Flow in Love🔗

Psychology explains that thoughts arise in the brain, and emotions from the heart. Irrespective of where they arise from, thoughts and emotions are inseparable. Ancient scriptures say that thoughts create us. So do emotions. We become what our emotions are. Managing our emotions is crucial to transforming our lives.

Whenever we look at something, the first thing we do is to calculate what we can get from it. It can be a person or an object, that doesn’t matter. Our thoughts start functioning either through fear or through greed to calculate what there is in the situation for us. 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 the process is only to ask, ‘What can I get out of it?’ then it is driven by lust. If the process asks, ‘How can I enrich it?’ It is driven by love! Lust is an energy that demands. Love is an energy that gives.

Love is an intense experience in one’s inner space. Many of us think love is a choice. We think experience and expression of love is a choice. We think that if we want to, we can handle love; otherwise we can let it go. No! It is not a choice as we think. It is a basic necessity of life.

When I say life, I don’t mean just breathing and staying alive. I mean being alive at the innermost being level, as a live Consciousness. If you can express love, if you can experience love, that is the only way of being alive as a Consciousness. If you don’t experience and express love, you may inhale and exhale, but you can’t say you are a live being. There are so many animals, plants and other things that breathe day in and day out. You will continue to exist like them, that’s all.

A small story: A disciple asked a Zen master ’Does an enlightened master speak?’ The master said, ’No, an enlightened person never speaks. Only a person who doesn’t know enlightenment speaks.’

Then the disciple asked, ’So does an enlightened master keep quiet?’

The master said, ’No, an enlightened master never keeps quiet. If he keeps quiet, then he is not enlightened.’

The disciple was puzzled. He asked, ’You say he neither speaks nor keeps quiet. What does he do?’

The master replied, ’He sings! His being sings. He neither speaks, nor keeps quiet. His very being sings.’

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! That is what the master means. When the experience possesses us, whatever we do will be like a beautiful song. Any word that comes out will be poetry. Our being will be so light. We will simply float. Our walking will be a dance. Our body language will radiate grace. All our expressions will be of great service to humanity.

All human beings are born as loving beings. A new born baby radiates causeless love. Does she know anyone around her at birth? No! Her energy is causeless love. As we grow, society instills fear and greed in us and we orient our love based on greed and fear. Then it is no longer causeless love. It is love with a reason. It becomes suffocating. We start feeling other emotions like jealousy, fear and anger. We experience only love with a cause, a reason. But with a little awareness and awakening, it is possible to reclaim our original love.

Love can never be made to happen with just your logical decision. Our mental setup itself should be created in such a way that we become love and our actions speak love. Our logic should start radiating a love that is beyond logic!

If you try to create love, it will be like forcing open the petals of a flower to make it bloom. Can it be called flowering? No. Love is a flower that blossoms deep within your being and sends out a sweet fragrance that we share with others.

A beautiful incident happened in the life of Ramanuja'. If you study the life of Ramanuja‘, you will see how he used every step of his life to move towards enlightenment. When his teacher initiated Ramanuja', he gave him a special chant. The teacher told him not to pass on the chant to anybody and that if he did so, he would go to hell. Ramanuja asked him what would happen to the others with whom he might share it. The teacher said that they would be led to salvation.

What would we have done? Naturally we would have kept quiet, thinking, Why unnecessarily go to hell?'

Ramanuja immediately stood on a platform in a temple and called out to the whole village. He loudly pronounced the chant given by his teacher and told the people, 'Let you all go to heaven! I am not bothered about me going to hell. Let you all reach heaven!'

When you are deeply in love, you feel as if your whole being is open and you are ready to go to any extreme for the sake of anybody. You are ready to go to any boundary, as there is nothing to protect within your being. Your being is totally open. You don’t feel insecure when you are wild with love. That is why people who are in love always do risky things. They take the risk because they feel they have nothing to lose. There is no insecurity about anything. They feel so expansive. Love gives tremendous courage and energy. It opens you up. It makes you finally available to yourself. As of now, you are not available to yourself. Love can make you available to yourself. When the teacher saw what Ramanuja did, he admitted that he learned a lesson from his disciple and declared that Ramanuja had reached greater heights than him. He told Ramanuja, ‘You are in a different space now.’

