Love: It’s What You Are
Love is a human emotion. It is one of the most beautiful things a human being is capable of. Many cultures or so-called civilizations have suppressed love. Many people have made an enormous effort to export love to heaven. But love is of the earth, of the heart.
Human beings are capable of immense love. You do not need to go to heaven to know it. It is the tenderness of the heart that you call love. By teaching people that love comes from above, we have made them more and more incapable of love. Love comes from within, not from above. If you free your mind of complex prejudices that you have developed, by identifying yourself with one thing or the other, you will see that it is very natural and spontaneous for a human to love.
The moment you divide the world into right and wrong, into what is yours and not yours, into God and devil, your love becomes very conditional. It gets enslaved to the external situations and it will no more be your quality, but something that will only happen because someone else or something else is wonderful.
To put it simply, experientially, you are just these four things: body, mind, emotion, and energy. The combination of these four is what you call “myself.” The best the body can reach is health and pleasure. The best your mind can achieve is joyfulness and peace. The peak of your emotion is love, devotion, and compassion. Your energies can reverberate either with a mundane feebleness or with a great intensity of ecstasy.
Generally, people do not know much intensity of body, mind, and energy, but they are capable of intense emotions—anger, hatred, jealousy, love, or compassion. For most people, emotion dominates and decides the general quality of their lives. And love is the sweetest of all emotions.
If you ask someone whether they would like to be healthy or unhealthy in the body, you know what the obvious choice would be. Similarly, on the plane of your emotions, would you want to be loving or hateful? If you are using your sense, you would naturally choose love.
When I use the word “love,” you probably think of it in terms of loving somebody, but love is not about someone else; it is your quality. Just as health is of the body and happiness is of the mind, love is your emotion. If the ones whom you love very much are not in your physical presence, you are still capable of loving them, aren’t you? Many people find the expression of their love only when someone is dead or about to die. We always love the dead, don’t we?
Every human being is capable of being absolutely loving, but each one has issues with almost everything and everybody around them. People have gotten into a mental state where no one in the world is okay except himself or herself. The discriminatory dimension of the mind has gone berserk. Sincerely look at yourself and see. Look at the dearest person in your life and see how many layers of resistance you have to them. The moment your mind says that someone or something is not okay, you cannot love.
Love is your quality. You are just using things and people around you as stimuli to find expression for this quality. If you bring sufficient awareness to the discriminatory intellect, loving is the only way you can be. Love is not what you do. Love is what you are.
| Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally renowned speaker, Sadhguru is the founder of Isha Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human wellbeing. (www.isha.sadhguru.org) |
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