Love Needs the Greatest Awareness, Sacrifice Everything for it, Live for it, Die for it.

• It depends. There are as many loves as there are people. Love is a hierarchy, from the lowest rung to the highest, from sex to super-consciousness. There are many, many layers, many planes of love. It all depends on you. If you are existing on the lowest rung, you will have a totally different idea of love than the person who is existing on the highest rung. Adolf Hitler will have one idea of love, Gautam Buddha another; and they will be diametrically opposite, because they are at two extremes.
• At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. Wherever love is contaminated by the idea of domination, it is politics. Whether you call it politics or not is not the question, it is political. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics – the politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. It is politics, the whole thing is political: you want to dominate the other, you enjoy domination.
• And love is nothing but politics sugar-coated, a bitter pill sugar-coated. You talk about love but the deep desire is to exploit the other. And I am not saying that you are doing it deliberately or consciously – you are not that conscious yet. You cannot do it deliberately; it is an unconscious mechanism.
• Hence so much possessiveness and so much jealousy become a part, an intrinsic part, of your love. That’s why love creates more misery than joy. Ninety-nine percent of it is bitter; there is only that one percent of sugar that you have coated on top of it. And sooner or later that sugar disappears.
• When you are in the beginning of a love affair, those honeymoon days, you taste something sweet. Soon that sugar wears off, and the realities start appearing in stark nakedness and the whole thing becomes ugly.
• Millions of people have decided not to love human beings any more. It is better to love a dog, a cat, a parrot; it is better to love a car – because you can dominate them well, and the other never tires to dominate you. It is simple; it is not as complex as it is going to be with human beings.
• At a cocktail party the hostess couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of a suave gentleman.
• “Oh, I adore her. I worship her,” declared the gentleman.
• “I would too if she were mine,” agreed his friend.
• “The way she walks and swishes. Her beautiful big brown eyes, her head so proud and erect…”
• “You’re very fortunate,” commented his friend.
• “And do you know what really thrills me? The way she nibbles my ear.”
• “Sir,” the hostess interjected. “I couldn’t help listening to those affectionate words. In this day of numerous divorces I admire a man who so passionately loves his wife.”
• “My wife?” said the gentleman, surprised. “No – my champion race horse!”
• People are falling in love with horses, dogs, animals, machines, things. Why? Because to be in love with human beings has become an utter hell, a continuous conflict – nagging, always at each other’s throats.
• This is the lowest form of love. Nothing is wrong with it if you can use it as a stepping-stone, if you can use it as a meditation. If you can watch it, if you try to understand it, in that very understanding you will reach another rung, you will start moving upwards.
• Only at the highest peak, when love is not a relationship any more, when love becomes a state of your being, the lotus opens totally and great perfume is released – but only at the highest peak. At the lowest, love is just a political relationship. At the highest, love is a religious state of consciousness.
• I love you too. Buddha loves, Jesus loves, but their love demands nothing in return. Their love is given for the sheer joy of giving it; it is not a bargain. Hence the radiant beauty of it, hence the transcendental beauty of it. It surpasses all the joys that you have known.
• When I talk about love, I am talking about love as a state. It is unaddressed: you don’t love this person or that person, you simply love. You are love. Rather than saying that you love somebody, it will be better to say you are love. So whosoever is capable of partaking, can partake. For whosoever is capable of drinking out of your infinite sources of being, you are available – you are available unconditionally.
• That is possible only if love becomes more and more meditative.
• Medicine and meditation come from the same root. Love as you know it is a kind of disease: it needs the medicine of meditation. If it passes through meditation, it is purified. And the more purified it is, the more ecstatic.
• Generally, we have made relationships within frameworks that are comfortable and profitable for us. People have physical, psychological, emotional, financial or social needs. One of the best ways to fulfill these needs is to tell people, “I love you.” This so-called “love” has become like a mantra: open sesame. You try to get what you want by saying it.

• Every action that we do is in some way to fulfill certain needs. If you see this, there is a possibility that you can grow into love as your natural quality. But people go on fooling themselves into believing that the relationships they have made for convenience, comfort and wellbeing, are actually relationships of love. I am not saying there is no experience of love at all in those relationships, but it is within certain limitations. It does not matter how much “I love you” has been said, if a few expectations and requisites are not fulfilled, things will fall apart.

How to Love Unconditionally

• When you talk about love, it has to be unconditional. There is really no such thing as conditional love and unconditional love. It is just that there are conditions and there is love. The moment there is a condition, it just amounts to a transaction. Maybe a convenient transaction, maybe a good arrangement – maybe many people made excellent arrangements in life – but that will not fulfill you, that will not transport you to another dimension. It is just convenient.
• When you say “love,” it need not necessarily be convenient. Most of the time it is not. It takes life. Love is not a great thing to do, because it eats you up. If you have to be in love, you should not be. You as a person must be willing to fall, only then it can happen. If your personality is kept strong in the process, it is just a convenient situation, that’s all. We need to recognize what is a transaction and what is truly a love affair. A love affair need not be with any particular person. You could be having a great love affair, not with anyone in particular, but with life.
• What you do, what you do not do, is according to circumstances around you. Our actions are as the external situation demands. What you do outside of yourself is always subject to many conditions. But love is an inner state – how you are within yourself can definitely be unconditional.

A Pool of Gratitude

• If you do not count what you give but always remember what you get, you will naturally be a pool of gratitude. Drop this nonsense of “How much I have done!” If you do not expect anything from anyone, you will live easy. If you expect something from someone, or you ask yourself whether they love you or not, then all these problems arise. When you do not expect anything from anyone, if they do it, it is wonderful for them. If they do not, what is the problem?

Sweetness, a Natural Choice

• If you want to be realized and active in the world, you need a blue aura, which means you need an active throat chakra. Only if your throat chakra is active, can you be in sweetness of emotion and have discernment of mind. You can play the world any way you want and still be untouched by it. Then you are in a different kind of love affair – not with anything or anyone. The word “love” does not indicate someone or something to you. It means that your emotion is totally yours – you can make it any way you want. If you had the choice, knowing what going through bitterness does to you, you would naturally choose sweetness of emotion. This sweetness sometimes may flow as it is needed for the people around you. The rest of the time, it may just be there, without flowing out or doing anything with the world. You can make it transactional sometimes.
• You say or do something nice because there is a certain sweetness within you. “Love” as a word has many connotations. But essentially, they describe something where human intellect and human emotion are still in a transactional mode. If you go beyond the transactional mode, love is not for anything or anyone – it is just the sweetness of your existence.

Love is All about You

• There is a lot of emotion attached to the subject of love and lots of fanciful things have been said about it, but I would like to bring it down to the mechanics of love. For example, people are saying, “God loves you,” but does anybody really know whether God loves or not? Love is a human emotion. Human beings are capable of love when they are willing. But unfortunately, we want to export everything that is beautiful in our life to heaven and live wantonly on this planet. Love, joy, blissfulness – all these are human possibilities. So let us not talk about divine love; let us talk about human love.
• Generally, when hormones hijack your intelligence, people think they have fallen in love –that is one aspect. When you say “me,” “myself,” what is it that you are referring to? One thing is your physical body, another thing is your mind – the way you think, yet another thing is your emotion – the way you feel, and the energy which drives the other three things. This is what you are calling as “me.” When this “me” feels pleasant on different levels, we call it by different names. If your emotions become very pleasant, we call it love.