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What is Love?
I have often felt that love is a way of expressing one's concern
for the other. Suppose you love your child. How do you express your
concern for that child? Mere love is not enough unless it is backed
by concern. It is almost like having paper currency without gold-backing
behind it. In modern days, perhaps, it reflects the inner psychic existence
of the human being that we have love without being backed by performance,
that we have paper currencies without adequate gold-backing. Perhaps
it is the reflection of the inner on the external. That is a speculative
thing. But if love does not relate or release concern for the one whom
you love, it is an empty shell parading with love, but there is no love
behind it. For instance, I cannot say, I love my neighbour and when
somebody is sick I say, well, let them call the doctor. Somebody comes
and asks for the car because the man who has fallen on the street is
struggling for existence - to take him to the hospital - I say I don't
want to be involved. How can this be love for the neighbour, when I
cannot concern myself sufficiently to put everything I have into his
welfare?
In today's selfish world, self-centered world, corrupt world, it would
be extraordinarily rare to find a human being, who takes a genuine interest
in another person. Superficial interest, we all have, you see. We pretend
to be brothers and sisters. Even in the family, I mean blood brothers
and sisters, even there, it is much a matter of pretence - father and
daughter, father and son, brother and sister, except perhaps in the
case of the mother whose poor female heart is overburdened with love.
So they go through the pangs of love, pangs of pain of separation. The
women are unable to throw it away. If they could, I am sure they would.
Even in the west, I have found - where there is a lot of cold-heartedness,
heartlessness - even there the women are not able to throw away their
fundamental capacity to love or shall I say the fundamental quality
of love. They have not been able to throw it away however much they
would like to go without love. Because love is a problem, you see. When
you love someone, you have to accept responsibility.
So love means responsibility. But we don't want responsibility,
therefore we don't want love. And unfortunately, pleasure being equated
with love, when you can have pleasure without love and responsibility,
people have the pleasure without responsibility, people have the pleasure
and nothing else. And then they find that the pleasure turns into pain.
Because everything in Nature is doomed to turn into its opposite. The
only thing which cannot change into its opposite is love. Because love
has no opposite. As Babuji has said, opposite of love is not hate.
Absence of love is hate. This is something which we must clearly
understand, because people often say. "Oh, love and hate are two
extremes, cold and heat are two extremes." It is a stupid concept;
western concept; psychological concept. The true thing is, where love
does not exist, there hate exists. They are not opposites. When love
comes, there can be no hate. It disappears. It is like, when the Sun
comes, there can be no mist or fog. It just disappears. Can we say therefore
that the Sun is the opposite of fog! In the presence of the one, the
other cannot remain.
Now in love we have many things. It is not merely an emotion as psychologists
say. It is not merely ecstasy as lovers feel. It is not merely something
to talk about as philosophers talk about or speculate. In its true form,
in its ultimate form, love is something which embraces some very fundamental
principles. This is founded on old Indian philosophy which says that
unless certain things come together, love cannot exist. The first
is purity. Purity means not merely purity of the body or of the
mind, but purity in every aspect of our being, in every aspect of our
existence; purity of thought, purity of action, purity in our interpersonal
relationships, purity of the house not at the cost of the environment
but while keeping the environment also pure, all this is necessary.
So we have to balance this purity between the inside and the outside.
The inner cleaning and the outer cleaning should go side by side. That
brings us to the first step which is essential - a very vital and all
embracing concept that this purity has to pervade every form, every
aspect of our life, every function of our life.
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