What is Love?

(Part 1 of 2)

Spiritual people, especially the great masters like my Master, have always been a little suspicious of the intellectual process-suspicious because of its limitations, suspicious because language imposes limitations. For instance, love-the subject of today's talk. What is love? We can all describe its feelings and its effects. Like Babuji Maharaj asked, "What is electricity?" We know that it illuminates a bulb, it turns a fan, it turns on a motor, a pump. But what is electricity? Similarly, love.

What is love? … This perhaps is a tragedy of the human situation, that we behave and respond in different ways under different situations, even with the same person. Can love be such a response? Is it a response at all? My Master was very emphatic. He said, "Love cannot be a response. Love is in you or it is not there."

I was repeatedly hearing yesterday about the need to love, and the need to be loved. In our understanding of the spiritual traditions of India, love is not a need. Love is the foundation of existence. On love rests everything else. We may or may not perceive the foundation; nevertheless it is there. So when we don't see it, when we don't perceive it, when we just go about saying, "God is love," have we ever felt this love? Because you can't see love, like you cannot see the air, you cannot see sunshine.

It's a well known fact of science that what you call light is light reflected off something. If there was no object you would not see light, even though the universe is full of light! The source may be there. All of you are familiar with this phenomenon. In a dark room with curtains drawn, a hole in the curtain permits a beam of light to enter. But the beam cannot be seen unless some floating particles of dust are caught in that beam. Then they are illuminated and the beam of light becomes visible. Then you say, "Aha! There is light entering the room!"

So you see, love-to be felt as a feeling, not as an emotion. An emotion, my Master said, is somewhat suspect. My Master said, "Emotion is to feeling as smoke is to fire." Fire is the real thing and smoke is the irritating thing that comes out of a badly lit fire or a fire which is wet. You know, the ideal in energy conversion is to have smokeless fuel-one hundred percent efficiency.

So love, bereft of emotion, works miracles. That means that if there is love in the heart, like light, it must not be seen, it must not be perceived, but it must be felt by somebody else. We don't have to go on saying, "I love you. I love you. I love you," ad nauseum through all eternity. In fact, like spirituality, the more we speak about love, the less we know about it.

My Master said this love is inherent in our being. It is not something we have to create. It is part of the equipage, or equipment that accompanies the soul. Perhaps it is the only thing that accompanies the soul, because the soul, being a spark of the Divine, and the Divine being love, this soul must also be love. One cannot say, "The soul loves." It is not a verb in that sense that, "I love." The true state of being should be where the entire being is love. God is love. To say that God loves, I believe, is watering down the truth, bringing down to the mundane, to the terrestrial, a divine phenomenon of existence associated with being, not doing.

So my Master always said, try to be love. A little confusing, I found, to our Western abhyasis who started coming to him way back in the early seventies; 1970, 1971. Because the Western idea says, "Love. Love me. Love you. Love us." But here is an old man, sitting in the centre of a dirty city, hardly educated, who says, "Be love." You can say, "Be happy," but how to be love? Then when he was asked, "How do you do it?" he said, "Meditate." Because as I said, and I repeat, there is no question of creating love in us, in ourselves. It is a question of uncovering the love that is flooding our hearts but which has been covered under layers of ignorance and fear.

Now you find in the Christian tradition a wonderful statement: "Perfect love casteth out fear." My Master said, "Yes, of course it does. But if fear has already been casteth out in the Biblical way, perfect love must be there." So we cannot wait for perfect love to develop and then it will cast out fear because that will never happen. Our job is to remove all fear, eradicate fear from the heart. By sitting in meditation, by doing the cleaning that is prescribed in this system, progressively, day after day, meditation after meditation, we are able to perceive not that we are less afraid than we were before, because there is no question of comparison, but that we are more open to people, that we are more responsive to situations and to the needs of others. I found this enormous responsiveness in my Master.

On occasion, we used to be a thousand people in Shahjahanpur, all sleeping under tents in the miserable cold. You know, in India we don't have heating and these sorts of things that are associated with life in the West. There is just a sheet on the ground and a tent with about a half a metre of open space in between, and the wind just whizzing through us. No sleeping bags, just some poor old torn blankets. One night I was asleep. I had flown in to Delhi, and then travelled by car to Shahjahanpur. I had no bed. I was lying there shivering. At midnight my Master came to me and covered me with a blanket-me out of a thousand odd people.

On another occasion, I had not eaten and it was almost midnight. He came to me with an apple. He said, "Parthasarathi," (that is my given name, P. Rajagopalachari is Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari) "You have not eaten. I am afraid there is nothing left of the cooked food, but you have this apple." I asked him the next morning, "How did you know that I had not eaten," because he hadn't seen me. He said, "I could not sleep, and when I examined the cause I found somebody there hungry, and when I pursued that thought I found it was you, and I came to you."

