How can I love better?

It needs no betterment. It is perfect as it is; it is not in any way meant to be more perfect. The very desire shows a misunderstanding about love and its nature. Can you have a perfect circle? All circles are perfect; if they are not perfect, they are not circles.

Perfection is intrinsic to a circle and the same is the law about love. You cannot love less, and you cannot love more— because it is not a quantity. It is a quality, which is immeasurable.

Your very question shows that you have never tasted what love is, and you are trying to hide your lovelessness in the desire of knowing “how to love better.” No one who knows love can ask this question.

Love has to be understood, not as a biological infatuation—that is lust. That exists in all the animals; there is nothing special about it; it exists even in trees. It is nature’s way of reproduction. There is nothing spiritual in it and nothing especially human. So the first thing is to make a clear-cut distinction between lust and love. Lust is a blind passion; love is the fragrance of a silent, peaceful, meditative heart. Love has nothing to do with biology or chemistry or hormones.

Love is the flight of your consciousness to higher realms, beyond matter and beyond body. The moment you understand love as something transcendental, then love is no longer a fundamental question. The fundamental question is how to transcend the body, how to know something within you that is beyond—beyond all that is measurable. That is the meaning of the word matter.

It comes from a Sanskrit root, matra, which means measurement; it means that which can be measured. The word meter comes from the same root. The fundamental question is how to go beyond the measurable and enter into the immeasurable. In other words, how to go beyond matter and open your eyes toward more consciousness.

And there is no limit to consciousness—the more you become conscious, the more you realize how much more is possible ahead. As you reach one peak, another peak arises in front of you. It is an eternal pilgrimage.

Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness. It is just like the fragrance of a flower. Don’t search for it in the roots; it is not there. Your biology is your roots; your consciousness is your flowering.

As you become more and more an open lotus of consciousness, you will be surprised—taken aback—with a tremendous experience, which can only be called love. You are so full of joy, so full of bliss, each fiber of your being is dancing with ecstasy. You are just like a rain cloud that wants to rain and shower.

The moment you are overflowing with bliss, a tremendous longing arises in you to share it. That sharing is love.

Love is not something that you can get from someone who has not attained to blissfulness—and this is the misery of the whole world. Everybody is asking to be loved, and pretending to love.

You cannot love because you don’t know what consciousness is. You don’t know the satyam, the shivam, the sundram; you don’t know truth, you don’t know the experience of the divine, and you don’t know the fragrance of beauty.

What have you got to give? You are so empty, you are so hollow . . . Nothing grows in your being, nothing is green. There are no flowers within you; your spring has not come yet.

Love is a by-product. When the spring comes and you suddenly start flowering, blossoming, and you release your potential fragrance—sharing that fragrance, sharing that grace, sharing that beauty is love.

I don’t want to hurt you but I am helpless, I have to say the truth to you: You don’t know what love is.

You can’t know because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. You have not experienced yourself, you know nothing of who you are. In this blindness, in this ignorance, in this unconsciousness, love does not grow. This is a desert in which you are living.

In this darkness, in this desert, there is no possibility of love blossoming.