Why Is Love So Painful

Modern man is living in a dark cell; it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind.

The thing that is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a good job, a good earning; it is not real education. It does not give you life. Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but the better standard of living is not a better standard of life; they are not synonymous.

Hence people are interested in sex because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don’t get involved. Love is involvement; it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror.

And that neurosis is coming from your narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with one’s own illusion of having a separate self; then people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative.

ove gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the first lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego. If you can be in harmony with a woman, if you can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if you can be in harmony with your child or with your mother, why can’t you be in harmony with all human beings? And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if you are in harmony with all human beings? And if you can be in harmony with all human beings, why can’t you be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another.

Don’t deceive yourself. The work of inner transformation is hard.

Love is the greatest Zen koan. It is painful, but don’t avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God, as a buddha.

The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love.

only the other can function as a mirror

ove is the greatest Zen koan. It is painful, but don’t avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God, as a buddha. And love will give you the first tongue-tip-taste of Tao, of Sufism, of Zen. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.