5 January 2015 - QA 1

Dear Gurudev, what is success in love?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Love is not a business to have success or failure, love is not a career to have success or failure, love is not even an act which you can call as success or failure, love is your nature my dear!
Whether you express it or not, it is there. Just realize love as your nature, you will not think of it as success or failure.

Some people may understand you and some may not. Some people who are in love with you, you cannot say that they will be in love with you forever. People who have lived together for 20 years, and had said at one point of time that they were made for each other, suddenly find that they were never compatible, and that they never got along.
Suddenly people feel suffocated and want to go their own ways.

Love is not an act, love is not even a situation, it is our very nature. If you are in love with somebody don’t think that it will be forever, unless and until there is knowledge or wisdom in it.
Love with wisdom is eternal bliss. Love with selfishness or love for individual pleasure, sooner or later will bring misery and heart break. If your love is there to help others, nobody can destroy it, but if your love is to get something from the other, sooner or later, it will be broken into pieces.

Find out what you think love is. Is love only a name for getting you pleasure from others? If yes, then it is going to bring you pain. But if your love is there only to care and you cannot be without it, then that is your true nature. That is what is true love.
Love is not even an emotion. I have spoken a lot on love in Narad Bhakti Sutras and even Celebrating Love, look into it. The big confusion and chaos in the world is all in the name of love. I don’t know what all people do in the name of love; it is so pitiful.