LOVE AND LOVE ONLY

Love is a powerful feeling that can move mountains, change the world and inspire great literature. Many people have interpreted the word 'love' in many ways, but most agree that love is a beautiful and profound feeling. The concept of love is found in the most primitive societies and is expressed through poetry, music and religion. Understand that love is not limited to sexual attraction; it can be felt for family, friends and pets as well as love- hate.

The natural world demonstrates to mankind the power of love. Human love is demonstrated by parents' willingness to sacrifice their own happiness for the happiness of their children. Other examples include sacrificing wealth and body parts for other people's well-being. Love is also displayed by soldiers who die for their country and by celebrities who promote brands they believe in. All of these are forms of human love. Human love is often compared to the unconditional love exhibited by nature's Mother Nature.

There are many sources that define many other kinds of love but four is a pretty manageable number.

Eros: erotic, passionate love. We might as well get that one out of the way first. ...

Philia: love of friends and equals. ...

Storge: love of parents for children. ...

Agape: love of mankind.

“You know, actually – and that is a terrible thing to realize – actually, we have no love.

We have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality; we have remembrances of something which we have thought as love. But actually, brutally, we have no love. Because to have love means no violence, no fear, no competition, no ambition. If there is love, there is peace, because you would educate your children not to be a nationalist, not to have only a technical job and look after his own petty little affairs. You would have no nationality, there would be no divisions of religion, if you loved. But as these things actually exist – not theoretically, but brutally – in this ugly world, it shows that you have no love.

If the mother really loved her child, do you think the world would be like this?

So we have not that love. But you must have it. If you don’t have it, you cannot have virtue, you cannot be orderly, you cannot live with passion.

And there is no time. You can’t say, “Well, I can live without love because I have lived without love for two million years and I will live another two million years without love” – that means perpetual sorrow for the next two million years.

So what will you do? If you say please tell me what to do, then you are missing the bus entirely.

But if you saw the importance, the immensity, the urgency of that question – not tomorrow not the next day or the next hour, but see it now while you are sitting. Admittance of time is the greatest sorrow. As sorrow and love cannot be resolved, or love cannot exist through time, what is the state of your mind that has put this question?

If you put that question with that alacrity, with that urgency, with that potency, then what takes place in the mind? Because it will not allow time to come and interfere. Therefore such a mind has an infinite space both in the mind and in the heart; and so that mind is in a state of love; and in that sense of beauty, in that sense of vast, infinite space, there is creation.”

LOVE IS NOT DESIRE. It is a great thing to find out this for oneself. And if love is not desire then what is love? Love is not mere attachment to your baby, love is not attachment in any form; love is not jealousy, ambition, fulfilment or becoming; love is not desire or pleasure. The fulfilment of desire, which is pleasure, is not love. So I have found out what love is. It is none of these things. Have I understood these elements and am I free of them? Or I just say, ‘I understand intellectually, I understand verbally, but help me to go deeper’? I can’t; you have to do it yourself.

SPREAD LOVE;WITH LOVE ENBHA