Day 7
If you ask yourself a straight question, “What is it that you want in your life?” It will boil down to one thing and that is love. Behind every desire there is love, isn’t it?
Yet, life cannot move an inch without love, life has sprung from love, moves in love, and its culmination is also love. Yet we see that life is full of problems. Sometimes if there is no love, then life seems to be better because then there are no problems.
Love comes with this tail called problems. If you love objects more, then that becomes greed. If you love people more, it is entanglement. If you love yourself too much, that is ego-centrism, arrogance. If you love someone too much, then jealousy comes behind that.
Whether jealousy, greed, lust or anger, there is love present underneath. Love, when it ferments, becomes hatred. Love, when it gets distorted, becomes fear. It is love that causes fear. It is love that is the cause for anger. You love perfection, so you are angry at imperfection.
Suppose you don't love perfection, there is no question of being angry. Just search underneath your anger, there is love. Every problem on this planet is caused by love. So, many people prefer not to love, they shut off, cut themselves off.
Some run away from society, some remain in an indifferent state, like a log of wood, almost dead. But this is not life, isn’t it so? Then what is the purpose in life? What is the goal in life? What do you want in life?
He says the search in life is for a love that is free from all these distortions, all these negative emotions. Love often suffocates you, but you cannot have love without freedom. Like the spider, you know, it makes its own web and it gets trapped in its own web.
Yet the spider cannot be there without the web, then it is no spider at all. Human life is in a similar situation. It cannot be without love. Like the spider weaves its web from it’s own saliva, we weave our world with our own love and we get trapped in our own world.
Love suffocates you. It makes you obliged, it takes away your freedom. But the innate tendency of human life is to be free. You want to enjoy freedom. So the quest, the search, is for such a love that does not take away your freedom.
Infact, the love that establishes you away from the imperfections of jealousy, greed, anger, and upholds you in its pure essence, that love is called devotion. That is called bhakti. That is called love, the divine love. How do you get it?
Who has really got that love? Who has lived that? This is the beginning point of the spiritual journey. The spiritual journey is not a fantasy of attaining something different. It is the fulfillment of life’s ultimate aim or goal, which is bhakti, the divine love. It is also called devotion.
In Sanskrit bhakti itself means that which is common between you and the infinite space. That which is there in you, as well as in the divine, that which you share with the divine, that which shines is bhakti.