The problem is that we have all practically become philosophers. We don’t understand that life is not philosophy. It is spontaneous flowing energy. It is new every moment. Philosophy is all about repeating the same old things in different wa s, that’s all. There’s nothing fresh in it. Life is fresh every moment. Philosophy robs life of the freshness.

A small story:

Ten philosophers were imprisoned in a country. They were kept together in one cell. They decided that somehow they should escape from the prison. They sat and made a big plan. They got the mold of the prison door key and made a duplicate key for the prison door.

Finally, they chose the date of escape. The whole plan was clearly laid out. They decided that on the particular night, two of them will open the prison door with the duplicate key and signal to the others. The others would escape and these two would follow after locking the door behind them.

The day of escape dawned and two of them went to open the door. The rest of them waited for the signal. They waited and waited but never got any signal. Three hours passed. Suddenly the two who had gone to open the door came back and said, 'We have to drop our plan to escape. It can't happen today. We will have to do it some other day. We will have to reschedule our escape.'

The others asked, 'Why, what happened?'

They replied, What to do? The foolish guards forgot to lock the prison door!'

Those who philosophize cannot think of anything new! It has to be the same old mental setup. If there is some change or some new situation, they cannot think creatively to deal with it, because they are not open. They are like a closed circuit.

We have also become like philosophers when dealing with our lives. We are stuck in patterns of the past. We are never in the moment. If anything new happens, we are at a loss.

With philosophy, you have fixed ideas and you become very assertive. When you are too assertive, you can't love. Assertion is aggressiveness that does not allow love to come in. When you are too sure and filled with preconceived ideas, then where is the space for love to enter? Love needs beautiful space in order to blossom. With philosophy, there is no room for love to settle in its existential state. It is like this: if you really want to experience the taste of nectar, can you experience it through just a set of ideas about it? No! You need to taste the nectar yourself, give it some space, allow it to fill you and settle in its existential state. Only then you will know its taste. In the same way, to experience love, just a few ideas alone will not help. You need to allow it to grow in its existential state in your inner space. Then you will know it. Allow it to happen in your heart, not in the head. Decide to be with the heart. Then it will grow and happen.

What was once a failure within the head can become a success within the heart! Love is really a success of the heart that every individual should experience. It is easy to stay in the head. It is, after all, a mundane and familiar intellect. It requires courage to come down to the heart, because with the heart nothing is familiar, everything is fresh. At the head level you have a solid identity and familiar patterns. At the heart level there is no identity, no pattern. It is an open space. To enter into it, you need tremendous courage. That is why love is fearful for many people. It is an unfamiliar zone. With the head, there is comfortable familiarity.

If the cosmos is a grand ocean, we are all part of it. We are one with the ocean, not individual drops in the ocean. When we think of ourselves as individual drops, we feel separate in our boundaries and in our feelings. This is what is called ego. We become driven by feelings of ‘I’ and ‘mine’. As long as this separation remains, we can never experience the energy of the ocean that is love. We never experience that causeless and surging love. As long as we remain a drop in the ocean, we say ‘no’ to life. We neither love nor trust. We don’t feel blissful either, because bliss is possible only for those who know how to love and trust. It happens only to those who know how to feel part of the ocean. Bliss is possible only when our heart says ‘yes’, when the ‘no’ completely disappears from our being. ‘No’ is darkness, ‘yes’ is light. ‘No’ is ego, ‘yes’ is egolessness.

‘No’ is the way of the unconscious person. ‘Yes’ is the way of the awakened one. All the conflict, all the suffering in our life is because of our saying ‘no’. ‘No’ is a fight, a war with Existence. ‘Yes’ is love, peace with Existence. ‘Yes’ is in deep accord with the totality of who we are — the ocean. Bliss is another name for that accord, that harmony.

The way to be in bliss is to dissolve into the ocean, not to be a drop but to merge with the ocean. To be a drop is to be a hindrance. To be a drop is to be with ego. The ego is the root of all misery. When the ego is absent, bliss reaches us from every nook and corner of the ocean of existence, as if it were just waiting for the ego to disappear.

