Love: An Intensity Of Inclusiveness
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
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One of the most abused and misunderstood four-letter words in the human lexicon is `love'.There is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It is not without reason that the poets have eulogised it over centuries. But we have distorted it to mean something that it is not. The result is struggle, disenchantment and frustration.Love, for most people, is a means of fulfilling various needs. For an infant who turns to its mother for nourishment and protection, the relationship is a matter of physical survival. For children and adolescents who turn to their peers for friendship, the relationship is often a matter of social survival. For professionals who build relationships with business partners and colleagues, the relationship is invariably related to economic survival.For those who invest their lives in romantic relationships, the issues at stake are often of sexual or psychological survival. People may claim that all these are founded on love. However, most are fundamentally transactional, governed by vested interests. The moment certain expectations are not fulfilled, love evaporates! Indeed, it is often replaced by burning hate or bitter disillusionment.
The fundamental problem is that human beings have based their lives on the fallacy that love involves another. Based on this limited understanding, they create a plethora of relationships. And so you have parental love, romantic love, friend love, God love even dog love! There is nothing wrong with any of these. It is just that in all of them, cooperation from outside forces is an essential prerequisite.This may be a working arrangement for domestic purposes.But for those who seek a more abiding well-being and freedom, this is a highly limited and impoverished idea of love. In actual fact, love has nothing to do with anyone else. Love is just the way you are. It needs no external stimulus; it is entirely self-propelled. Love is simply a state of emotion a state of indiscriminate involvement with existence.
If you decorate it with fairy-tale associations, and inflate it into some exalted mystical condition, you will suffer. But if you play the game consciously , it can be a beautiful game. When you have achieved a sweetness of emotion within, you have the choice to be involved with any aspect of existence without fear of entanglement. This is not hormonally hijacked compulsi veness masquerading as love! This is love as freedom. For you now have the freedom to turn this inner sweetness into love, joy, blissfulness or ecstasy. The choice is yours.
Relationships are inevitable in the social world. Those whose emotions are sweet can enter into graceful and harmonious relationships when necessary , transforming simple needs into a beautiful process as a conscious choice.
However, the compulsive nature of people's desires makes them fetishise love and freeze it into a set of limited, calculated, conditional transactions. To then extol the virtues of `unconditional love' is a gross travesty! The reason why Eastern cultures spoke of the guru-shishya relationship as sacred is because it is reasonably unconditional (at least from one end!). A mother's love comes next. Similarly , dog love is high on many people's lists, because at least from one side, it is unconditional.
However, once you experience love as a way of being, you are not limited by a single definition. When you know the ecstasy of entering into an emotional state of union with anything a tree, a bird, a full moon, even a no moon your love is empowered to become a tool of transcendence. The life you now lead is in an exhilarating intensity of inclusiveness.
The fundamental problem is that human beings have based their lives on the fallacy that love involves another. Based on this limited understanding, they create a plethora of relationships. And so you have parental love, romantic love, friend love, God love even dog love! There is nothing wrong with any of these. It is just that in all of them, cooperation from outside forces is an essential prerequisite.This may be a working arrangement for domestic purposes.But for those who seek a more abiding well-being and freedom, this is a highly limited and impoverished idea of love. In actual fact, love has nothing to do with anyone else. Love is just the way you are. It needs no external stimulus; it is entirely self-propelled. Love is simply a state of emotion a state of indiscriminate involvement with existence.
If you decorate it with fairy-tale associations, and inflate it into some exalted mystical condition, you will suffer. But if you play the game consciously , it can be a beautiful game. When you have achieved a sweetness of emotion within, you have the choice to be involved with any aspect of existence without fear of entanglement. This is not hormonally hijacked compulsi veness masquerading as love! This is love as freedom. For you now have the freedom to turn this inner sweetness into love, joy, blissfulness or ecstasy. The choice is yours.
Relationships are inevitable in the social world. Those whose emotions are sweet can enter into graceful and harmonious relationships when necessary , transforming simple needs into a beautiful process as a conscious choice.
However, the compulsive nature of people's desires makes them fetishise love and freeze it into a set of limited, calculated, conditional transactions. To then extol the virtues of `unconditional love' is a gross travesty! The reason why Eastern cultures spoke of the guru-shishya relationship as sacred is because it is reasonably unconditional (at least from one end!). A mother's love comes next. Similarly , dog love is high on many people's lists, because at least from one side, it is unconditional.
However, once you experience love as a way of being, you are not limited by a single definition. When you know the ecstasy of entering into an emotional state of union with anything a tree, a bird, a full moon, even a no moon your love is empowered to become a tool of transcendence. The life you now lead is in an exhilarating intensity of inclusiveness.
