LEARNING TO LOVE…
By Mr. Viswanath Das
Mr Viswanath Das is a current student in the
Prasanthi Nilayam campus of Sri Sathya Sai University
pursuing his Masters in Sciences.
I believe in love. And I believe and worship this
love in the form of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. To
Him I offer this "Love".
If I speak in the tongue of men and angels, but
have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers and understand all
mysteries and knowledge and if I have all faith, so as
remove mountains, but have not love, and if I deliver
my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain
nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or
boastful; it is not arrogant and rude. Love does not
insist on its own way; it is not irritable or
resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices
in the right. Love bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass
away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for
knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is
imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the
perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I
was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a
child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I
gave up childish ways. Now I know in part; then I
shall understand in full. So faith, hope, love abide,
these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(The Bible - 1 Corinthians 13 v 1-13)
Understanding True Love
Everywhere in the world people are in search of love,
for everyone is convinced that love alone can save the
world, love alone can make life meaningful and worth
living. When we are in love we find ourselves looking
at everyone with new eyes; we become generous,
forgiving, kind hearted, where before we might have
been hard and mean.
But how very few understand what love really is, and
how it arises in human hearts. It is so frequently
equated with good feelings towards others, with
benevolence, or with non-violence, or service.
Sai Love
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What is love? Take a look at a rose. Is it possible
for the rose to say, "I shall offer my fragrance to
good people and withhold it from wrong?"; or can we
imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked
person who seeks to walk in its light? It could only
do that by ceasing to be a lamp. Love brings and
enriches love.
Love does not rest content with merely loving, but
flows out in acts of service. Love is delightful only
when it freely gives itself. Love must be revealed in
service; otherwise love has no value; it is not love.
Love cheerfully sacrifices. Love willingly suffers.
Such a love illumines and blesses life.
"The man who is filled with love has great peace of
mind, is pure at heart and is unruffled by any adverse
circumstances, failure or losses. This fortitude is
derived from love of the Lord, which endows him with
self-confidence. Self-confidence generates an immense
internal power. Everyone has to develop this power.
Everyone has to develop this self-confidence so that
Atma-Ananda (bliss of the Self) may be experienced.
Love should be free from feelings of expectation of
any return or reward, love which arises out of desire
for something in return is not true love. Utterly
selfless and motiveless love should be developed,"
Swami says.
"He who loves not, knows not God", said Saint John.
"For, God is Love". Swami, the very personification of
this True Love Himself, says, "God is Love. Love is
God. Live in Love."
Practicing Love
Learning to love is the most difficult, the most
demanding, the most delightful, and the most daring of
disciplines. It does not mean loving two or three
members of our family; that can often be a kind of
ego-annex. It does not mean loving only those who
share your views, or read the same newspaper, or play
the same sports. Love, as God puts it, means blessing
those who curse you, doing good to those whom you
don't know; these are the real measures of love.
Swami says, "Humanness blossoms in a pure heart. When
we come into this world, it is only love that comes
with us. From love comes truth. When love and truth
come together, humanness finds its sustenance.
The mansion of human life can be built with
self-confidence as the foundation, self-satisfaction
as pillars and self-sacrifice as the roof. Only then
can you have self-realization in life. For
self-satisfaction this self-realization is needed.
Without self–satisfaction there can be no happiness in
life. And the happiness comes from love within. One
who does not have inner love does not see the
happiness outside.
"Love is experienced in three ways, rather love is of
three types - svaartha prema (self-oriented love),
paraartha prema (love towards all fellow beings), and
anyonya prema (mutual give and take type of love).
Svaartha love is comparable to the bulb that
illuminates just one single room. Anyonya love is like
moonlight. Though it illumines all directions, it is
very dim. It does not help one to have a clear
perception. Paraartha prema is like sunlight which is
very bright and will not give room for any doubt."
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Sai Love
Nourishing Love
"There is hunger for ordinary bread and there is
hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and
this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so
much" - Mother Teresa.
