Love becomes attachment because there is no love

Osho was asked:

You said love can set us free. But commonly we see that love becomes attachment, and instead of freeing us it makes us more bound. So tell us something about attachment and freedom.

Love becomes attachment because there is no love. You were just playing a game, fooling yourself. Attachment is reality; love was just a prelude. So whenever you fall in love, sooner or later you find that you have become an instrument – ​​and then all the misery begins. What is the mechanism? Why does it happen?

A few days ago a man came to me and he was feeling very guilty. He said: “I loved a woman, I loved her very much. On the day she died, I was crying and crying, but suddenly I became aware of a certain freedom within me, as if some burden had left me. I felt a deep relief, as if I had become free.”

At that moment, he became aware of a second layer of his feeling. Outwardly he was weeping and wailing and saying, “I cannot live without her. Now it will be impossible, or life will be just like death. But deep down” – he said – “I became aware that I am feeling very good, that now I am free”.

A third layer began to feel guilt. Did she say to him, “What are you doing”? And a dead body was lying there, right in front of him, he told me, and he began to feel enormous guilt. He said to me, “Help me. What's going on in my mind? I betrayed her so soon”?

Nothing happened; no one was betrayed. When love becomes attachment, it becomes a burden, a bondage. But why does love become an attachment? The first thing to understand is that if love becomes an attachment, you were just under an illusion that it was love. You were just kidding yourself and thinking that was love. In fact, you were in need of attachment. And if you go even deeper, you will find that you were also in need of becoming a slave.

There is a subtle fear of freedom and everyone wants to be a slave. Everybody, of course, talks about freedom, but nobody has the courage to be really free, because when you are really free, you are alone. If you have the courage to be alone, only then can you be free.

But no one is brave enough to be alone. You need someone. Why do you need someone? You are afraid of your own loneliness. You become bored with yourself. And really, when you're alone, nothing feels meaningful. With someone you are busy and you create artificial meanings around you.

You cannot live for yourself; so you start living for someone else. And it is also the same case with the other person: he or she cannot live alone; thus, he is on the quest to find someone. Two people who are afraid of their own loneliness come together and start a game – a game of love. But deep down they are looking for attachment, compromise, bondage.

So sooner or later everything you want happens. That is one of the most pitiful things in the world. Everything you want comes to pass. You'll have it sooner or later and the prelude will disappear. When its function is fulfilled, it will disappear. When you have become a wife or a husband, slaves to each other, when marriage has taken place, love disappears, because love was just an illusion in which two people could become slaves to each other.

Directly you cannot ask for slavery; it's very humiliating. And directly you cannot say to somebody, “Become my slave”. – …he will revolt. Neither can you say, “I want to become your slave”; so you say, "I can't live without you." But the meaning is there; it's the same. And when that – the real desire – is fulfilled, love disappears. Then you feel bondage, bondage, and then you start fighting to become free.

Remember this. This is one of the paradoxes of the mind: whatever you get, you will be bored with it, and whatever you don't get, you will crave deeply. When you are alone you will crave some bondage, some bondage. When you are in bondage, you will begin to crave freedom. In fact, only slaves want freedom, and free people try again to be slaves. The mind goes on like a pendulum, moving from one extreme to the other.

Love does not become attachment. Attachment was the need; love was just a bait. You were looking for a fish called attachment; love was just a bait to catch the fish. When the fish is caught, the bait is thrown away. Remember this, and whenever you are doing something, go deep within yourself to find the root cause.

If there is real love, it will never become attachment. What is the mechanism for love to become attachment? The moment you say to your lover or beloved “I only love you”, you have started to possess. And the moment you own someone you have deeply insulted him, because you have made him a thing.

When I own you, you are not a person then, but just one more item among my furniture – a thing. So I use you and you are my thing, my possession; thus, I will not allow anyone else to use it. This is a bargain in which I am owned by you and you make me a thing. That's a bargain, that "now" no one else can use it. Both partners feel bound and enslaved. I make you a slave, so you make me a slave in return.

