A disciple asked Osho about the feeling of love in her heart and aloneness at the same time. How is it possible? It was too difficult to understand.
This is one of the deepest mysteries of life. We often feel alone when our heart is overflowing with love. This is the quality of love that deepens meditation and in deep meditation one is left alone. The alchemy of meditation is that even though one meditates in being alone, one feels blissful that it overflows and seeks others to share it with them.
Meditation connects the individual to the ultimate source and the individual returns fulfilled from that flight. To the one who thinks that aloneness and love are diametrically opposite and have nothing to do with each other, this description may be shocking and unbelievable. One cannot believe this, but can only experience.
People often think that when you are in love, you will not be alone. The misunderstanding is between two words — loneliness and aloneness — which means the same thing for many people They don’t differentiate between these two words, hence, the confusion.
Osho points out: When you are in love, you cannot be lonely; that is true. But when you are in love, you are bound to be alone — that is even far truer... Aloneness is like a flower. I know your dictionaries will say that loneliness and aloneness are synonyms — they are not. They are totally different phenomena. Loneliness is a wound and can turn into a cancer. Many people die of loneliness. The world is full of lonely people, and because of their loneliness they go on doing all kinds of stupid things to somehow cover that wound, hollowness, emptiness and negativity. A lonely person starts eating too much, just to feel full, s/he starts taking alcohol or other drugs, because s/he wants to forget herself/himself.
Osho adds: Aloneness is totally different. Aloneness is a flower, a lotus blooming in your heart. Aloneness is positive. It is the joy of being yourself. It is the joy of having your own space. Yes, when you are in love, you feel alone. Aloneness is beautiful, it is a blessing. But only lovers can feel it, because only love gives you the courage to be alone, only love creates the context to be alone. Only love fulfils you so deeply that you are no more in need of the other — you can be alone. Love makes you so integrated that you can be alone and ecstatic.
Love becomes the contrast: love and aloneness are two polarities of one energy. It is good to understand it, because sometimes it happens that lovers don’t allow space enough to be alone. If lovers don’t allow each other space to be alone, then love will be destroyed, because it is out of aloneness that love gets fresh energy, juices.
When you are alone, you accumulate energy to a point from where it starts overflowing. That overflowing becomes love — then you can go and share with your friend, with anybody you love. You have enough to share now; in fact, too much — you have to share.