Ego is a closed state of consciousness. All the windows and doors are closed. Life itself becomes insulated and encapsulated. Our ego surrounds us like a capsule. Our ego is like a sealed capsule, there is not even a small gap to allow anything to enter. It closes itself due to fear and shrinks into itself. That is how we create misery for ourselves. Love is being in the flow with Existence, to be totally with it. Ego is like frozen ice. Love is like liquid water. Only when we are liquid do we become part of the ocean. Then we don’t have any private goal or destination. Each moment is blissful, incredibly ecstatic, just going with the plan of the cosmos.

It is such sheer joy to simply exist and flow. Just ‘to be’ is enough. But we need to be sensitive to feel the joy of being. We need to grow feelers. The feelers are what we call love. Love feels the joy of just being. When you grow the feelers of love, life is no longer made of independent thoughts but becomes a continuous feeling. Then the ego starts to dissolve. Once we have moved from thinking to feeling, there is only one more step and that is from feeling to being, and that is very simple.

The first step is difficult: to move from thinking to feeling. The ego has trained the mind to think so much, that's why. The second step comes almost automatically. There's nothing we need to do for it to happen. From feeling to being, the distance is nothing at all. It can happen at any moment. The poet can become the mystic at any moment. He is almost there. The real problem is how to get out of our thinking and get more and more into feeling. Just follow the heart. Just love more, that's all! Feel more. Enjoy more so that you can feed your heart. Watch the sunrise, sunset, clouds, rainbows, birds, flowers, animals, rocks, and people, and watch them with awareness. Look into their eyes. Existence is so multidimensional. Look into every dimension like a poet. Praise it. Feel it. Be ecstatic! Expand your consciousness and experience every single detail of Existence with love. Slowly, the ego will lose its hold and disappear.

The only barrier to love is fear. When things start happening, we become fearful because with love we enter into a merger. This threatens the very basis of our ego. Ego is separateness while love is a merger. The fear we feel is nothing but the fear of the dissolving ego. Let the fear be there. It will hang around for a while. If we simply ignore it, the ego will leave us. It is a great day when fear of losing the ego leaves us. From then on growth becomes simple, easy and spontaneous. Then we are not, only love is.

Encounter any situation in life with deep love. Soon you will become pure love. Whether it is a person or your work or a passerby or god or anything, just encounter it with deep love for love's sake. If you are a painter, just be completely in love with painting. If you are a dancer, be completely in love with dancing. If you are working with your computer, treat it with utmost love and become lost in it. Just be completely sincere and completely in love every moment.

If you are painting and at the same time thinking about which gallery to put up the painting in or how much to sell it for, then be very clear, you are not lost in love. You are in love only with some particular thing, which is money in this case. If you are dancing while calculating what you will get once you finish the dance, then be very clear you are not lost in love. You create more and more bondage by doing this.

If you become lost in every moment, you become love. Then, when you work you work with the utmost focus because you are in deep love with it. This way, your very life becomes a deep meditative love.

Then you start feeling, relating and respecting everything as a living being, just as you are. You even start feeling the other person's thoughts. You start responding and relating to the other person without him or her opening up to you. You feel the cosmos as a translucent, ever living presence. You have tremendous intelligence. You know exactly how to connect to things. Such is the power of love.

The Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi' says, 'Wherever you are, whatever your condition is, always try to be a lover!' The whole of Existence is in a deep romance with itself. You are part of it. So it is your nature to be a lover every moment. Only by being that can you experience the real fulfillment of your original nature.

The big problem today is that most people don't love themselves. Society never teaches that it is possible to love ourselves. Understand that unless you love yourself, you cannot possibly love another person. Only when you lose yourself to yourself can you lose yourself to others. We are taught that we can only love even ourselves if we have a reason. If we perform well, we love ourselves. If we fail, we hate ourselves. We apply the same logic to others. We love them only because of something, never without a cause, without a reason.

When you don't love yourself, you become cynical and negative towards life.

For a few minutes every day, just sit by yourself and feel overflowing love towards yourself. Feel what a wonderful being you are. Feel how much you have taken yourself for granted. Feel yourself as part of Existence and love yourself for it. Melt with the feeling of love for yourself. If you practice this everyday you will see that where you were once hard and self-centered, now you have become soft and loving. Then, when people love you, you don't feel guilty or unworthy because just as they love you, you love yourself too. You become ready to receive love from others. Usually when others show love to you, you feel guilty or unworthy because you don't feel you are worth being loved. Once you settle within yourself with deep love, you will receive others' love with joy.

