Osho on Love – Quotes on Love from Osho

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Love Is Nourishment in Itself

"Your question is, 'Can you talk about the art of nourishing oneself with love?' There is no art because there is no need of any effort. Love is the nourishment. But humanity has been so confused by its leaders that one does not know the most inner realms of one's own being. Love is nourishment in itself. The more you love, the more you will find untrodden spaces where love goes on and on spreading around you like an aura.

"But that kind of love has not been allowed by any culture. They have forced love into a very small tunnel: you can love your wife, your wife can love you; you can love your children, you can love your parents, you can love your friends. And they have made two things so deeply rooted in every human being. One is that love is something very limited – friends, family, children, husband, wife. And the second thing they have insisted is that there are many kinds of love.

"You love in one way when you love your husband or your wife; then you have to bring another kind of love when you love your children, and another kind of love when you love your elders, your family, your teachers, and then another kind of love for your friends. But the truth is, love cannot be categorized the way it has been categorized throughout the whole history of mankind. There were reasons for them to categorize it but their reasons are ugly and inhuman, because in this categorization they killed love...

"The reason why all the cultures have insisted on categorization is because they have been very much afraid of love, is because if there is existential love, then it does not know boundaries – then you cannot put Hindus against Mohammedans, then you cannot put Protestants against Catholics. Then you cannot draw a line saying that you cannot love this person because he is Jewish, Chinese. The leaders of the world wanted to divide the world, but to divide the world they have to do the basic division which is of love."

Osho, Om Mani Padme Hum: The Sound of Silence, the Diamond in the Lotus, Talk #20
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Sentiments Are Not Stones, They Are Like Rose Flowers

"There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self. Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word love seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones – everything material is involved in it…

"Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves. But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person's heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.

"Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together. People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like rose flowers…"

"Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a rose flower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it. The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend.

"I don't know which kind of love you know – most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love? Certainly it will be gone – but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness."

Osho, From Death to Deathlessness, Talk #17
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Only Love and Its Failure Can Throw You Inside

"I am for love. I have been teaching my whole life in favor of love. The reason is strange, but I am an eccentric man. I have been teaching you to go for love because I know that unless you come to this crucial point, where the other is hell, you will never become religious. I am not for love. My whole effort is for religion.

"The pseudo-religions just give you readymade formulas, and I want to give you the real experience – which I cannot give…I can only show you the path, can explain to you how it happens, and then leave you free to experiment with it if you want. If love has not failed, then you are not yet adult enough for religion. You are below the age. Whatsoever your age it does not matter; it may be sixty, may be seventy, it does not matter. If you are still hoping that love can succeed, then you're yet under age. But if you have come to realize this totally, that it is against the nature of things, existence does not work that way…. You are you, the other is other.

"If you want to taste the experience of existence, it is not via the other, it is a direct jump within yourself. It is via you, through you. And only love and its failure can throw you inside. Nothing else can throw you inside, because everything else is far below love."

Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, Talk #27
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Love Yourself

"We begin with one of the most profound sutras of Gautama the Buddha: 'Love yourself…'

"Just the opposite has been taught to you by all the traditions of the world, all the civilizations, all the cultures, all the churches. They say: "Love others, don't love yourself." And there is a certain cunning strategy behind their teaching.

"Love is the nourishment for the soul. Just as food is to the body, so love is to the soul. Without food the body is weak, without love the soul is weak. And no state, no church, no vested interest, has ever wanted people to have strong souls, because a person with spiritual energy is bound to be rebellious.

"Love makes you rebellious, revolutionary. Love gives you wings to soar high. Love gives you insight into things, so that nobody can deceive you, exploit you, oppress you. And the priests and the politicians survive only on your blood – they survive only on exploitation. All the priests and all the politicians are parasites.

"To make you spiritually weak they have found a sure method, one hundred percent guaranteed, and that is to teach you not to love yourself. If a man cannot love himself he cannot love anybody else either. The teaching is very tricky. They say "Love others," because they know if you cannot love yourself you cannot love at all. But they go on saying, "Love others, love humanity, love God, love nature, love your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, but don't love yourself" – because to love oneself is selfish according to them.

They condemn self-love as they condemn nothing else – and they have made their teaching look very logical. They say: "If you love yourself you will become an egoist, if you love yourself you will become narcissistic." It is not true. A man who loves himself finds that there is no ego in him. It is by loving others without loving yourself, trying to love others, that the ego arises.

"The missionaries, the social reformers, the social servants, have the greatest egos in the world – naturally, because they think themselves to be superior human beings. They are not ordinary: ordinary people love themselves; they love others, they love great ideals, they love God. And all their love is false, because all their love is without any roots. A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love."

Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 5, Talk #5
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Real Love Is Capable of Being Alone

"One can be in deep love and yet be alone. In fact, one can be alone only when one is in deep love. The depth of love creates an ocean around you, a deep ocean, and you become an island, utterly alone. Yes, the ocean goes on throwing its waves on your shore, but the more the ocean crashes with its waves on your shore, the more integrated you are, the more rooted, the more centered you are. Love has value only because it gives you aloneness. It gives you space enough to be on your own.

"But you have an idea of love; that idea is creating trouble – not love itself, but the idea. The idea is that, in love, lovers disappear into each other, dissolve into each other. Yes, there are moments of dissolution – but this is the beauty of life and all that is existential: that when lovers dissolve into each other, the same are the moments when they become very conscious, very alert. That dissolution is not a kind of drunkenness, that dissolution is not unconscious. It brings great consciousness, it releases great awareness. On the one hand they are dissolved – on the other hand for the first time they see their utter beauty in being alone. The other defines them, their aloneness; they define the other. And they are grateful to each other. It is because of the other that they have been able to see their own selves; the other has become a mirror in which they are reflected. Lovers are mirrors to each other. Love makes you aware of your original face.

"Hence, it looks very contradictory, paradoxical, when stated in such a way: "Love brings aloneness." You were thinking all along that love brings togetherness. I am not saying that it does not bring togetherness, but unless you are alone you cannot be together. Who is going to be together? Two persons are needed to be together, two independent persons are needed to be together. A togetherness will be rich, infinitely rich, if both the persons are utterly independent. If they are dependent on each other, it is not a togetherness – it is a slavery, it is a bondage.

"If they are dependent on each other, clinging, possessive, if they don't allow each other to be alone, if they don't allow each other space enough to grow, they are enemies, not lovers; they are destructive to each other, they are not helping each other to find their souls, their beings. What kind of love is this? It may be just fear of being alone; hence they are clinging to each other. But real love knows no fear. Real love is capable of being alone, utterly alone, and out of that aloneness grows a togetherness."

Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 2, Talk #4
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Love Needs no Reference

"Love needs no reference – that's the beauty of love and the freedom of love. Hate is a bondage. Hate is imprisonment – imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates hate, hate provokes hate. If you hate somebody you are creating hate in that person's heart for yourself. And the whole world exists in hate, in destructiveness, in violence, in jealousy, in competitiveness. People are at each other's throats either in reality, actuality, in action, or at least in their minds; in their thoughts, everybody is murdering, killing. That's why we have created a hell out of this beautiful earth – which could have become a paradise.

"Love, and the earth becomes a paradise again. And the immense beauty of love is that it has no reference. Love comes from you for no reason at all. It is your outpouring bliss, it is your sharing of your heart. It is the sharing of the song of your being. And sharing is so joyful – hence one shares. Sharing for sharing's sake, for no other motive.

"But the love you have known in the past is not the love Buddha is talking about or I am talking about. Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. Hence, your love has reference: somebody has been beautiful to you yesterday, he was so nice that you feel great love for him. This is not love; this is the other side of hate – the reference proves it. Or somebody is going to be nice to you tomorrow: the way he smiled at you, the way he talked to you, the way he invited you to his house tomorrow – he is going to be loving to you. And great love arises.

"This is not the love buddhas talk about. This is hate disguised as love – that's why your love can turn into hate any moment. Scratch a person just a little bit, and the love disappears and hate arises. It is not even skin-deep. Even so-called great lovers are continuously fighting, continuously at each other's throats – nagging, destructive. And people think this is love…

"Your love is not really love: it is its very opposite. It is hate disguised as love, camouflaged as love, parading as love. True love has no reference. It thinks not of the yesterdays, it thinks not of the tomorrows. True love is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it, and the showering of it – for no other reason, for no other motive, than just the joy of sharing it."

Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 1, Talk #1
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Love Basically Is a State of Being

"The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love but one is love. Whenever I talk about love remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained to the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension, because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is, and you don't know. Love basically is a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.

"And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling but by rising, soaring upwards, higher than you. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.

"Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, "Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you." Love is like breathing: when it happens you are simply love. It does not matter who comes close to you, the sinner or the saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, is rejoiced. Love is unconditional giving – but only those are capable of giving who have."

Osho, The Guest, Talk #5
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The First Ripple of Love Has to Be Around Yourself

"The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you.

"It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one's body, one has to love one's soul, one has to love one's totality.

"And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself.

"If you don't love your house you will not clean it; if you don't love your house you will not paint it; if you don't love you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself.

"And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality."

Osho, The Secret, Talk #18
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Relationship Destroys Love

"Relationship is a structure, and love is unstructured. So love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship. Loving people need not have any relationship – love is enough.

"Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship – because relationships happen one day and disappear another day. They are flowers; in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone.

"You be a loving person.

