Universal Self

Beyond Schizophrenia

A man who is in love and meditative is beyond schizophrenia, is beyond all kinds of split. He has become one, he is integrated. In fact, he has a soul.

Love is a silence, a joy, a peace, a blissfulness between two persons.

Meditation is the same experience of silence and peace and bliss-but alone.

Being in love is one of the best feelings in the world. Until we fall out of love, and then it’s one of the worst feelings in the world.

But what if we could get past the idea that love has to be in relationship with another, and simply be love?

To be in love gives you only a glimpse of grace, but to become love is to become grace itself. Start by being in love and end in becoming love.

Love is always new. It never becomes old because it is non-accumulative, non-hoarding.

It knows no past; it is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops. It lives moment to moment, it is atomic. It has no continuity, it knows no tradition. Each moment it dies and each moment it is born again. It is like breath: you breathe in, you breathe out; again you breathe in and you breathe out. You don’t hoard it inside.

If you hoard the breath you will die because it will become stale, it will become dead. It will lose that vitality, the quality of life. So is the case with love – it is breathing; each moment it renews itself. So whenever one gets stuck in love and stops breathing, life loses all significance. And that’s what is happening to people: the mind is so dominant that it even influences the heart and makes even the heart possessive! The heart knows no possessiveness but the mind contaminates it, poisons it.

So remember that: be in love with existence! And let love be like breathing. Breathe in, breathe out, but let it be love coming in, going out. By and by with each breath you have to create that magic of love. Make it a meditation: when you breathe out, just feel that you are pouring your love into existence; when you breathe in, existence is pouring its love into you. And soon you will see that the quality of your breath is changing, then it starts becoming something totally different to what you have ever known before. That’s why in India we call it ‘prana’, life, not just breathing, it is not just oxygen. Something else is there, the very life itself.

The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love but one is love. Yes, relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained to the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension, because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is, and you don’t know. Love basically is a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.