Existence is not a thing. It is a living energy being. Every single tree, every single stalk of a plant responds to your love and hate, your every thought.

Cleve Backster‘, a polygraph expert, has conducted several experiments to examine the response of plants to human emotions and thoughts. He discovered that plants would respond to human thought in a way similar to how a human being would respond. A simple thought by a person about burning the leaves of the plant would register erratic movement in the polygraph recording of the plant! Backster called this response ‘Primary Perception’ - the ability of plant, animal and human cells to perceive and respond to any thought.

On one occasion, Backster’ recorded graphs that registered a flat line that suggested the plants were in a state of shock. He asked the owner of the plant if she had done anything to hurt the plants. The lady told him, ‘I roasted a few of its leaves to get their dry weight!’

When you start loving Existence, it begins responding to you in beautiful ways. You start rising above all of the differences around you - differences between people, situations, emotions, between anything and anything. Everything merges into unity. And that is the truth. Everything is part of one Whole. And love is the only thing that can make you realize this truth.

In India, there is a tradition of spiritual wandering where people walk by foot the length and breadth of the country, visiting many temples and pilgrim centers. I used to wonder how they were able to do that, especially going through forests, sleeping with wild animals and begging for food. The secret is that they start feeling connected with nature so completely that nature protects them beautifully. Whether it rains or shines, the animals and trees, everything, takes care of them. Even though this may be logically difficult to understand, it is the truth.

If you begin to live with a little respect and love for Existence and all its creations, you will be able to recognize these things happening in your own life as well. Nature will simply reciprocate your love in many beautiful ways.

Very often, love is confused with respect. From a young age, children are brought up to always show respect but never to show love. You can hear people teach the children, ‘You should respect your elders.’ You will hardly hear, ‘You should love your elders.’ That is the problem.

Respect sows the first guilt in you that you are something inferior. It makes you feel separate from the other person to whom you show respect. On the other hand, love sows the seeds of joy and unity in you. It makes you feel connected with the other person and with everything in Existence. With respect, there is fear. With love, there is authentic respect as well as the scope for deep understanding to happen. With respect alone, not much understanding is possible. With love, there is a possibility for tremendous understanding and transformation to happen. Love by its very nature is transforming. It softens and melts you.

Respect creates distance between you and the other. Love bridges the distance between you and the other. Only because people themselves have not experienced love, do they give respect as the rule of acceptable behavior. Respect is easier but not real. Love might be difficult only because not many know how to go about it, but it is real. With love, respect IS automatic and authentic. With pure respect, the appearance of love is forced and may never be authentic.

Love is the original religion. It is the root of all spirituality. All other religions are offshoots. Love is like the root of the tree and all religions are like leaves or branches. Even the greatest religions are only big branches compared to the religion of love!

Love has no temple or scripture. It is like the roots that lie beneath the ground but provide the nourishment for life. Without it, the whole tree dies. Through love many branches and leaves are created. But what do we do? We cling to the branches and leaves instead of clinging to the root. When we cling to the root, we get the direct nourishment. When we cling to the branches, we enjoy only one dimension of the nourishment. When you become more loving, you will enter the invisible temple of love.

A small story: One day a master asked his disciples how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun.

One of them said, 'When you can look in the distance and tell whether the animal is a cow or a horse.' The master said, 'No.'

Another disciple said, 'When you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a pine tree or a mango tree. 'The master again said, 'No.'

They asked the master 'Then what is it master?'

The master replied, 'When you can look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him. When you can look into the face of any woman and recognize your sister in her. If you cannot do this, then no matter what time of the day it is, it is still only night time. ' The master can give a few hints, a little hints here and there. Then we must find our own way carefully, cautiously. Love is just a hint, but if we follow love slowly, very slowly, we will be surprised that god becomes more and more of a reality. He is no longer just a thought, no longer simply an idea, but something that we can feel. The deeper we go into love, the closer we come to the feeling. The day we dissolve into love we merge with unity.

From time immemorial, the conclusion of many mystics has been that matter is glued together with love. An invisible force keeps atoms and molecules together. They do not fall apart because of this invisible force. Science has yet to discover this ultimate energy. It has detected a few of its manifestations such as gravitation and electricity but these are only gross manifestations. The day that science discovers love will be the day when religion and science will commune with each other in the same language. For now, just rejoice because love is possible. Be joyful that love is your inner potential. You can rise to the ultimate heights with love. Nothing is impossible with love because love can transform itself into god.

