BELOVED OSHO, PLEASE TALK TO US ABOUT THE COOLNESS OF LOVE.

You have become too accustomed to hot dogs! Passion is hot, but passion is not love. Passion is an effort to use the other for your own biological and sexual needs. And the man who has renounced passion becomes cold -- ice cold, almost dead.

Love is just in between these two extremes, hot dogs and cold saints. In your restaurant you should start selling hot dogs and cold saints -- they are the two extremes. Just between the two is the coolness of love.

Love is not cold and love is not hot; it is a cool breeze, a fresh breeze, an early morning breeze. When it comes to you, you feel almost young again, fresh again, as if suddenly you have taken a shower.

Passion uses the other; that's why passion is a continual fight -- because so-called passionate lovers are both trying to use the other. Love does not use the other; it gives its own heart to the other. It is not a desire to get something, but a longing to share something. One is full of peace and silence and joy, and wants to share it with those who are close. They may be friends, they may be husbands, wives, children, father, mother -- anybody.

Love has an immense coolness about it. But very few people have attained to the coolness of love. Either they are hot and passionate, or when they become tired and bored with this heat, they turn to the opposite -- they become an ice-cold saint, frozen.

Mind has a way of moving like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. That's how the clock runs, by the pendulum moving from one extreme to the other. If the pendulum stops in the middle, it will be the coolness of love; and if the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock will also stop.

I can say it in another way: in the moments of cool love, you feel time has stopped; there is no movement -- everything has stopped. It is so silent that there is not even a ripple on the lake of your consciousness.

My longing is to fill this whole world with cool love; and through cool love we can give birth to a new man, to a new humanity -- which are urgently needed. And I hope that man has enough intelligence not to choose death, that he will choose a different style of life -- without conflict, without wars, full of the peace which passeth understanding.

I hope man will not prove so retarded as to destroy himself. The greatest thing that can happen to save humanity is the coolness of love -- friendliness. Passion burns you up, and in the same way, the frozen saint is already dead.

Love keeps you alive, and coolness keeps you young and fresh. Man can have such a beautiful planet and such a beautiful humanity. Just a little understanding is needed, and I think that understanding is arising, slowly but constantly.

If you can understand me, then everybody else in the world can also understand me. Maybe it will take a little more time for them, but there has never before been a time when understanding was needed so much. It is no small matter, because now understanding is equivalent to life.