548

Love is death, but the one who dies in love has never really existed. It is the unreal self, the idea of an ego, that dies.

So love is death, it is suicide, it is dangerous. That’s why millions of people have decided against love. They live a loveless life. They have decided in favor of the ego – but ego is false. And you can go on clinging to the false and the false will never become real. So the life of an egoist always remains in insecurity. How can you make something unreal, real? It is always disappearing. You have to cling to it, you have to constantly create it again and again. It is a self-deception. And it creates misery.

Misery is the function of the unreal. The real is blissful – Sat-Chit-Ananda. The truth is blissful, and the truth is awareness. Sat means truth, chit means consciousness, ananda means bliss. These three things are the qualities of truth. It is so, it is alert, and it is blissful. Unreality is misery. Hell is that which does not exist but you create, and heaven is that which exists but you don’t accept. Paradise is where you really are, but you are not courageous enough to move into it, and hell is your private creation. But because it is your creation, you cling to it.

Man has never left God. He lives in God, but still suffers because he creates a small hell around himself. Heaven need not be created, it is already there; you have to relax and enjoy it. Hell has to be created.

Take life in a relaxed mood. There is no need to create anything, and there is no need to protect anything, and there is no need to cling to anything. That which is, will remain whether you cling to it or not; that which is not, cannot remain whether you cling to it or not. That which is not, is not, and that which is, is.

You ask: [“Why does it feel like you are dying when you are in love?”]

Because the ego, the unreal, dies. Love opens the door to the real. Love is the threshold of the temple. Love opens you toward God. It brings great joy, but simultaneously it brings great fear: your ego is disappearing. And you have invested so much in the ego. You have lived for it; you have been taught and conditioned for it. Your parents, your priests, your politicians, your education, your school, college, university, they have all been creating your ego. Theyhave been creating ambition – they are factories to create ambition – and one day you find yourself crippled by your own ambitions, caged by your own ego. You suffer much, but your whole life you have been taught that this is valuable, so you cling to it; you suffer and you cling to it. And the more you cling, the more you suffer.

There are moments when God comes and knocks at your door. That’s what love is – God knocking at your door. Maybe through a woman, through a man, through a child, through a love, through a flower, through sunset, sunrise; God can knock in millions of ways. But wherever God knocks, you become afraid. The priest, the politician, the parent – the created ego – is at stake. It starts feeling that it is dying. You pull back. You hold back. You close your eyes, you close your ears; you don’t hear the knock. You disappear back into your hole. You close your doors.

Love feels like death. It is. And those who want to be really blissful have to go through that death, because the resurrection is possible only through death. Jesus is right when he says you will have to carry your cross on your shoulders. You will have to die. He says, “Unless you are reborn, you will not see my kingdom, you will not see what I am teaching to you.” And he says that love is God. He is right because love is the threshold.

Die in love. It is far more beautiful than to live in ego. It is far truer than to live in the ego. Life in the ego is death in love. Death in the ego is life in love.

Remember: when you choose ego, you are choosing real death – because it is death in love. And when you choose love you are only choosing unreal death, because to die in ego you are not losing anything – you had nothing from the very beginning. That is the whole emphasis of Ikkyu’s doka, yesterday. You are not, so why be afraid? Who is going to die? There is nobody to die! To whom are you clinging? Whom do you want to make safe? Whom do you want to protect and armor?There is nobody. There is only emptiness, emptiness – utter emptiness.

Listen to Ikkyu’s song. Accept this emptiness and the fear will disappear. Be a moth when you find the flame of love burning bright – be a moth! Jump into it – and you will lose the false and you will gain the real, you will lose dreams and you will gain the ultimate, you will lose something which was not there and you will gain something which has always been there.