The Anahata Chakra & love🔗

Whenever we look at something, the first thing we do is to calculate what we can get from it. Whether it is a person or an object, our thoughts start functioning either through fear or through greed. Our attention is centered on that object or person. It is possible to turn our attention towards our own inner space and ask, 'What can I contribute?', 'What can I add?', 'How can I enrich others?' If you are asking, 'What can I get out of it?', you are driven by lust. If you are asking, 'How can I enrich it?' it is driven by love! Lust always demands. Love always gives.

Whenever you express love, you express energy also. When you are deeply in love, deeply flowing, you feel as if you heart has flowered. This is true! What you are experiencing is the expansion of your anahata chakra, the heart center. The anahata chakra overflows with the energy of love. What is attention-need? If love is energy, attention need is nothing but low energy! When we don't feel fulfilled inside ourselves, we seek attention from others. Understand, attention is energy! That is why, in whatever we do or even think, we are subconsciously seeking concurrence and approval from the people around us in some subtle way. All your life, you are on a signature campaign, getting endorsements from your family, your friends and society: Good Father, Good Husband, Good Employee, Good Friend and so on! We judge ourselves only based on others' opinions of us, through their certif-icates. We are so dependent on others' opinion of us because they have become the source of our energy. When you are dependent on external sources for energy, you become psychologically handicapped. With a physical handicap, at least you know that you are handicapped, but with psychological handicap, you don't even know that you are handi-capped. When we are so dependent on others for attention, we can fall into depres-sion any moment. People who suffer from depression are actually suffering from attention-need. If we don't get enough attention and we find it difficult to handle it. Just one word is enough to put us into depression. But we don't know the real reason for our depression. So what do we do? We start taking medicine to cure it. How will it heal? The cause for the depression is inside you and you look at medicines for help!

Today, love is more of a transaction. If someone says something nice to you, you love him; tomorrow if the same person falls short of your expectations, you immediately in him that much or you probably hate him. The moment there is expectation, possessives, doubt – it is not love, it is a business contract! If your love can change into hate or anger, be very clear, it is not real love. It is simply your changing reaction to a person or a situation, that's all You might claim that your love has no expectations, but the moment the other person doesn't respond as you imagine, you will be able to observe the tension and disappointment in you! As you grow more aware in your relationships, you will see this.

It is time to move from the mind to the heart. You have listened enough to your mind. Decide now to listen to your heart! When you live with your heart, you will never regret anything in life because there will be completeness in anything that you do. You can never experience true love with your mind. Love needs to be experienced at the very center of your being When you can love without a reason, you will release tremendous energy and beauty. You will appear beautiful irrespective of whether you are physi-cally beautiful or not. Don't think that unconditional love will not get you back anything. It will get you back things in more than one way. But you evolve to an extent where you see these things coming to you and continue loving, for the sake of loving. Some people tell me, 'Swamiji, I love the whole world. I don't do harm even to a small ant...' Why do you want to delude yourself by saying all these things? Can you even love your neighbor whole-heartedly? I tell you: it is easy to 'love the whole world', because you need not do any-thing to prove it! But when you say that you love your neighbor, the problem starts! You have to see his face everyday. You have to do something tangible to prove your love for him! Then it becomes a problem!

When you really love, the opposite emotions cannot enter into you. They will simply be excluded. When there is bright light in a room, can darkness be brought in? When you are brimming with love, there is no way another emotion can enter. When you go deeply into any emotion, only that emotion remains and you cease to exist. This is what we mean by 'totality'. When you are brimming with love, you don't feel yourself, you feel only love; you become love. Only when you become love have you found real love. When you become love, you automatically exude compassion towards ev-eryone and everything around you. To be able to love unconditionally, you need to be free. I am not saying that you should forget your family, religion etc. Just don't see love in the context of all this, that's all. Free your inner space from these bondages. When you feel that you belong to the whole of Exis-tence, you can love without any boundaries. Love is the ultimate experience of a human being. When the experience happens, we will not be able to possess the experience, only the experience will possess us! If you see, when you have loved totally, you will never feel guilty or sad when a person dies. You may feel sad at the physical separation, but you will never feel that you have missed anything when they were living. When I say total love, I don't mean that you should have fulfilled all others' expectations. I mean, you should have been centered in yourself well and exuded that kind of energizing love towards them, seeing and respecting them as part of Existence. Only a person who loves like this knows how to love.

When you grow in love, you learn to include everything and everyone. When you see a master, you will understand how encompassing he is. He never excludes anything or anyone. He sees no imperfections in anyone. He is just pure love, that's all. Existence is pure love. And pure love sees no imperfections. Society never approves of letting go and loving every plant and animal with love. It would tell you that you are mad. It will approve only of love that is governed by give and take; love that comes with a reason. But I tell you: don't give up. Keep on loving with all your heart. See every person, stone or tree as a part of God. That is real worship. Your mind does not need love, but your being needs it. Love is an adventure where you go into dissolution. When you are not, love is. We don't have the courage to 'not be' and so we hold on; we pull back from unconditional love. Those who are ready to take the adventure into dissolution, into experienc-ing the whole, are the brave ones. The ordinary love that you know is like fighting within four walls. Real love is like fighting in the cold on the open streets.

Love and responsibility always go hand in hand. When you truly love, you will take up total responsibility as well. The more responsibility you take up, the more you expand and the divine energy will automatically flow in you! This responsibility is not out of ego of serving people, but out of the over-flowing love energy in you. When you feel that you are responsible for the pain around you, you will automatically stand up to help reduce it in some way or other. People often think that it is enough if they do things for their own family. This is the way of contraction, not expansion. You need to expand for growth to happen. Existence will automatically flow through you when you take up responsibili-ty. Take on responsibility with joy! You will feel selfless love growing in you. The whole world will become your family. Even if the responsibility seems too much, simply take it up! Merely deciding to take it up is enough. The rest will be taken care of by Existence. Responsibility is nothing but the ability to respond spontaneously. When you love without discrimination, you can take up responsibility without discrimination.

Simple: Stop asking and start giving! Instead of asking for energy, radiate energy. We are so used to seeing ourselves as the center of attention. We need to start seeing the world outside as the center of attention. How to do this? Just understand this one thing: when you are able to love without a reason, you will expand like anything. Your world will suddenly seem larger than life.

It will be so ecstatic. You will become an energy source to yourself and to others. You will be overflowing with such energy that it has to touch others. There is no other way.