"Love is a by-product of freedom; it is the overflowing joy of freedom, it is the fragrance of freedom. First the freedom has to be there, then love follows. If you try to will love, you will create only something artificial, arbitrary. A willed love will not be true love, it will be phony.

"And that's what people are doing. Love cannot be willed, and they go on willing it. What can be willed: freedom, they go on ignoring. They go on thinking that somebody else is responsible for their slavery and their life of slavery. This is a very topsy-turvy conception of your own life. You are upside-down.

"Change the vision. Will freedom, and love will come of its own accord. When love comes on its own accord only then is it beautiful, because only then is it natural, spontaneous.

"Willed love will be a kind of acting. You will be pretending – what else can you do? You will be moving through empty gestures – what else is possible? You cannot be ordered to love somebody, you cannot order yourself to love somebody. If it is not there, it is not there; if it is there, it is there. It is something beyond your will. In fact it is just the opposite of will: it is surrender.

"When one is totally dissolved into freedom and when one is really free, the ego disappears. The ego is your bondage, the ego is your prison. In total freedom there is no ego found. Surrender happens, you start feeling one with existence – and that oneness brings love.

"The second question:

Osho,
Many see the work that goes on around you as a model for the holistic approach to life. Please talk about this.

"The old man is dying. And it is good news that the old man is on his deathbed, because the new can be born only when the old is gone, utterly gone. The old has to cease. The old has existed long, and the old man has been a curse, because he was rooted in very stupid conceptions of life.

"The old man was based on superstitions. The most basic flaw in the concept of the old man was perfectionism: he wanted to be perfect, and the very idea of perfectionism drives people crazy."