You need love, because only in love do you become self-unconscious; only in love does the other disappear. There is no need to be ’I’. With someone you love you can be alone. Even if the lover or the beloved is present you can be alone. The deepest possibility in love is that it helps you to drop self-consciousness.

But if you have to continuously carry the other’s presence, if you have to behave accordingly, if you have to follow rules, if you have to plan even in love what to say and what not to say, then this love is sooner or later going to turn sour, bitter, because self-consciousness is there. Wherever you find self consciousness disappearing: in alcohol, in love, in meditation, you feel good. 

But alcohol cannot give you a permanent state; love can give that to you, but that possibility is very, very difficult. 

Remember, love is more difficult than meditation because love means living with the other and without the self. Meditation means living with oneself, forgetting the other completely – it is a less difficult dimension than love. That’s why those who can love don’t need meditation; they will reach through love. 

Jesus says: Love is God. But to love is very difficult. It is difficult because the other enters with all his problems. The other is ill – you are ill, and when two ill persons meet, illness is not only doubled, it is multiplied. 

It is very difficult to love, but if you can love then there is no need for any meditation. Love will become your meditation and you will reach through it. If you cannot love, if you feel it difficult then meditation is the only door. 

Only one in a million reaches through love; others reach through meditation. Once you become meditative love also becomes easy, and then you can love. If you love then meditation comes as a shadow of it. 

You have to decide how to drop your self-consciousness. There are two methods: one is through love, through a relationship; living with the other, and growing – it is a difficult path, very, very arduous – there is nothing more difficult than that; and the other is living in meditation. You have to choose.

If you grow in love, meditation will happen like a shadow. Love and meditation are two aspects of the same coin; if you have gained control of the one aspect, the other follows. If you meditate, love will follow – if you love, meditation will follow. This you have to choose.

Meditation is easier – love is more difficult. Unless you want to move into the difficult unnecessarily – that is for you to decide – with meditation love comes automatically. This is my feeling: that ninety- nine percent in one hundred have to go through meditation, then love will happen. Only one percent can go through love, and meditation happens. This is the state of affairs, this is how things are.