Love is the Earth Where One Needs to be Rooted – Osho

If you are rooted in love, you are rooted. There is no other way to be rooted. You can have money, you can have a house, you can have security, you can have a bank balance; that will not give you rootedness. That is just a substitute, a poor substitute for love. It may increase your anxiety even more, because once you have physical securities, money, a social status, you become more and more afraid that these things may be taken from you, or you become more and more worried about having more and more of these things, because discontent knows no limit, and your basic need was of being rooted.

Love is the earth where one needs to be rooted. Just as trees are rooted in the earth, man is rooted in love.

Man’s roots are invisible, so anything visible is not going to help. Money is very visible, a house is very visible, social status is very visible. Man’s roots are invisible. Man is a tree with invisible roots. You will have to find some invisible earth – call it love, call it God, prayer – but it is going to be something like that…invisible, intangible, elusive, mysterious. You cannot catch hold of it. On the contrary, you will have to allow it to catch hold of you. You cannot have any grip on it.

On money you can have your grip; you can catch it in your hands – but then it cannot become your earth. That which you can possess will never become your earth. Only that which possesses you can become your earth.

Love possesses you. That is the attraction and that is the repulsion also. That is the paradox of love. It possesses you. It gives you life on the one hand, on another it kills you completely, utterly; it destroys you. On one hand there is the cross and on the other it gives you resurrection. But first one has to face the cross, then only is one reborn.

Love is your need as it is everybody’s need, and nobody can avoid it. Everybody has to come to settle accounts with the energy called love. So remember it. You can misinterpret it and can think, ‘If I have some bank balance, some security in the world, some physical way to live comfortably, no fear of the future…. Then you will be misinterpreting it. And if you waste a few years in this misinterpretation, those years are gone; you cannot get them back. And with those years, many possibilities of love, many opportunities of love, disappear.

-Osho

Excerpt from A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose, Chapter 23

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