Many people confuse lust with love. This is one of the greatest tragedies. The person who thinks lust is love remains confined to the physical plane. He never rises higher than that. He has no idea that there is a higher plane. He remains in the basement of his house. Sex is the base-ment. It is not the place to live in. You can use it for other purposes, but it can't be your home. Your home is above it. Man has three planes of being: animal, human and divine. First is the plane of lust, which is the animal plane. It is a crude form of love. It is not that love is not present there. Love is mixed or polluted by gross greed and desire, that's all.

As our being becomes more refined, we enter the second plane, ordinary human love. Human love has traces of possessiveness and jealousy. Since human love is grounded in greater understanding than animal love, one does not simply use the other person for his or her own gain. Human love is capable of seeing the other as an end unto itself.

The third type of love is divine love. It is love in its highest form, almost like a prayer. There is no possessiveness. There is nothing earthly in it. It becomes an invisible but powerful force. This is when love becomes prayer and we feel restful contentment for the first time. I say restful because the other two types of love always keep reaching for more or keep missing something. There is no restfulness in them. When the third type of love happens, even sex becomes a deep and divine act beyond mere physical pleasure.

The first thing we need to understand is that relationships can happen causelessly, without any reason. Only then will we understand that the experience of love is much more important than the object of love. You must have at least one relationship in your life that exists for no reason. If you don't have such a relationship, be very clear, even if you have money, deep down you are still poor.

From today onwards start relating with someone for no reason. There should be no monetary or physical benefit from the relationship. If you experience causeless love once, after that, if the money is shared, if the body is shared, it is okay. The quality is totally different. I am not against money or against marriage. I am not against the physical relationship, but if it becomes the center of your life, you are missing something very important. That is what I want to convey here. You miss a major dimension or energy center of your being.

I always tell people, 'Do some work for half hour everyday that does not bring you money or name and fame. Just for half an hour, go to some temple or church, clean and sweep the floor, offer some service. Don't plan to become a committee member in that place! Don't think that it will fetch you good credit and a place in heaven... no. Don't look any further than that work for half an hour.' Initially you may think, 'This half hour is a waste of time. After a few days you will realize that only in that half hour are you really alive! Only for that half hour you are not driven by fear or greed. You smile at the people around you without any calculation. You feel strangely sincere in a way that you never felt before. If you observe yourself at other times, you will see that you even smile only after some mental calculation. Even before laughing you will see who is the person next to you. Based on that, you decide how many inches to open your mouth, how polite you should be, how you should project yourself. As of now, every action of yours is driven by fear and greed. You are fuelled by fear and greed. That's why you feel lonely and tired.

If you try this technique, you will suddenly see that your body and mind start functioning without the need for fear and greed! Once you learn this simple knack of how to move your body without fear and greed, be very clear, you can enter into love. You learn how to tap into the energy of love. You learn how to run your life on the beautiful energy of love. Only then will you know what is meant by the word 'love'.

A new center will be awakened in you. A new energy will start radiating in you. Then you will understand how loving and causeless relationships are possible.

Hatred and love are opposite sides of the same coin as long as love is conditional. Love can flip into hatred the moment we feel that our expectations are threatened. In love of this type, it remains love only as long as the conditions remain as expected. The moment the conditions change, the love also changes. Often what we believe as love is actually related to time and space. So long as the distance between lovers is large and the time of contact is minimal, they feel love towards each other. However, once they get closer and spend more time together, they feel that they are not so much in love after all! That is why they say familiarity breeds contempt'. Familiarity can also convert love into hatred. To transcend both love and hatred, we first need to drop expectations. Expectation is the first enemy of love.

We all go through several stages of relationships in our lifetime. If you observe very closely, whichever stage we are in, when we ask for love we are actually asking only for the other person's attention. When we say a person doesn't love us, we actually mean that the other person doesn't give us enough attention. The basic need for any human being is attention from others. The attention-need, along with our dependency on others for survival, is what we experience as love. The dependency on others might be psychological, physical or spiritual. For example, when you expect someone to lend you a shoulder to cry on, you are dependent upon that person psychologically. When you expect someone to provide you with money or fulfill your bodily pleasures, you are dependent upon them physically. In whatever way people may fulfill this dependency, what it boils down to is the attention that they give us! The whole idea of love is nothing but getting the attention of the other in some way.