"But people find it very difficult to be a loving person, so they create a relationship – and befool that way that "Now I am a loving person because I am in a relationship." And the relationship may be just one of monopoly, possessiveness, exclusiveness.

"Relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security – financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. Relationship is a substitute.

"Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth."

Osho, Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind, Talk #8
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Without Love, Life Has no Poetry in it

"A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That's why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin: you have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning; it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. Without love, temples are just ordinary houses; with love an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love you remain just possibilities – empty gestures. With love, for the first time you become substantial. With love, for the first time, the soul arises in you. The ego drops but the soul arises...

"Moving towards love is moving towards an abyss. One starts wavering, one feels dizzy. Go to a height in the Himalayas and look down at the valley; that valley is no-thing. When you look down at the valley of love, a tremendous fear grips you. You are almost paralyzed: you cannot run away, you cannot take the jump. You simply tremble in infinite fear. What to do? Going back is not possible because love attracts: love calls your depth, love calls your future, love calls your potentiality; love gives you a glimpse of what you can be. You cannot run away from it, and you cannot jump because the cost is too high. You will have to drop yourself – all that you have been thinking yourself to be – the image, the past, the identity.

"But I tell you, the cost only seems to be too much before the jump. Once you take the jump…then you will know that whatsoever you have given up is nothing, and what you have attained is infinitely valuable. Let me tell you a paradox: love demands that you drop that which you don't have, and love offers you that which you already have. Love wants you to get rid of that which you don't have."

Osho, Come Follow to You, Vol. 4, Talk #6
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Love Is a Door

"If there is passion in love, then love will become hell. If there is attachment in love, then love will be a prison. If love is passionless it will become heaven. If love is without attachment then love itself is the divine.

"Love has both possibilities. You can have passion and attachment in love: then it is as if you have tied a stone around the neck of the bird of love so that it cannot fly. Or as if you have put the bird of love in a golden cage. However precious the cage may be – it may be studded with diamonds and jewels – a cage is still a cage and it will destroy the bird's capacity to fly.

"When you remove passion and attachment from love, when your love is pure, innocent, formless, when you give in love and don't demand, when love is only a giving, when love is an emperor, not a beggar; when you are happy because someone has accepted your love and you don't trade love, you ask nothing in return, then you are liberating this bird of love into the open sky. Then you are strengthening its wings. Then this bird can set out on the journey to the infinite.

"Love has made people fall and love has made people rise high. It all depends on what you have done with love. Love is a very mysterious phenomenon. It is a door – on one side is suffering, on the other side is bliss; on one side is hell, on the other side is heaven; on one side is sansara, the wheel of life and death, on the other side is liberation. Love is a door.

"If you have only known a love full of passion and attachment, then when Jesus says, "God is love," you will not be able to understand it. When Sahajo starts singing songs of love you will become very uneasy: "This makes no sense! I have also loved but I got back only misery. In the name of love I reaped only a crop of thorns, no flowers ever blossomed for me." The other love will seem to be imaginary. The love which becomes devotion, which becomes prayer, which becomes liberation, will look like just a play of words.

"You have also known love – but whenever you knew love you knew only a love full of passion and attachment. Your love was not really love. Your love was only a curtain to hide the passion, attachment and sex. On the outside you called it love, inside it was something else. What did you long for when you were in love with a woman or a man? – your longing was sexual and love was only the outside decoration.

Osho, Showering without Clouds, Talk #2
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The World will Drop Wars Only when Love Enters into the World Again

"The society does not allow love because if a person is really in deep love he cannot be manipulated. You cannot send him to war; he will say: I am so happy! Where are you sending me? And why should I go and kill strangers who may be happy in their home? And we have no conflict, no clash of interests…

"If the young generation. moves deeper and deeper in love, wars will disappear because you will not be able to find enough mad people to go to the war. If you love, you have tasted something of life; you would not like death and killing people. When you don't love you have not tasted something of life; you love death.

"Fear kills, wants to kill. Fear is destructive, love is a creative energy. When you love you would like to create – you may like to sing a song, or paint, or create poetry, but you would not take a bayonet, or an atom bomb, and go rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown to you, who have done nothing; who are as unknown to you as you are unknown to them.

"The world will drop wars only when love enters into the world again. Politicians don't want you to love, the society does not want you to love, the family doesn't allow you to love: they all want to control your love energy because that is the only energy there is. That's why there is fear.

"If you understand me well drop all fears and love more and love unconditionally – and don't think that you are doing something for the other when you love, you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don't wait; don't say that when others love, you will love – that is not the point at all.

"Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people – you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it.

"And when love goes deeper fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness."

