Kahlil Gibran, one of West Asia’s most celebrated mystic writers, has written many books. His writing is lyrical, flowing like a river and he expresses himself very aesthetically, but not without a tinge of pessimism. One feels there is a mist of sadness surrounding his poetry and his concept of love is no exception to this.
Sample this statement from Gibran: “Man cannot reap love until after sad and revealing separation, bitter patience and desperate hardship.” We all would agree with this because it resonates with our experience. Love does remain a distant horizon for us — always beckoning, always elusive. Till the time love is romantic, people are ecstatic — it’s like living a fantasy and people are full of hope. But as soon as lovers begin to live together, romance is dashed against the rock of reality and gets shattered to pieces. This gives rise to bitterness between lovers.
Since, neither of the two is willing to surrender to the other, most love stories have a sad ending. What Gibran says about love is the experience of a man who wanted to love but could not, because of his ego.
However, the first requirement of love is that one should put his/her ego aside. While artists, poets, painters and musicians are very egoistic people. The Osho vision, in contrast to Gibran’s, is extremely positive and life-affirmative. Osho proposes a different kind of love, an enlightened love so to say.
He says Gibran could not put his ego aside. It was not love that became his despair; it was his ego that would not allow him freedom to move into the world of love. The longing for love and being chained to the ego created the whole tension in Gibran’s life.
“Love does not need you to go into depression or despair,” says Osho, but it “needs you to go into silence, into peace, into meditativeness, into a tremendous rejoicing — rejoicing just in the fact that you are alive.
Out of this rejoicing, this dance, love radiates. If you want to experience love, you have to pass through your inner paradise. You have to become centered. You have to become so peaceful that small things of life make you dance. Just a rose flower dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun — and something in you starts dancing with it. You are ready. You have graduated from the school of paradise; now love is your reward.”
With such clarity and insight, love no longer remains a distant dream; or a sad experience. On the contrary, it becomes a shining reality of life.