In the first session of our meditation camp, I ask people to make an honest list of at least one or two persons in their lives who they really love. Usually in the beginning, people come up with a big list: husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister and so on. They include people whom they would like to please or need to please in order to be happy themselves. As they hear me talk about real love, they start crossing out names from their list one by one! Understand, if you cross out something, then it was not truly there in the first place.

Many people include certain people in their love list because these people give them a ‘feel good’ feeling. What do I mean by a ‘feel good’ feeling? It is a certificate saying, ‘You are good. You are this, you are that’ etc. We love anyone who pays us compliments, is it not? We think twice before arguing with them. We secretly nurture our good name with them in the name of love. If they go back on their approval of us, we might fall into depression, so we continue to please them and love them. Like this, there is always some hidden reason for our love. Some people tell me, ‘No Swamiji, I don’t love my son or daughter for any of these reasons.’ I ask them, ‘Alright, if your son suddenly starts to make his own decisions, if he suddenly doesn’t fit into your framework, ifhe doesn’t follow your guidance, ifhe doesn’t live according to your rules, will your love for him be the same?’

They tell me, ‘No, it will not. My love will be reduced a little!’

What does this mean? We love our next generation as long as they are extensions of our life. As long as they fall into our pattern of thinking, as long as they live in accordance with our conventions, we love them. We simply fulfill our own desires through them. We fulfill our lives through them. Whatever we couldn’t accomplish in our youth, we try to accomplish through them. If we wanted to be a doctor and couldn’t for some reason, we inspire them to be a doctor. As long as they act and live as an extension of our life, the relationship is beautiful. But the moment they start deciding on their own, the moment they feel we are suffocating them, the moment they stand up and say ‘no’, the relationship takes a different turn.

As long as our love happens towards a particular object, even if the object is a person, we will try to reduce that person only to the level of an object. That is exactly what we do when we feel possessive or attached to another person. In the way that we try to possess furniture or a house or any object, we try to possess the person also. We want the person to be just how we want him or her to be, which means we are actually reducing the person to sheer matter. So understand, whenever our love or our attention is towards something in particular, we will be only materialistic, creating suffering for ourselves and for others. We will only suffocate the object or person. Instead, if we turn our attention towards the experience of love itself, we will be liberating the object and we too will be liberated from the object. That is the beauty of love that happens just as love and not for the sake of any object.

When you start possessing someone, you bind yourself also. If you are walking holding your dog’s leash, be very clear that you are also bound. Don’t think only the dog is bound; you are also bound. Don’t think that only the dog cannot run away, you too cannot run away! You may be thinking that you are holding the rope and the dog may be thinking that he is holding the rope. Who knows?

The next time you are with someone, when you are with your friend with whom you are completely open, remember to practice this technique.

Just sit next to him or her. Don’t bother about what you are going to do or what you are going to say. Just sit, that’s all! That is the technique. Actually, speaking is nothing but avoiding the other person. Because you cannot look into the other person’s eyes, you go on speaking. That is the truth. The other person listens so that he can start speaking whenever you take a break! If a person is listening to you, it means that he is either thinking of something else or he is preparing for his turn. He sits there so that he can start once you finish. Now if you try this technique, it can take you to a different space altogether. When you are with the master or your friend or your beloved, whoever you feel deeply connected with, whoever you are very open with, you can try this technique. It will straightaway lead you to enlightenment. Be very clear, I am not teaching this technique for you to have better relationships or for you to develop your personality. No! I am giving it to you to straightaway experience the pure love that can lead you to enlightenment.

This technique will take you through a quantum jump from the form to the formless, from possessive love to causeless love.

When love happens as causeless overflowing, you simply liberate yourself and the other person from your own attachment and possessiveness, because possessiveness as you know it, binds not only the other person but you as well. It tortures the other person as well as you! Real love simply liberates both of you. It gives freedom to you and the other person.

When I travel around the world, people ask me, 'Swamiji, did you sleep well last night? It is a new place for you.' I tell them, 'Only when you have attachment to a particular house does another house become a new place for you and you struggle. When you don't have attachment to any house, you feel at home wherever you go!'

