Giving Away Love by Osho

YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO GIVE MORE LOVE. This is not only your problem. In varying degrees it is the problem of everybody. Everybody wants to be loved, that is a wrong beginning.

AND IT STARTS BECAUSE the child, THE SMALL CHILD, cannot love, cannot say anything, cannot do anything, CANNOT GIVE ANYTHING; HE CAN ONLY GET. A small child's experience of love is of getting: getting from the mother, getting from the father, getting from brothers, sisters, getting from guests, strangers -- but always getting. So the first experience that settles deep in his unconscious is that he has to get love.

BUT THE TROUBLE ARISES because everybody has been a child, and everybody has the same urge to get love; and nobody is born in any other way. So all are asking, "Give us love," and there is nobody to give because the other person was also brought up in the same way.

So one has to be alert and aware that just an incident of birth should not remain a constant prevailing state of your mind. RATHER THAN ASKING, "GIVE ME LOVE," START GIVING LOVE. Forget about getting, simply give -- and I guarantee you, you will get much. But you are not to think about getting. You are not even indirectly, by the side, to watch whether you are getting it or not. That much will be enough disturbance. You simply give, because to give love is so beautiful that getting love is not so great. And this is one of the secrets.

GIVING LOVE IS THE REALLY BEAUTIFUL EXPERIENCE, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is very small experience, and it is the experience of a beggar: Don't be a beggar! At least as far as love is concerned, be an emperor, because it is an inexhaustible quality in you. You can go on giving as much as you like. Don't be worried that it will be exhausted, that one day you will suddenly find, "My God! I don't have any love to give anymore."

LOVE IS NOT A QUANTITY; IT IS A QUALITY -- and a quality of a certain category that grows by giving and dies if you hoard it. If you are miserly about it, it dies. So be really spendthrift. Don't bother to whom -- that is really the idea of a miserly mind: "I will give love to certain persons with certain qualities."

You don't understand that you have so much... YOU ARE A RAIN CLOUD. The rain cloud does not bother where it rains -- on the rocks, in the gardens, in the ocean -- it doesn't matter. It wants to unburden itself. And that unburdening is a tremendous relief. So the first secret is: Don't ask for it, and don't wait, thinking that you will give if somebody asks you. Give it!