Gurudev, what are the qualities of the kind of love that is dear to you?
Love with wisdom. Love with patience. Love in action, that is seva (service).
You cannot tell someone, ‘Oh, I love you so much, but I will not do anything for you.’
If you love someone, you have to bring it into action and that is seva. Do not think of love as just an emotion, or a very mushy-mushy thing, in which you keep on saying, ‘I love you’, so many times.
Teenagers when they fall in love with someone they will write that person’s name a 100 times, all over. That is the nature of love; saying it once is not enough, you want to say and write it so many times.
Love is not just that mushy-mushy, teenage emotion, which stays only for a short period of time. Love is our very existence. You can never be out of it. It only gets distorted here and there. When there is wisdom you will see that the distortion does not happen. Love remains in its pure form.