Osho, Talking Tao, Talk #2
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Love Is the Only Meaning

"Really, when you fall in love you throw your reason completely. That is why we say man "falls" in love. Falls from where? Falls from the head down into the heart. We use this term of condemnation, "falling in love," because the head, the reason, cannot look at it without condemning it. It is a fall. Is love really a fall or a rising? Do you become more with it or do you become less? Do you expand or do you shrink? With love you become more! Your consciousness is more, your feeling is more; your ecstatic sensation is more, your sensitivity is more. You are more alive, but one thing is less: reasoning is less. You cannot reason it out; it is blind. As far as reason is concerned it is blind. The heart has its own reason – that is another thing – and the heart has its own eyes, but that is another thing. The eyes of reason are not there, so reason says it is a fall; you have fallen.

"Unless the heart center starts functioning again man will not be capable of love, and the whole misery of modern life is because unless he loves he cannot feel any meaning in his life. Life looks meaningless. Love gives it meaning; love is the only meaning. Unless you are capable of love you will be meaningless, and you will feel that you are existing without any meaning, futilely, and suicide will become attractive. Then you will like to kill yourself, to finish with yourself, to end, because what is the use of existing?

"Mere existing cannot be tolerated. Existence must have a meaning; otherwise, what is the use? Why go on prolonging yourself unnecessarily? Why go on repeating the same pattern every day? Getting out of the bed and doing the same thing, and again falling asleep and the next day the same pattern: why?

"You have done it so far, and what has happened? And you will do it unless death comes and relieves of you of your body. So what is the use? Love gives meaning. It is not that through love any result comes into being or any goal – no! Through love every moment becomes of value in itself. Then you never ask this. If someone asks what is the meaning of life, know well that love is lacking. Whenever someone asks what is the meaning of life, he is asking because he has not been able to flower in a love experience. Whenever someone is in love, he never asks what is the meaning of life. He knows the meaning; there is no need to ask. He knows the meaning! The meaning is there: love is the meaning in life."

Osho, The Book of Secrets, Talk #44
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A Man Who Is Filled With Love Is in Heaven

"Without love a man stands alone, separated from the core of existence. Without love everyone is a lone entity, lacking any connection with others of his kind. Today, man finds himself totally alone. We are all shut off from each other, trapped within ourselves. This is like being in the grave. Even though he is alive, man is a corpse.

"Do you see the truth in what I am saying? Are you alive? Do you feel the flow of love in your veins? If you do not feel that flow, if the throbbing of love in your heart has ceased, then you should understand well that you are not really alive at all.

"Once I was on a journey and someone asked me which word in a man's vocabulary was the most valuable. My reply was,Love. The man was surprised. He said he had expected me to answer soul or God. I laughed and said "Love is God."

"Rising on the ray of love one can enter the enlightened kingdom of God. It is better to say that love is God than to say that truth is God, because the harmony, the beauty, the vitality and the bliss that are part of love are not part of truth. Truth is to be known; love is to be felt as well as known. The growth and perfection of love lead to the ultimate merger with God.

"The greatest poverty of all is the absence of love. The man who has not developed the capacity to love lives in a private hell of his own. A man who is filled with love is in heaven. You can look at man as a wonderful and unique plant, a plant that is capable of producing both nectar and poison. If a man lives by hate he reaps a harvest of poison; if he lives by love he gathers blossoms laden with nectar."

Osho, The Long, the Short and the All, Talk #6
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To Love and to Need Love are Two Different Things

"Fill your life with love. But you will say, "We always love." And I tell you, you rarely love. You might be longing for love…and there is a vast difference between the two. To love and to need love are two very different things. Most of us remain like children all our lives because everyone is looking for love. To love is a very mysterious thing; to long for love is a very childish thing. Small children want love; when the mother gives them love they grow. They want love from others also and the family loves them. Then when they grow older, if they are husbands they want love from their wives, if they are wives they want love from their husbands.

"And whoever wants love suffers because love cannot be asked for, love can only be given. In wanting there is no certainty that you will get it. And if the person from whom you expect love also expects love from you, it is a problem. It will be like two beggars meeting and begging together. All over the world there are marital problems between husbands and wives, and the only reason for this is that both expect love from each other but are unable to give love.

"Think about this a little – your constant need for love. You want someone to love you, and if someone loves you you feel good. But what you don't know is that the other loves you only because he wants you to love him. It is just like someone throwing bait to fish: he does not throw it for the fish to eat, he throws it to catch the fish. He does not want to give it to the fish, he only does it because he wants the fish. All the people that you see in love around you are only throwing bait to get love. They will throw the bait for a while, until the other person starts feeling that there is a possibility of getting love from this person. Then he too will start showing some love until eventually they realize that both of them are beggars. They have made a mistake: each had thought the other was an emperor. And in time each one realizes that he is not getting any love from the other, and that's when the friction starts."

Osho, The Path of Meditation, Talk #3
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ओशो इंटरनेशनल फाउंडेशन से संपर्क करने के लिए यहां क्लिक करें
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