Our modern civilization is so physically oriented that
when we hear the word hunger, we immediately think in
terms of vitamins and minerals and amino acids. It
seldom occurs to us that just as the body develops
problems when it does not get adequate food, the
person who is deprived of love - or worse who finds it
impossible to love - becomes subject to problems every
bit as serious. Absence of love takes away our
humanity and makes us blind to others around us.
More and more evidence indicates that lack of love not
only leads to loneliness, despair and resentment but
eventually may even lead to deterioration of the vital
organs. In the book entitled 'The Broken Heart: the
Medical Consequences of Loneliness', James J Lynch of
the University of Maryland Medical School, makes a
good case connecting cardiovascular accidents with
selfishness, isolation, alienation, and bereavement,
all of which can be traced to lack of love. It is said
that a man is not born a terrorist from the womb of
his mother. It is a lack of love that destroys his
humanity.
More than intelligence, love quickens talent and
genius. Without love, intelligence can do much harm.
Such a person then hardly thinks of the aftermath of a
bombing. The ears cease to hear the cry of pain, agony
of a mother mourning over the body of her young
daughter. The mind ceases to see that no purpose can
be achieved by killing innocent lives.
More than logic, love recognises the dignity of an
unerring thought. Without love, logic can be
dangerous.
When Bhagavan talks about our need to love and be
loved, the need is not metaphorical. Bhagavan is not
talking about spirituality alone; He is talking about
a nutritional need too. Resentment, hostility,
alienation and selfishness are the deficiency diseases
of society. You can have nourishing food and all the
essential supplements, but if we cannot love, we are
not likely to remain in good health. This bad health
would be like any other epidemic disorder, spreading
in the community, crippling society's very foundation
stones of Sathya, Dharma, Shanti, Prema and Ahimsa.
Usually a good physician will not write a prescription
without some accompanying instructions like plenty of
rest, lots of fluids, and so on. Similarly if love is
prescribed as the remedy for our condition, to perfect
pure love we need to follow five principles –
* Quality Time
* Control over our Attention
* Nourishing our Life Energy
* Discrimination
* Awareness of the Unity of Life.
Nurturing Love – Five Principal Ways
An obsession with time has so worked into our social
system that we scarcely notice we have left no time to
love. Everywhere the slogan is 'Hurry, Hurry, and
Hurry'. To be aware of the need of the other, to spend
time with others, to speak and act with patience and
consideration, we must make time.
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Sai Love
Mother Teresa drew a beautiful unexpected connection
between time and love:
"Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush,"
she observed, "anxious for greater developments and
greater riches and so on, so that children have very
little time for their parents. Parents have little
time for each other, and in the home begins the
disruption of the peace of the world."
Slowing ourselves down is closely connected with
increasing our one-pointed attention. When we are in a
hurry, the problem is not only one of speed. Our
attention is riveted on ourselves - our needs and
desires - so there is no attention to give to those
around us, who probably have needs and desires very
much like our own.
People are not boring; we get bored because our
attention wanders. Giving someone our full attention
says clearly: "You matter to me. You have my respect."
Almost every disruption in human relationships -
between parents and child, friend and friend, worker
and co-worker - can be prevented by learning control
over attention, for, with mutual attention between
people comes loyalty, interest and trust.
To love we have to be able to do things for others,
even if it is inconvenient, or when we have no energy.
For example, when we know we should help one of our
classmates with his homework but have only enough
energy to drop into a beanbag chair with a soft drink
in hand, how can we be of service. Our minds are
great repositories of energy – when healthily used -
but we go through life trying to punch as many as
holes in it as possible, multiplying our desires, our
possessions, our anxieties, our frustrations, until by
the end of the day we have scarcely any energy left at
all. The biggest of these holes is selfish desire. The
more we want for ourselves, the less energy we shall
have, and therefore the less capacity to love. Swami
says, "God's love fills you with energy. It is God
only who gives us this energy. Therefore, love God and
love all people who are verily the children of God."
The capacity to discriminate between right and wrong
desires is the fourth essential safeguard of love.
