Sexuality - The Pain of Love

Love is both. It is rich and it is painful, it is agony and it is ecstasy -- because love is the meeting of the earth and the sky, of the known and the unknown, of the visible and the invisible. Love is the boundary that divides matter and consciousness, the boundary of the lower and the higher. Love has roots in the earth; that is its pain, its agony. And love has its branches in the sky; that is its ecstasy. Love is not a single phenomenon, it is dual. It is a rope stretched between two polarities. You will have to understand these two polarities: one is sex, another is prayer. Love is the rope stretched between sex and prayer; part of it is sex, part of it is prayer. The sexual part is bound to bring many miseries, the part that belongs to prayer will bring many joys. Hence it is difficult to renounce love, because in renouncing one is afraid the joys that come will also be renounced. One is not able either to be totally in it, because all those pains again and again remind you to renounce it. This is the misery of the lover: the lover lives in a tension, pulled apart. Donna, I can understand your problem. This is the basic problem of all lovers, because love brings both, many thorns and many flowers, and they both come together. Love is a rosebush. One does not want those thorns, one would like the rosebush to be all flowers and no thorns; but they come together, they are aspects of one energy. But I am not saying to you to renounce love, I am not saying to you to become detached. What I am saying to you is: make it more and more prayerful. My whole approach is that of transformation, not of renunciation. You must have misunderstood me. I am not against sex, but I am all for making sex a prayer. The lowest can be possessed by the highest, then the pain of it disappears.

Osho, The Book of Wisdom #27