What is Love?

(Part 2 of 2)

Many great men, political leaders, military people, have meditated. Unfortunately, in the Western intellectual tradition, there is a certain odium attached to meditation. It is as If you are doing something which is not really desirable, something fishy about the whole thing. "But why does he meditate, for Heaven's sake?" Well, that is the answer; for Heaven's sake, he meditates! Should he meditate for the sake of hell? Why do we meditate for Heaven's sake? For the sake of Heaven. Abraham Lincoln meditated. But unfortunately, people consider it a weakness to sit and meditate, and to ask help from the inner being whom we call God. Meditation is essentially the way of the mystic. It is the immanent deity that we approach. We don't pray; we don't really worship. Nobody worships his father. Nobody worships his own self-not himself, but his Self or her Self.

So what should be our attitude to what you can call God, or the Master, or the inner Self? What should be our attitude? It should be one of love, saying, "You and I, who have been one through all eternity, have become separated in some way." In one tradition they call it the fall, in another they call it original sin, in another they call it ignorance, in a third or fourth one they call it fear. But whatever it may be, we have become separated. "Please let me rejoin you." This is all that meditation is about. And when this rejoining begins-that is, we walk towards Him who is our Lord and Master inside, who is in essence my Self, we realise how long the journey can be. The space of an atom, but it can take years. For those who believe in reincarnation and rebirth it can take many lives, hundreds of lives, and yet it is just the space between me and my Self.

We have mastered the universe, more or less, so say the scientists and astronomers. We can travel in space. Our probes are going towards Mars and Pluto and Venus and we are very proud. But this tiny little space-an atomic division between Him and my humble Self-can we not bridge this gap? What makes it so difficult? And why don't we embark upon that journey if it is going to take so long? The problem is, religions teach us one thing, spirituality teaches us something else. All religions say that God is in Heaven, very far away, and that it takes a long long time to go there. That is the external worship of the Divine. When are we going to complete this journey? We shrug our shoulders in Gallic fashion, or if we have a pretension to humility we say, "When He wills it," as if He never wills it for us! I can't think of a God who has any other will than that I should be at His feet and within Him-now, at this moment in time. But by such self-illusions we satisfy and delude ourselves.

Then, of course, there are the pressing needs of modern life: food, education, bodily needs, as they are politely called, the couple and its existence. So we procrastinate and procrastinate and procrastinate until one day there may be a situation when, in an act of utter despondency, utter futility, utter hopelessness, we lie discarded on the sidewalks of some city and there we shout, "God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And God says, "My son, you can forsake me; I cannot forsake you. I have always been with you, through thick and thin, through pleasure and pain, through fire and water, but you didn't call me."

I remember I once sent for a book from London; it was called The Hound of God. One day an envelope arrived from the publishers and I was a little surprised to find it was a small booklet of only six pages. It is the story of a firewood cutter who goes into the jungle every day, cuts his load of firewood, and comes back. That is his sustenance, that is his wherewithal. One day, it was getting a little later because he had taken a little extra load of firewood, and he heard the pit-pat of feet following him. He walked faster and they fell faster. He ran and they ran. Finally when he was too tired to move, he just fell in exhaustion, and looked around and saw a luminous figure standing. The figure replied, "I am God." He said, "Where have you been? I have been looking for you all these years of my life." He said, "My son, I was always just behind you. I have been following you throughout your existence but you never recognized me. You never looked for me."

So you see, we don't have to look for God. We don't have to search for God. We have to do something to feel His presence. Feeling means silence. All the organs of perception brought to a stillness. Therefore, in the Indian tradition, we sit in the lotus pose, close our eyes, breathing comes down to normal; silence reigns outside and therefore it reigns inside. As my Master said, "Silence alone can reveal the presence of God to you, because silence is His language." We feel only gross effects when all our senses are open. The subtlest of the subtle requires utter stillness, utter silence inside.

When, on this journey towards the Self, we progress and are able to open our hearts, or He opens it for us, we become responsive. We can no longer live as an isolated self, surrounded by its own selfishness, its own lusts, its own greed, its own acquisitiveness, its own fears, but we are as open to the elements as the tree on the ground. And now comes the problem: we are so sensitive that often it becomes a burden, it becomes a pain. Therefore the association of love and pain. Not that if you suffer pain you can be a lover; not at all. But if there is no spiritual practice ... pain can make us realise or understand or feel the suffering of another, because to empathize in pain is easy; to empathize in pleasure is not possible. My Master said, you may be enjoying a party, fifty of you in one room, but each one is enjoying his own pleasure. But in a room full of responsible loving hearts, if one person is sick, everybody is sick-feeling sick, not really sick, but feeling the sickness of that sick person. In such a situation (what was called a 'placebo effect' yesterday) anything will work as medicine.

I haven't heard of Jesus giving medicine to anybody. The man with the palsy-he said, "Take up thy bed and walk," and that man walked. No, I don't want arguments about whether this is historically plausible, whether it ever happened, because there is a philosophy which says anything that the mind can think of is possible. Mind cannot think of something which is absolutely impossible. How was this response of this sick man with the palsy possible? Because here was something which said, "Get up," and he could not disobey. More importantly, he felt needed. In our lives, in our mundane existence today, nobody feels needed. Today we all need something. To be loved and to be needed is what we really need, and that can arise only from this miracle of the heart being open and our capacity to respond to the need with utter indifference to ourselves. In such a situation, if you give a glass of water, it works. You just hug the person and say, "Honey, come on. You are okay," and the miracle happens. He or she is okay.

Today, we are always talking in science about mind over matter, of spiritual healing. Why suddenly spiritual healing? Why this resurgence of spiritual healing in the last ten, fifteen years? Perhaps because we have tried all the material healing. We have tried allopathy, we have tried so many other systems of medicine, but without the love in the heart.

So if you want to relate love, health, and medicine, I would dare to say here that you can forget medicine-if love is there. And if love is not there, you can forget medicine, too, because it's not going to help. This is not a dig at the medical profession, because I love and admire those who dedicate themselves to the service of human beings. But in all humility we must remember that old saying of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann who started the homeopathic movement, who said, "The physician treats; He cures." He is love. Love cures. Love cures all. May it always be so.

Today the need is for open hearts, not for open purses. If Christ could feed us with two loaves and five fishes, why on earth do I need millions of dollars? Two loaves and five fishes to feed the multitude. We have a similar tradition in the Indian mythology, where Krishna is with his sister. Dinner is over and everything has been washed up. At that moment comes this very angry saint called Durvasa with a whole host of his disciples, and says, "I am hungry." The lady of the house is frightened. What will she say? Krishna says, "Bring me that vessel." There is one particle of rice in it by accident. He eats it and everybody is fed. Let us become such people who take a little bit of medicine and heal everybody, who take a little suffering and remove the sufferings of everybody else. All that we are asked to take is a modicum of human suffering, and then we can see this immense divine miracle that all human suffering can be wiped out. Shalom.