This is the sort of responsiveness, the ability to feel, that we have to develop if we claim to have any love in us. Not by giving a gift to a beggar, or sending aid to somebody in Africa or India-those are political acts of so-called charity, often destined to rid oneself of an overburden which we don't want. Good for the recipient, but not very good for the donor countries. There is really no charity behind it; there is no heart. "Let us send it to India, poor people." Lip service, we call it. But if there is a responsiveness in the heart of those in power, it would assume a much different quality-a fragrance.

My Master always used the word 'fragrance'. The rose would not be a rose but for the fragrance; nor a jasmine, a jasmine. Food which does not smell would not be half as appetizing if there was not the smell that wafts out of a kitchen on a breeze, and you follow with your nose. Not for nothing did God give us olfactory nerves and taste buds on our tongue. So this fragrance is what love creates. A gift without love is no gift; it is something wrapped in nice paper.

So you see, the idea that love is latent in our hearts, that love is indeed part of us, is not something that we have to pray for. "God, give me the capacity to love." It is a futile prayer because God will only laugh. He will say, "My son, when have you been without this power to love? Do you think I would send you out into this universe of mine without love in your heart? Because that which is my instrument, which is myself, which is my being, of which you are a part-can you be devoid of that? Can you be less than what I am? And if you are what I am, must you not be also love?" "Yes, but Father in Heaven, I don't find it." "Look for it."

So where is this love? What are we doing to create it, or to set it on fire all over again, make of it a burning flame within us which will consume us in its grandeur, in its warmth, in its lights, and in destroying us, create itself all over again and be like Abraham, to whom God said, "Give me your son." And when he was prepared to sacrifice his son, the Lord in His mercy, in His tenderness, in His love said, "Not necessary. I only want to see whether you are obedient." When we are obedient, sacrifice is not necessary, pain is not necessary, suffering is not necessary. But when we are disobedient, we take upon ourselves the responsibility for our existence, for its direction, for its goal, and we suffer.

So you see, love casts upon us an enormous responsibility of obedience to what that love demands. If you respond to a situation, and that situation demands that you give up everything, you had better do it or you will suffer. The spiritual way, the way of the heart, to a normal human being is not an easy way because it is a demanding way. Nothing is mine. "Do you really mean it, Parthasarathi?" my Master can ask, and I say, "Yes." He says, "Are you willing to give your life?" We have to. If it comes to that, and if my life can serve a purpose, of course it has to be given-not sacrificed-given back to Him who gave it to me, for Him to use all over again.

So you see, when we are obedient, it is the obedience of love. Love does not say, "Obey." We obey without even knowing that we obey. It is a natural spontaneous reaction which others will look upon and see and observe as obedience. It is not obedience. It is just a response. You open the window and the breeze blows in. Yesterday when it was very hot, every time somebody opened this window the air was refreshed. It was not as if the window was waiting, and you open the window and say, "Come in, breeze," and the breeze comes in. It is a natural state.

So where there is love, there is this implicit obedience, the acceptance of love's demands as something natural, as something spontaneous, as something which flows out of us without even our conscious awareness of it. In such situations where there is love, can we be selfish? Selfishness is being centred upon our own selves. "I need. I want. I want to be loved." But as my Master used to say, "If the door is closed, it is closed for you as much as to the person outside." If he cannot come in, you too cannot go out. "Beware of closed doors," my Master used to say. "If it is open, they can come in and you too can go out."

So a responsive heart, in which the doors of the heart are open, in which there are no more any doors, automatically lets in the love of others. You don't have to go around saying, "Love me, love me, love me," in an act of nauseating begging. But it will be a glorious fulfilled life when, because the heart is open and the doors of our inner perceptions are open, we are flooded with love-often miraculously, with much more than what goes out. And then comes this enormous need, an inner need, an inner perception, to go out and to help, to serve, not because I have been asked to do so, not because I feel I must do so, but because I cannot avoid doing so. It becomes an aspect, like the Bible says, "The wind bloweth where it listeth." What does it mean? It means that it cannot be chained up, it cannot be put into a room and locked up. It flows. And where does it flow? Where there is a low pressure area, where there is a vacuum created-it has to go there.

You cannot imagine such utter simplicity in a person. You don't find it nowadays. Often tears would come to my eyes to see an old man of seventy-three so utterly simple, so meek. He knew utterly, absolutely nothing. Yet there was this miracle that from him flowed everything that I have been aware of. He created in the human heart "the peace that surpasseth understanding," about which Christ spoke, the love that is of God's own essence.