“Loyalty demands that you should always, in life or in death, be devoted to the person whether your heart is willing for it or not. It is a psychological way of enslavement.”
-Osho, from Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and Other People

I have been doing a lot of thinking about loyalty and love recently, and this quote from Osho has been galvanizing a lot of my thoughts. On the one hand, I consider myself a very loyal person; committed to my friends, my family, my partner through thick and thin, no matter what. On the other hand, I prize the freedom to live precisely what’s in my heart at any moment, to act on unencumbered desire, and to live my life on the hairy boundaries of fear, because the liberation of my spirit (call it attaining enlightenment, Nirvikalpa Samadhi, atonement, bliss, whatever) from the conditioning of my mind and body so that I can help others achieve the same is precisely why I understand myself to be here.

What strikes me as most disturbing about this quote is how directly it flies in the face of a lifetime of training in the virtues of loyalty. Suddenly I’m questioning some of my most deeply-held beliefs: that if I’m not loyal to the people with whom I’m in relationship, I’m a bad friend, lover, son, sibling, and that I’ve failed in my civic duties to help to maintain the cohesive structure of the society I participate in. I feel like this is a fairly common and pervasive social belief that most of us are trained in in some way or another. I also recognize within myself that this belief is at odds with another of my beliefs: that if I express anything other than what I most desire and wish to express, I am undermining the fabric of the society I’m trying to help to create. Namely, one of greater personal freedom, love, and kindness than the one that I grew up in.

“Love is a dangerous experience because you are possessed by something bigger than you. And it is not controllable; you cannot produce it on order. Once it is gone, there is no way to bring it back. All that you can do is to pretend, be a hypocrite.”

I’m disquieted by the answers I come up with when I think about the implications of these ideas as they apply to my life, right here, right now. Am I undermining my own search for freedom and the transformative power of love by trying to deconstruct and define the love in my life, and keep it familiar and safe? When I listen quietly to the sounds my heart makes, I have to confess that I am.

Oddly, this answer brings with it a kind of joy. It tells me that more freedom is on its way, more wild love, a greater expression of bliss and tranquility and illumination. It also brings with it enormous fear. What do I have to give up that I don’t want to let go of in order to feel this freedom? My friendships? Closeness with my family? My relationship with my romantic partner? The joy in me whispers that perhaps there’s a way to surrender utterly what those things are now, and not have it be a loss, but a win. How that unfolds is ultimately out of my hands. All I can do is let go and watch.

Living on those hairy boundaries is hard, but worthwhile. With each victory over fear, another opportunity to resist fear instead of embrace it will present itself as a challenge. Remembering to rise to my highest sense of honor, and acting from what I know to be right fills me with a sense of accomplishment that the feeling of achieving a material goal can ever touch. That doesn’t make it especially easier to do, however!