Real love
Real love is something so deep, so energizing, that you will not know it unless you experience it. Love is an expression of energy, not something that is transacted. Tell me one thing: can you love people when you meet them for the first time?
(From the audience: No Swamiji*! We don't even know them, then how can we love them?)*
Exactly! This is what you think. Let me tell you, with a little bit of intellectual understanding and meditation, you will realize that you can love anyone without a reason, causelessly! You can love the trees on the road, you can caress them and feel the energy flow from you. You can love people whom you pass by on the road without even knowing them. Love is actually your very being, not a distilled quality that you possess.
Real love is something so deep, so energizing, that you will not know it unless you experience it.
Nothing is as misconstrued as love is today. Today, love is more of a transaction. If someone says something nice to you, you love him. Tomorrow if the same person falls short of it, you don't love him that much or you probably hate him.
Even your lifelong friend, with whom you chat everyday on the computer, will seem suddenly not so close if he says something that goes against your approval. Where is your love at this time? It has suffered temporarily!
It is just games that you play; a game in which love and hate surface alternately and interchangeably. And this love-hate relationship is not love at all. Be very clear. It is simply your reaction to a person or a situation, that's all. This is what we call love. This is not real love. It is subjective love, that's all.
Real love knows no object. It is simply there whether there is an object or not. Real love is the
Real love is the subject itself. It does not know any object. subject itself. It does not know any object. You are the subject and you have become love, that's all. Any object that comes in touch with it, feels it. Just like a river flows naturally and people enjoy it at the different places that they encounter it, real love exudes from a person and the people around him will be able to feel it.
There is absolutely no room for conditioning in real love. The energy in you should overflow and express itself as love. It is then that you can break through the highly knotted boundaries of relationships and express yourself beautifully, as a loving being!
In order to discover the quality of your being, that is love, two things can be done. The first thing: repeatedly listen to words like these so that they create a conviction in you about real love; so that a space is created in you for the process of transformation. Second thing: meditate so that the transformation can actually happen.
In practical life, when you go deeper and deeper into relationships, you will understand that all that you feel is not real love, but just some form of give and take. It is all just adjustment, some compromise, some duty-bound feelings, some fear, some guilt. It is all there in the name of love.
Meditation will take you beyond these mis- understandings of love. Meditation will work at the being level. That is why it is a shortcut! When you have to go through life and know it by yourself, it will take you a lifetime. But with meditation, a space opens inside you to experience these things clearly for yourself, whatever your age may be.
Just understand this one thing: when you are able to love without a reason, you will expand like anything. Your world will suddenly seem larger than life. It will be so ecstatic. You will become an energy source to yourself and to others. You will be so overflowing that the energy in you has to touch others. There is no other way. Others will be naturally drawn to you.
Q: What about love between a mother and a child? Is it not self less love?
Even motherly love comes with expectations. Many times, people have confronted me with arguments when I say this. Let me tell you, a mother
When you are able to love without a reason, you will expand like anything. loves her son alright. But at the end of the day, there is an unwritten expectation written on that love. If the son causes a little friction, the first words that would come out would be telling the things that she had done for him since childhood. A small dent in the relationship is enough to bring the whole thing out.
Real love is the expression of the Existential energy in you and this love can never think of any such arguments. It only knows to flow causelessly. It doesn't know to maintain any track record.
The moment you cite incidents from the past, it means that expectations were always there hidden behind your love and when it is this way, it can never be real love.
It is the same way when it comes to the son also. The son loves the mother, expecting her to look after him, expecting her to get up at five and pack his lunch for him, expecting her to maintain his clothes for him, without missing a single day. He adores the mother because he enjoys the care, the luxury.
A small story:
A boy was learning fractions in his school. One day the teacher asked him, 'If there was a cake and we divided it into 5 portions and gave them to each of your family members, what fraction of the cake would you get?' The boy replied, '2/5 Ma'am*.*' The teacher asked, 'How? Haven't you studied your fractions well?' The boy replied, 'Ma'am, my mother will give her piece to me if I like the cake.'
Mothers want to sacrifice for their children, alright, but the attitude with which they sacrifice is what we are talking about. They should do it simply out of an overflowing in them, not out of any hidden expectations. Events will never get recorded in them if they do it out of an overflowing. And even if they get recorded, they will not surface with a vengeance when things like this happen.
Common love always thrives on expectation. No one can deny this, although everyone may try to. The expectation in love is so well woven into it that it is difficult to perceive it. That is the problem.
Actually, as long as things go smoothly, it is difficult to believe what I am saying. But we hear of so many cases where sons and daughters are written off from the family for simple reasons! Simply because they married outside the community, or because there was some feud in the family. Where did all the love disappear suddenly?
Until such incidents happened, the son or daughter would have been loved very much. What happened suddenly? How can it suddenly disappear if it was real love? Real love can never be stopped because it is not bound by any cause-effect cycle.
Even in subtle family issues, if you look carefully, you will understand how bound your love is. Just try to re-arrange a few things in your life, and watch how your own family will react to it.
With your children, as long as you provide for them in the name of love, they also enjoy you, in the name of love. As long as you don't rub each other the wrong way, it is alright. If either of you behaves in an unexpected fashion, the mood of the love changes; the flavour changes.
Love which is always under threat is not real love. It is just arranged love. And anything arranged cannot be total. And when something is not total, it is always under threat. Love needs to be a total celebration, not a duty.