd because happiness is here: you cannot achieve it. Nothing has to be done about it, you simply have to allow it. It is happening, it is all around you; within, without, only happiness is. Nothing else is real. Watch, look deep into the world, into trees, birds, rocks, rivers, into the stars, moon and sun, into people, animals — existence is made out of the stuff of happiness, joy. Relax and it fulfills you.

Love is not attachment

Love knows no attachment, and that which knows attachment is not love. That is possessiveness, domination, clinging, fear, greed — it may be a thousand and one things, but it is not love. In the name of love other things are parading, in the name of love other things are hiding behind, but on the container the label ‘love’ is stuck. Inside you will find many sorts of things but not love at all.

Are you afraid of aloneness?

Watch. If you are attached to a person, are you in love? Or are you afraid of your aloneness, so you cling? If the person dies or moves somewhere else or falls in love with someone else then you will kill this person or you may kill yourself and you will say, ‘I was so attached that I couldn’t live without her or without him’.

It is sheer foolishness. It is not love, it is something else. You are afraid of your aloneness, you are not capable of being with yourself. And you use the other person as a means for your own ends.

To use another person as a means is violence

Immanuel Kant has made it one of his fundamentals of moral life. He used to say that to treat a person as a means is the greatest immoral act there is. Because when you treat another person as a means — for your gratification, for your sexual desire, for your fear — you are reducing the other person to be a thing, you are destroying his or her freedom, you are killing his or her soul.

Courtesy Osho International Foundation/ www.osho.com