Love-I

Love doesn't necessarily mean romantic love. Love to me means much more than that. It doesn't need a lover. Love is an independent object to me. Like many other things in this world, acquiring Love is not an easy task. To have it is to embrace it and show it to all. And only when you can show it to all, it can be called Love.

My understanding of Love comes from Vivekananda's "Secret of work". I present some paragraphs from it to make it easy for you to understand what love is:

"The whole gist of this teaching is that you should work like a master and not as a slave; work incessantly, but do not do slave's work. Do you not see how everybody works? Nobody can be altogether at rest; ninety-nine per cent of mankind work like slaves, and the result is misery; it is all selfish work. Work through freedom! Work through love! The word "love" is very difficult to understand; love never comes until there is freedom. There is no true love possible in the slave. If you buy a slave and tie him down in chains and make him work for you, he will work like a drudge, but there will be no love in him. So when we ourselves work for the things of the world as slaves, there can be no love in us, and our work is not true work. This is true of work done for relatives and friends, and is true of work done for our own selves. Selfish work is slave's work; and here is a test. Every act of love brings happiness; there is no act of love which does not bring peace and blessedness as its reaction. Real existence, real knowledge, and real love are eternally connected with one another, the three in one: where one of them is, the others also must be; they are the three aspects of the One without a second — the Existence - Knowledge - Bliss. When that existence becomes relative, we see it as the world; that knowledge becomes in its turn modified into the knowledge of the things of the world; and that bliss forms the foundation of all true love known to the heart of man. Therefore true love can never react so as to cause pain either to the lover or to the beloved. Suppose a man loves a woman; he wishes to have her all to himself and feels extremely jealous about her every movement; he wants her to sit near him, to stand near him, and to eat and move at his bidding. He is a slave to her and wishes to have her as his slave. That is not love; it is a kind of morbid affection of the slave, insinuating itself as love. It cannot be love, because it is painful; if she does not do what he wants, it brings him pain. With love there is no painful reaction; love only brings a reaction of bliss; if it does not, it is not love; it is mistaking something else for love. When you have succeeded in loving your husband, your wife, your children, the whole world, the universe, in such a manner that there is no reaction of pain or jealousy, no selfish feeling, then you are in a fit state to be unattached.

Krishna says, "Look at Me, Arjuna! If I stop from work for one moment, the whole universe will die. I have nothing to gain from work; I am the one Lord, but why do I work? Because I love the world." God is unattached because He loves; that real love makes us unattached. Wherever there is attachment, the clinging to the things of the world, you must know that it is all physical attraction between sets of particles of matter — something that attracts two bodies nearer and nearer all the time and, if they cannot get near enough, produces pain; but where there is real love, it does not rest on physical attachment at all. Such lovers may be a thousand miles away from one another, but their love will be all the same; it does not die, and will never produce any painful reaction.

To attain this unattachment is almost a life-work, but as soon as we have reached this point, we have attained the goal of love and become free; the bondage of nature falls from us, and we see nature as she is; she forges no more chains for us; we stand entirely free and take not the results of work into consideration; who then cares for what the results may be?

Now you can see what Love really means. I have not mastered it. Nor am I near to the end. There is a long journey ahead. But due to God's grace, through a friend, I learned a bit of it. I understood that, to know Love, you need to know what Hate is. One should understand that opposites are not really opposite but are contained in each other. Many philosophies talk about this and I too believe it.

It all happened by fate. A war raged between her and me. I was forced to hate. I was forced to go against her. But I resisted it. I never tried to hide my Love. I held it with all my strength and I still hold it. It is the same thing I show to my parents or my Shiny or Vinu. I showed it in the morning to poor kitten and the beautiful rose in the garden. I will continue to show it to all beings.

I will love all. I will love the bad, but will never tough it. I will love my enemy, but will never help him/her. I will love all, for God is love.

Jagannadh Kashyap Garimella