Love, to be Loved

When I give love, I receive love. Now love is something I cannot give back. Money I can give back, things I can give back. I cannot give back life. When I am dying and someone gives me some medicine which restores me to life, I cannot give him anything except gratitude. Can I say, "Here, take back the life that you gave me?" Therefore these are debts which we can never repay, except with love.

Therefore when we give love and we receive something of extraordinary value, of extraordinary bliss, what can you give more? You can only give something more from yourself. Having given yourself, it is still possible to love, though you don't exist there to love. This is the secret, you see. Many abhyasis ask me, "But I find my love growing, how can you grow in love when you are not there yourself to give any more?" Because love is never given. Only things can be given, facts can be given, but not love. Therefore it is as if having given myself away, my love continues to grow in a no place no time situation. It is as if you have planted a tree and given it to the Master and even after the tree is cut, He is able to still get fruits from that.

So you see, this is the secret of love. And this is what we are dealing with in spirituality. This is the sort of love we talk about when we say, "Having given, you cannot give again." This is the sort of morality of which we speak, that having given once to someone, you cannot give it to somebody else again. It is not something you can deal with as if it is a thing, you see, to be broken up and divided. A heart is given whole or not at all. It cannot be cut up into pieces, a hundred and two pieces to be distributed to a hundred and two different individuals. It cannot be even given piece by piece to one person and claimed that this is morality, because I have only given it to the same person. It is given once wholly, or not at all.

The way of yoga is nothing but the way of love, sublimated beyond the physical, sublimated beyond the mental, sublimated beyond the intellectual, emotional to that pristine purity of love where there is no more love of person to person, but love of heart to heart. So the way of yoga is nothing but the way of love. And you cannot have love without giving love. It is something of a mystery to me that in the modern life, more and more people are leading loveless lives. They say, "I want to be loved, but nobody loves me." The first question I am tempted to ask is, "Do you love anybody?" Unless you love, you cannot be loved.

So you see, if you cannot love, you cannot get love. For an echo, you have to shout, then the echo comes back. It is a law that, "Give and take." We are leading loveless lives precisely because we have lost the capacity to love, in most cases. In the rest of the cases, we are afraid to love. Love is a commitment. You cannot just love and throw your lover aside and walk out. That is, first, not love; secondly, if it is love, you are going to suffer all your life.

Lamps give light, but just by sitting near a lamp I will not become a lamp. I must allow myself to be burned, as Babuji Maharaj used the example of the candle. It consumes itself to illuminate everything. You cannot illuminate anything without consuming yourself. You cannot create love in others except by consuming yourself with that love, allowing yourself to be burned up in that love. People want today to get fulfillment in love. They want to get in love. They cannot. It is against the law of love, it is against the nature of love, it is against the divinity of love. One who loves has to give, not to take. It is impossible to take from it.

So, all these things which Sahaj Marg insists upon, is not to glorify the Master; He doesn't need our glorification; not to praise; He doesn't need our praise; not to love Him even; He doesn't need our love. What on earth for? For ourselves! We love Him so that we may love ourselves. If we praise Him, it is so that we may be able eventually to praise ourselves. If we respect Him and regard Him, it is so that we may respect and regard ourselves. So, what is at stake? The stake is ourselves. If we are well-behaved, disciplined from inside, we adore the Master, worship Him as somebody who is unique in the Universe, love Him, not for what He can give us, but for Himself, because in that love there can be no separation from the Beloved. One does not love so that one gets something. One loves because one cannot help loving, even if that love is not reciprocated. As you know, in English there is that old saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all." So, one who is afraid of losing himself says, "No, no! I am not prepared for this loving and losing business, that is for the Englishmen." Well, don't love! But you will find you have lost yourself. When you are unwilling to lose yourself, precisely because this miracle exists, that when you give yourself you find your SELF.

So, let us understand, that if we are not progressing, it is because we create problems inside ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves. If I love my self, it would result in evolution; from myself to my Self, the other 'Self' being Him. If there is a lack of love, it is again a lack of ability in me to love the Self, the Self being Him. So you see, the ultimate destruction, the ultimate loser is myself! I lose myself in the process if I disregard the need for etiquette, for morality, for sound and regular practice and consider these as obligations imposed on me by my external Master who is visible before me. The path becomes very easy and acceptable and simple and natural, if I say 'yes' to the fellow who is inside me, and what is inside me is my Self and now it is no external authority which is enforcing these things on me. It is I myself who am telling myself, "Be disciplined, be regular, be loving." Then the whole thing becomes easy.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about love - love means this, love means that. Love means nothing. Love only means love your Self, as you would be the highest thing you can ever find, because you are a jewel, hidden by a great deal of filth and it is your love for your self, which must melt that filth away, and when that filth is melted away and the inner glory shines, you will find, it is both you and your Master.

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