Is there a difference between inner discipline and love?

        Osho, 

        Is there a difference between inner discipline and love?

        There is none: with the inner discipline a love arises naturally. But there is a great difference between the outer discipline and love – not only difference, but antagonism. If you force an outer discipline on yourself it will kill your love qualities; it will kill your love sensibilities; it will make you dull. You will lose your fine receptivity because any discipline forced from the outside is against your sensibilities, and love is the culmination of all sensitivities.

        When you fall in love with a woman, you fall in love from all the five senses. You may not be aware because man has become so alienated from his own senses that he is not aware. But watch the animals which are still more rooted in their beings – however unconscious, but still rooted in their beings. A dog is going to smell his girlfriend before he makes love. It is not only a question of seeing a beautiful woman; you should sense the smell too. Sometimes it happens that the face is beautiful and appeals to you, but the smell is not appealing. Then, if you marry this woman, you will be in trouble. One sense will be constantly divorcing and your other sense will be constantly marrying, and there will be conflict.

        Real love happens only when your five senses are in harmony like an orchestra. Then there is a sort of eternity to your love. Then it is not temporal; then it is not momentary. When you love a woman, you love her sound, you love her touch, you love her smell, you love the way she walks, you love the way she looks at you, you love her totality. And this totality can only be glimpsed through all the senses.

        Man has become very eye-oriented. No other senses are allowed to say anything; you just look through the eyes – the proportion. In your world beauty contests they don’t smell the body. This is foolish. This is simply foolish. A woman may have a beautiful proportion of the body and may stink! She may have the right proportion, but may not have the right voice, the right sound. Her sound may be unmusical, then she is not beautiful – something is missing. A real world beauty contest will have to be based on all the five senses. Why should the eyes dictate and dominate? This is very dictatorial. The eye is dictating your whole life; naturally you are not happy because one sense has become Adolf Hitler. There should be a democracy in your being, in your body. All the senses should be allowed to say their things, and you should listen to all.

        If you enforce any discipline from the outside, it is going to kill your love because all disciplines from the outside are bound to dull you. That is the meaning of an outer discipline. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi went on saying. That’s what Adolf Hitler did – imposed a discipline on the whole nation from the outside, and imposed it so perfectly that people started doing things which they could not have even dreamt of. The discipline had dulled them completely, they were no longer sensitive. Millions of Jews were burned, and the people who were in charge of burning those millions of Jews were standing there unaffected. What happened? Their sensitivity had been dulled. A great layer of dullness had been imposed on their being.

        That’s what is being done in every army. The whole training of the military is nothing but how to dull a person, how to dull his sensitivity and how to dull his intelligence. You will never find army people intelligent – impossible, otherwise why should they be in the army? Can’t they find anything else to be? The army should be the last thing. The whole training is nothing but creating dullness. “Left turn, right turn, left turn, right turn” three, four hours in the morning, continuously.

        Once a professor became a soldier and he was a man of great intelligence. So, when he was ordered “Right turn!” he stood wherever he was standing. And the general asked, “Why are you standing there when I have said ‘right turn’ and everybody has turned?”

 He said, “Sooner or later you will say ‘left turn,’ so what

is the point? They will come to the same position again, and this is going to
happen for three, four hours. Why bother?”

 

          Why this continuous, “left turn, right turn”? There is a trick in it: it is a conditioning; you are not allowed to think. “Left turn” means “left turn” – you have to do it. Go on doing something, obeying something, and by and by you lose your intelligence. Then you don’t think, then some day you are ordered to kill the enemy and you kill. It is just like “right turn, left turn.” You don’t think; you don’t ponder: “What has this man done to me? Why should I kill?” The why never arises – you simply do it. You become a robot, a mechanical thing; you are no longer a man.

 

          In India, the Sikhs, the Punjabis are the best army people, the best soldiers, and naturally the whole country thinks they are the stupidest. These two things go together. If a race is very perfect as far as war is concerned, then the race becomes less intelligent. It is bound to happen – the two things cannot go together. An intelligent person will have to think before he acts. The soldier has to act before he thinks. That is the whole process: he should act before thinking. Then what is the point of thinking when you have acted already? Then there is no need.

 

          Any outer discipline, whether it is of a soldier or of a saint, kills your sensitivity, kills your fineness, your receptivity; and naturally it kills your love because love is nothing but the harmony of all your senses and intelligence. With inner discipline there is no contradiction with love. With inner discipline, love arises. But remember: love that will arise with inner discipline will not be the love that you have known up to now. Your love has been everything but love.

 

          The limousine pulled up in front of the madhouse and the aristocratic-looking gentleman got out. “Is this an asylum for the insane?” he asked the gate attendant.

 

          “Yes, sir,” said the gateman.

 

          “Do they take inmates upon their own recommendation?”

 

          “How should I know? Why?” asked the gate keeper.

 

          “Well, you see I’ve just gotten hold of a package of my old love letters, and I feel that I must be mad.”

 

          Just look at your old love letters, and you will also feel like going to the nuthouse – on your own recommendation. Whatsoever you have called love is a frenzy, a fever, a sort of chemical neurosis; it is not love. How can you love? Love happens only as a shadow to meditation. When you have become so alert, there arises a new quality – that is love. Right now what you call love is jealousy, competition, possessiveness, anger, hatred. Maybe you are fed up with yourself, you cannot be with yourself, so you need somebody else; and you call it love. You cling to somebody, you dominate somebody, you try to manipulate somebody. It is politics, not love; it is ambition to dominate, not love. And naturally it leads you to hell; naturally it makes you more and more miserable.

 

          What has your love done to you? Dreams and dreams and dreams. Dreams are when you look at your love somewhere in the future, then it is a dream. When you look back on the love that has happened, then it is a nightmare. All dreams prove nightmares. No, this is not love; otherwise the whole earth would have been happy. So many people loving, everybody is loving: the mother is loving, the father is loving, the son, the sister, the brother, the wife, the husband, the friend, the priest, the politician, everybody is loving somebody, love must be so great… But look into people’s eyes – there is only misery and nothing else. Then something has gone wrong; something else has been named love. It is not love. On the container it says, “Love,” but look at the content: jealousy, possessiveness, anger, hatred, domination, all ugly things are there. Yes, the container is very beautiful, very well packaged, like a Christmas gift. Open, and inside, just hell.

 

          This love is not the love I am talking about. When you go inside your being a totally new energy arises. You have so much energy that you would like to share it; then love is a sharing. Then you don’t need love; then you are not in need of somebody to love you. For the first time you have possessed your treasure of love; and a new need arises – to share it, to give it to whomsoever needs it. Share it and give it. When love is a need, and you want somebody to love you, it is going to create misery. It is a beggar’s love, and beggars can’t be happy. When love has been known… That is only possible when you move inward and come to the innermost shrine of your being.

             

        When you have known the reservoir of love there, then a new need arises to share it, to give it, to whomsoever needs it. Give it, and you feel thankful that somebody has taken it. Then there is happiness, then love is heaven.

        Then a need has taken a radical turn: then you need to give. Right now, you need somebody to give to you – you are a beggar. Then, you become an emperor. The inner discipline makes you an emperor.