Then the fight begins. I want to be a free person and yet I want you to be owned by me; you want to keep your freedom and still own me - that's the struggle. If I own you, I'll be owned by you. If I don't want to be owned by you, I shouldn't own you.

Possession should not get in the way. We must remain individuals and we must move as independent and free consciences. We can be together, we can merge into each other, but without ownership. Then there is no bondage and then there is no attachment.

Attachment is one of the ugliest things. And when I say “uglier”, I don't just mean religiously, I mean aesthetically as well. When you are attached you have lost your loneliness, your aloneness: you have lost everything. Just to feel good – because someone needs you and someone is with you – you have lost everything, you have lost yourself.

But the trap is that you try to be independent and you make the other a possession – and the other is doing the same thing. So don't own if you don't want to be owned.

Jesus said somewhere, "Judge not that you may not be judged." It is the same thing: "Do not possess so as not to be possessed". Don't make anyone a slave; otherwise you will become a slave.

So-called masters are always servants of their own servants. You cannot become someone's master without becoming a servant – that is impossible.

You can only be a master when nobody is a servant to you. This seems paradoxical, because when I say that you can only become a master when nobody is a servant to you, you will say: “Then what is the master? How am I a master when no one is a servant to me”? But I say only then are you a master. Then nobody is a servant to you and nobody will try to make you a servant.

Loving freedom, trying to be free, basically means that you have come to a deep understanding of yourself. Now, you know that you are enough for yourself. You can share with others, but you are not dependent. I can share myself with someone. I can share my love, I can share my happiness, I can share my joy, my silence with someone. But this is a sharing, not a dependency. If there is no one, I will be just as happy, just as joyful. If someone is present, that is also good and I can share.

When you realize your inner consciousness, your center, only then will love not become an attachment. If you don't know your inner center, love will become an attachment. If you know your inner center, love becomes devotion. But you must first be there to love, and you are not.

Buddha was passing through a village. A young man came to him and said, "Teach me something: how can I serve others?"

Buddha laughed at him and said, “First, be. Forget the others. First be yourself, and then all things will follow.”

Right now you are not. When you say “when I love someone it becomes an attachment”, you are saying that you are not; so whatever you do goes wrong because the doer is absent. The inner point of consciousness is not there; so whatever you do goes wrong. First be, and then you can share your being. And that sharing will be love. Before that, everything you do will become an attachment.

And finally, if you're struggling with attachment, you've taken a wrong turn. You can fight. So many monks – recluses, sannyasins – are doing this. They feel that they are attached to their homes, their property, their wives, their children and they feel caged, imprisoned.

They run away, leave their homes, leave their wives, leave their children and possessions and they become beggars and escape into the forest, into solitude. But go there and watch them. They became attached to their new surroundings.

I was visiting a friend who was living a secluded life under a tree in a dense forest, but there were other ascetics as well. One day I happened to be with this recluse under his tree and a new seeker had come while my friend was away. He had gone to the river to take a bath. Underneath his tree the new sannyasin began to meditate.

The man came back from the river and pushed the novice out of the tree, and said, “This is my tree. Go and find another one somewhere else. No one can sit under my tree.” And that man had left his home, his wife, his children. Now the tree has become a possession – you cannot meditate under his tree.

You cannot escape attachment so easily. It will take on new forms, new contours. You will be deceived, but he will be there. So don't struggle with the attachment, just try to understand why it exists. And then know the root cause: because you are not, this attachment exists.

Within you, your own being is so absent that you try to cling to anything in order to feel safe. You are not rooted; so you try to do anything to your roots. When you are rooted in your being, when you know who you are, what is that being that is within you and what is that consciousness that is in you, then you will not be attached to anybody.

That doesn't mean you won't love it. In fact, only then can you love, because then sharing is possible – and without any conditions, without any expectations. You simply share because you have an abundance, because you have so much that it is overflowing.

This overflowing of yourself is love. And when that overflow becomes a flood, when, by its own overflow, the whole universe is filled and your love touches the stars, in your love the earth feels good and in your love the whole universe is bathed; so this is devotion.

Osho, in “The Book of Secrets”