I never feel any place is mine or not mine. I feel totally at home anywhere. The comfort is always within us, never outside us. When there is no comfort within us, we look for comfort outside us. Feeling comfortable within us is the result of the causeless love energy.

When we don’t feel attached to one home, we feel at home in the entire world. We are totally relaxed anywhere in the world.

In real life, we always look to express our love towards others in some tangible way. Only if love is demonstrated in tangible form, it is considered to be love nowadays.

True love is like a communion. It is a resonance between two beings. It can be felt without any expression. It doesn't need communication because it is already happening as a communion.

If you really love a person, then your very body language will show it. It will be too much to express in words. You will feel that any words are inadequate and will only bring down the love that you feel. But if you are using words, then somewhere the love has not really happened. When you have to speak to express love, then somewhere there is a lie in it! You are using the words just to decorate the lie.

Real love liberates because it doesn’t compel you to express it all the time. It just is. Real love also gives you the freedom to freely express what you want to express. You can easily express anything like disapproval or anger and it will not be mistaken for reduced love. Not only that, with real love, there will be no domination or power play in relationships. Each person will be like a beautiful flower that has blossomed to radiate its unique fragrance, that's all.

With real love, there will be no fear or insecurity either. In normal love, physical distance between two people causes a lot of insecurity and a lack of trust.

A small story:

A young soldier went to his senior officer and said, 'Sir my friend is not yet back from the battlefield. I request permission to go out and get him.'

The officer said, 'Permission refused. Your friend is most probably dead. I don't want you to risk your life going there.'

The young soldier went all the same and came back mortally wounded and carrying the corpse of his friend.

The officer was furious. He shouted, 'I told you he was dead. Now I have lost both of you. Tell me, was it worth going out there to bring a corpse?'

On the verge of dying, the soldier replied, 'It was, Sir. When I got there he was still alive. He said to me, I was sure you would come.'

Real love doesn't look for utility. It operates on sheer trust and is also beyond space and time.

These days I see people gifting each other with so many things to show their love. Gifting has become an expression of love. If the gifting happens as causeless overflowing, it is okay.

But if it is a condition to be fulfilled, it becomes a problem! Then it becomes a poor substitute for real love.

As long as real love is there, no relationship can become boring. One of the aadheenavasis asked me one day, 'Everyday you see all of us, all our mistakes and confusions. It is the same thing for you every day. Are you not bored by us?' It was a very honest question! I told them, 'For enlightened beings, just because of their very love, they feel everybody is unique. They do not look at people as mere numbers. They see each one as unique.'

That is why, with so much patience, masters continue to work with everybody. If it were just a matter of numbers, it would be very different. When you have this love, your inner space is such that there is no logical reason behind your actions. You will just feel connected and you radiate love, that's all!

Not only that, causeless overflowing love is always total in its expression. It doesn't carry the usual dilutions of greed or fear. So any person whom you love, you will love totally without any reservations. Irrespective of the way he is, you will love him. When you love this way, even if the person leaves your life, you will not grieve. When a person passes away, you grieve only because you regret not having loved him completely. You can love him completely only when your love itself is complete. It doesn't have to do anything with the other person. It doesn't matter what kind of person he is. That is the beauty of real love. It loves for the sake of love, not for the sake of the other person.

If you are grieving for the loss ofa person, be very clear, you are grieving because you missed loving him in totality. If you had loved him in totality, you would say good-bye to him with complete restfulness, not with grief. You grieve only because you missed something somewhere. Even if it is your own father or husband or wife, it is the same. If you had radiated your causeless love to them when they were alive, then when they left there would not be any regret. But if you had loved them with rationalizations, then when they left, the incompleteness of your love towards them would create a hangover, and that hangover is what you feel as grief.

Sit down comfortably by yourself and close your eyes.

Focus on your heart region. Exclude everything else. Focus only on the heart.

Visualize your heart as an endless reservoir from where blessings can flow.

Feel every heartbeat deeply. Let every beat resound throughout you.

Between the heartbeats, feel the energy of love happening. In the deepest parts of and soul, the love energy acknowledged. Invite the love energy of the heart to flow and fill these deepest parts of your body, mind and soul. Slowly open your eyes.