"They don't want to go deep in love, sex is enough, because sex is superficial: it will not leave them alone. It will be fun, an entertainment, for a moment they will enjoy it and then they will forget all about it. It will not bring them to their own center. But love brings you to your center: love is so profound that it leaves you alone.

"This will look very paradoxical, because ordinarily people think love will make you aware of togetherness. That is utter nonsense. If love is deep it will make you aware of aloneness, not togetherness, because whenever anything goes deep, what happens? – you leave the periphery of your being and you fall into your center, and the center is all alone. There only you are, or not even you, but only a consciousness – with no ego in it, with no identity in it, with no definition in it – an abyss of consciousness.

"After listening to great music, or after penetrating into the meaning of great poetry, or seeing the beauty of a sunset, it always happens: in the wake of it you will feel sad. Seeing this, millions have decided not to see beauty, not to love, not to meditate, not to pray – to avoid all that is profound. But even if you avoid truth, truth bumps upon you sometimes. Unawares, it possesses you.

"You can distract yourself for the moment, but no distraction is going to help. Aloneness has to be accepted because it is ultimate. It is not an accident, it is the very way things are. It is Tao. Once you accept it, the quality changes. Aloneness is not creating sadness. Your idea that you should not be alone, that is creating sadness; your idea that to be alone is to be sad is creating the problem. Aloneness is utterly beautiful because it is profoundly free. It is absolute freedom – how can it create sadness?

"But your interpretation is wrong. You will have to drop your interpretation. In fact, when you say 'I face new aloneness' you really mean you face new loneliness. And you have not seen the distinction between loneliness and aloneness."