Right desires benefit everyone - including of course,
ourselves. Wrong desires may be pleasing, but they
benefit no one - again, not even us. The problem that
arises is that wrong desires can be very skillful
impersonators. They put on a three piece suit and a
false mustache and present themselves as suavely as
Mr. Right. To love we need to be able to recognize
right desires and yield to them, which creates a
healthy and happy life - a somewhat rare condition in
today's world. But much more importantly, we need to
be able to recognize wrong desires and resist them,
which is very difficult. Whenever we defy a powerful,
selfish desire, immense power is released into our
hands and this is the secret of all spiritual work and
transformations.
Our desires are not our business alone; they are
everybody's business. Whenever we resist a selfish
desire, even if we do so for no one in particular,
that is an act of love. The reason is simple:
everything we do affects others, whether directly,
through the environment, or by our own example. To
love is to be responsible in everything: the work we
do, the things we buy, the people we look up to, the
words we use, every choice we make from morning till
night. That is the real measure of love: it is a
wonderful demanding responsibility.
Discrimination then leads us to the last quality of
love - the awareness that life is one individual
whole. This is the very basis of love. Any violation
of the unity of life, whether it is between
individuals, between nations, between us and the
environment, is a failure of love. Everything that
separates diminishes love; everything that unifies
increases it. Lack of love divides; wealth of love
heals.
Beneath the thinnest shell of differences, every one
of us is very much the same, whether we live in Asia,
Africa, or Antarctica. In times of nationalism and
international tensions we forget this; had we
remembered, no nation would have ever gone to war.
"Vasudaiva Kutumbhakam" (the world is one family) is
the fruit of pure love. Once we realize the unity of
life, we see the whole world as a single family, whose
welfare is indivisible.
Most of us would not dream of tearing up our front
yard, filling the garage with garbage, spraying
noxious chemicals around the house and then telling
our siblings, "We are moving out. You can have
whatever is left." That is exactly how we are behaving
towards the Earth. When we love all life as our
family, it will be impossible for us to waste
anything, be it money, food, water, energy, resources,
and time. We will want to share everything which we
have. Bhagavan says, "Mamai Vamso Jiva Loka Jiva Bhuta
Sanathana" (I am the One who became many) - when He is
present in bit of every atom, why would we then want
to waste anything.
God is love, and therefore, religion ceases to be
religion if it is not a religion of love. Love
understands, knows, illuminates, conquers and makes
life eternal. Love purifies and liberates. Love is to
be known and experienced by love. Love of God is the
soul of religion. It annihilates all limitation and
differentiations. It frees human perception from
errors, the human heart from its mistakes, and human
life from its imperfections. Pure love is an
irresistible force.
Becoming Embodiments of Love…
To him whose heart is filled with pure love, the voice
of his own conscience is the voice of God. He engages
himself in alleviating the suffering of others. He is
an ideal of selfless service. God's Will works through
him. God's Light shines through him. God's Life
expresses through him.
Ever joyful and fearless, he brings into the life of
anyone he comes across peace, harmony, strength and
happiness. From the lover of God, love streams equally
to all beings, even as the warmth streams forth from
the sun equally to all. It is the most potent remedy
for curing the diseases of fear, hatred, discord and
unhappiness.
The religion of pure love is the only real foundation
of lasting unity for all humanity. With such a
religion alone life becomes a song of peace, progress,
perfection, and the world a heaven.
Sai Love
Learning to love is not a luxury. It is a vital
necessity - especially when the whole world today is
threatened with violence on every side, and is
striving for love and unity. "In the home", Mother
Teresa said, "begins the disruption of peace of the
world." Similarly, it is in the home that the peace of
the world is preserved. In nourishing our family, our
community and finally our world with love, in bending
over backwards when necessary, to give what the world
so desperately needs, we become in the words of
Bhagavan, instruments of peace, embodiments of love
and 'Ideal Sai Youth: The Messengers of Sai Love.'
Dear Reader, did you find this article helpful? Do you
have any experiences that you would like to share with
us? Please contact us at h2h@radiosai.
your name and country. Thank you for your time.
source: http://media.
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