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Dying In Love
When there is love between two persons, whether husband and wife, father
and son, mother and daughter, friends, guru and disciple - if this real
love is there between the two, there will automatically develop a mutual
respect, a mutual regard, even a mutual admiration, perhaps, even a
mutual worship. Because friendship must ripen into love, love must ripen
into adoration. Adoration must ripen into worship, into surrender and
then into the extinction of the self.
Therefore, loving is dying. To love is to die. And when you cease to
exist in love, that is, "I must be alive so that I can enjoy my
love, bask in my love, drown myself in my own love," that is narcissistic,
psychologically speaking, and it is destructive. So to say that love
and death are linked, is also a lesser truth than to say that love is
death. Truly, when you love, you seek only the other, you think only
of the other - only the other exists - you don't exist. It is love which
gives form to substance, to essence.
It is also said, that we are born because of love, and we should die
in love of God. And in between birth and death, it is love that guides
our life. So love is a very necessary thing, it guides the entire creation,
let us say. The word creation being used in its widest possible sense,
that is, as representing the entire universe, manifested and unmanifested
universe. And Sahaj Marg and my Master, they teach us that therefore,
love is very necessary, but it has to be guided in the right direction.
And this is what we are trying to do in meditation, constant remembrance,
cleaning and all these things.
In whatever circumstances we are conceived, a human being is born out
of human intercourse, part of the Divine plan and it is Love that brings
us into existence. So in some way we are here because of love. So the
way out must also be through love. So love and death are, to my mind,
two ways of escape out of this trap that we call existence. And those
who have followed Sahaj Marg properly, who have followed the Master's
teachings properly, will find that it is this love which leads to death,
or to dying before we die. Because at a moment in our love lives for
the Master - it is very definitely a love life - we cease to exist and
only HE exists, so that love makes us die before we die. So, essentially,
it is one way.
Love gives nothing. Love gives itself. Now, if that 'itself' has nothing
in it, we get nothing when we get that love! Do you understand what
I am trying to say? Whomever we love, with that love we can get him;
and there is nothing in him. In love, we get nothing and it is for that
nothing that we are dying here!
So you see, if you don't die in love, you will have a different type
of death - in fear, hatred, sorrow, misery. Death is inevitable. One
death is unglorious, painful, miserable, self-destructive. The other
death is glorious, worshipful, full of love, full of what, in Christianity,
they call the beatitude. So all that we do, when we inculcate our children
and ourselves with the spirit of holiness, with the attitudes of holiness,
the ability to worship that which we love, to adore that which we love,
to surrender to that which we love, to finally die for that which we
love - we are seeking a form of death which transcends death. It is
no longer death. I die without dying. Death, for me, no more exists.
It is erased from the slate of my existence in eternity. Such a person
never dies, because he has died to himself, by himself. For such a person,
death can have no fears. Since he cannot die, we call such a person
immortal. They are there forever. Their love is inextinguishable. Why
is it inextinguishable? Because, they no longer love - they are love.
So you see, how closely love and death are linked. To die in love
means to live forever. To die thinking of yourself, in your selfishness,
in your own personal vain-glory, is to die forever. So, one is the way
to immortality, the other is the way to hell, to recurrence - eternal
recurrence, as one psychologist has called it, again and again and again,
until we learn to love, to sacrifice, to die to ourselves.
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