The Hindustan Times: New Delhi
15 February, 2002
Swami Chaitanya Keerti
Love is in the air, declares every newspaper on this year’s Valentine’s Day. So let’s breathe this air. It does not matter whether it is a Christian occasion or a Hindu one, it is worth celebrating.
Open your wings and fly high in the sky. Love is the greatest meditation a human heart can do. Every sage has only one message of love. And this celebration of love should not remain limited to the teenagers or young generation. Everybody who is capable of expressing love is basically young at heart. And one need not fall in love when one can rise.
So do not fall in love. Rise in love. Our love should uplift us and should become our evolution.
Osho advised one of his disciples in US, “Falling is always easy. You can fall in any ditch. Getting out is difficult. But you will have to get out. Once the love disappears the ditch becomes hell. Rising in love is beautiful and getting out of it is very easy, because that will be falling down. Never fall in love. Try to rise. And rising in love is a totally different matter.
Love should come out of your silence, awareness, meditativeness. It is soft, it is unbinding, because how can love create fetters for the one who is loved?
It is giving freedom to each other, more and more. As the love grows deeper, freedom becomes bigger. As the love grows deeper, you start accepting the person as he is. You stop trying to change the person.
Rising in love, you become aware that the other has his own territorial imperative, and you are not to encroach upon it.
If love becomes freedom, then there is no need to separate. I can say only one thing: you have given each other beautiful moments – be grateful, be thankful. The parting should not be ugly when the meeting was so beautiful.
I teach a different kind of love. It does not end in friendship but begins in friendship. It begins in silence, in awareness. It is a love which is your own creation, which is not blind.
Such a love can last forever, can go on growing deeper and deeper. Such a love is immensely sensitive. In this kind of relationship one starts feeling the need of the other person.
It is grateful that the other receives something when he offers, or she offers. It never feels in any kind of bondage, because there is none.
Next time try not to fall, but try to rise. Don’t let biology dominate you. Your consciousness should be the master.
