The first question:

Osho,
Freedom can be willed, love not. Please comment.

Freedom can be willed because it is your own decision to remain in a prison. It is your own responsibility. You have willed your slavery, you have decided to remain a slave, hence you are a slave. Change the decision, and the slavery disappears.

You have invested in your unfreedom. Any moment you see the point, you can drop it; instantly it can be dropped. Nobody has forced unfreedom on you, it is your choice. You can choose to be free, you can choose to be unfree; you are so free that you can choose either. This is part of your inner freedom – not to choose it is part of your freedom. Hence it can be willed.

But love cannot be willed. 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.