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Every civilization in every age has attempted to pin it down in every possible way, but it remains as elusive as ever. And yet, in spite of our difficulties to define it, we feel pleasantly stirred by relationships that exist, say, between two persons, between two chimps, between a person and his pet, between the sky and the earth below, between the flowing river and a boatman dipping his oar in it as he returns home in the setting sun, in getting thoroughly wet in a drenching rain, or in imbuing silence in the core of our attention without a sliver of thought sandwiched in between. We cannot touch it, and yet, it is there touching us like the smell of earth after a sudden fresh shower: we can feel it only if we are there to feel it. In it, existence is celebrated; without it, life is a routine without any discovery.
LOVE is not possession. It is not sex, it is not anything that I could verbalize or think about. It cannot be practiced, cannot be summoned, and cannot be sought or demanded. It is unconditional, original, unsought, untouched, without any confine of disciplines chiseled by missions or motives. LOVE cannot be a goal; it cannot be shaped to follow any specific contour; it dances in its own dynamics. LOVE can embrace us, but we can’t embrace it.
One could cement the banks of a river in a specific way, giving it a boundary and a shape, confining it to move on a specific contour. But in that design the river is killed; it wouldn’t be its own dynamics but someone else’s; it wouldn’t be its own magic that would whisper in our ears its joyful splendor, but a dead one captured and preserved between a determinate corridor without any freedom to be, killing the attendant ecology that was once its mate in one wholeness. LOVE is the spontaneous dynamics in that wholeness; LOVE is the response in wholeness without any prepared script.
LOVE is to be felt. But a mind caught in its own design can feel only itself, can anticipate only itself; even its notion of the “other” is colored by its own agenda, own makeup, own preparation in which the “other” exists only in its terms. For such an occupied mind, there is no “feeling” beyond its own confine – hence, it cannot experience LOVE. Sure, a mind may know longing, it may hurt from separation, from suffering and pains it can conjure up through thought, but it’d not know LOVE since thought doesn’t know LOVE. In LOVE, there is none other but LOVE only.
To feel without thought, one must be beyond one’s chattering mind without any seeking, without any goal, without any conspicuous reason to go beyond “mind”. It is a state of attention without any subject or anything or anyone as its object. Subject/object dichotomy is the premise on which mind works; in LOVE, there is no premise — only LOVING in LOVING!
- Saumen Sen Gupta
life is alabout love. there can not be any peace in the world if love is not in place, in homes, between brothers and sisters feriendship, husband and wife etc