15 July 2016 - QA 2

What is love?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Well, if you have not known it, there is no way you can know it! There is not a single being on this planet which or who does not know what love is. On one hand this is true, on the other hand, nobody has known love.
Love is not something that you know, it is something that you feel. Why do you want to analyze and put a tag to it?

You can go on describing the shades of love, or the types of love that are there, but what are its repercussions? In fact, all the negative emotions are just distortions of love. Your anger is because of love. You love perfection, so you get angry at imperfections. You love people too much, and so it becomes jealousy or possessiveness. You love yourself too much, and that becomes arrogance. When you love objects more than people or more than anything else, then it is greed. Love plus knowledge or wisdom leads you to bliss. Love minus knowledge or wisdom, leads you to misery. We can go on analyzing it, but what is the use?

If you have a puppy at home, it will tell you what love is. If you have a dog at home, when you return home, it will show you what love is. It will not say, "Yesterday I greeted you, I don’t have to do it now". Every day when you come home, a dog or a baby can tell you what love is. Hours of lecture cannot convey what a baby can convey in a fraction of a second.

As far as love is concerned, a thousand words cannot equal one glance, and a million glances cannot equal a moment of silence, one moment of that inner connection. That is love! You are made up of a substance called love and everything in the world is made up of that one thing called love.