Love is paradise, hate creates even more hate

Love exists in the present. Hate has a reference in the past: somebody abused you yesterday and you are carrying it like a wound, a hangover. Or you are afraid that somebody is going to abuse you tomorrow — a fear. And you are already getting ready, you are getting prepared to encounter it. You cannot hate in the present.

Try it today: sit silently and hate somebody in the present, with no reference to the past or the future.... You cannot do it. But you can love.

Love needs no reference, that's the beauty of love and the freedom of love. Hate is imprisonment, imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates hate, hate provokes hate. If you hate somebody you are creating hate in that person's heart for yourself.

And the whole world exists in hate, destructiveness, violence, jealousy, and competitiveness. People are at each other's throats either in reality, in action, or at least in their minds; in their thoughts, everybody is murdering, killing.

That's why we have created a hell out of this beautiful earth — which could have become a paradise.

Love, and the earth becomes a paradise again. And the immense beauty of love is that it has no reference.

Love comes from you for no reason at all. It is your outpouring bliss, it is your sharing of your heart. And sharing is so joyful — hence one shares. Sharing for sharing's sake, for no other motive. But the love you have known in the past is not the love I am talking about.

Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. Hence, your love has reference: somebody has been beautiful to you yesterday, he was so nice that you feel great love for him.

This is not love; this is the other side of hate, the reference proves it. Or somebody is going to be nice to you tomorrow: the way he smiled at you, the way he talked to you, the way he invited you to his house tomorrow — he is going to be loving to you. And great love arises.

This is not love the Buddha talks about. This is hate disguised as love — that's why your love can turn into hate any moment. Scratch a person just a little bit, and the love disappears and hate arises. It is not even skin-deep.

Even so-called great lovers are continuously fighting, continuously at each other's throats — nagging, destructive. Your love is not really love: it is its very opposite.

It is hate disguised as love, camouflaged as love, parading as love. True love has no reference. It is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it.

The birds singing in the morning, this cuckoo calling from the distance — for no reason. The heart is just so full of joy that a song bursts forth. When I am talking about love I am talking about such love. Remember it.

And if you can move into the dimension of this love, you will be in paradise immediately. And you will start creating a paradise on the earth.

- Osho. Abridged from The Dhammapada: The Way Of The Buddha