A Walk into Philosophy

Love is the prime and only feeling that governs and run the entire cosmos. Hate can also be considered as love but love in the opposite realm. Love is always painful because it leads to transformation. Love is like a mutation. The transformation is going to be painful and agonizing as the old self has to be left and shed away for the new self. The old self is one which is familiar, secure, safe, the new self is absolutely unknown. It is like moving in an uncharted ocean. You cannot use your mind with the new self. Everything is a mystery for the new self.  With the old, the mind is skillful, tactful and actions are based on prior experiences. The mind can function only with the old self.  With the new self, the mind is utterly useless as it has not be attuned to react to this new self.

This state of uselessness of the mind gives rise to  fear. The fear of  leaving the old, comfortable, safe world and the world of convenience, thereby leading to  pain. The pain is similar to  what the child feels when her/he comes out of the womb of the mother. It is the same pain that the bird feels when it comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when it will try for the first time to be on the its own wings and fly. It is the fear of the unknown, and the security of the known, the insecurity of the unknown, the unpredictability of the unknown, that makes one very much frightened.
As the transformation is going to be from the self towards a state of no-self, agony is very deep. But again we cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire.

Love is fire.

Across the universe due to the pain of love, millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative. It takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste as it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle.
The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. They know only themselves. And how much can you know yourself if you have not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror? You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he/her is, because he/her will not have the mirror to see their own reflection.
Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But the higher love needs that you should be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable and open yourself for all possibilities. You have to drop your armor’ that is painful. You do not need to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you. That is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you. That is the fear in being in love. The reflection that you will find in the other of your own self may be ugly. That is the anxiety. You can avoid the mirror all together. But by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken.
One has to go into love. That is the first step towards God, and its something that cannot be bypassed. Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach God. That is absolutely necessary because we become aware of our totality only when we are provoked by the presence of the other, when our presence is enhanced by the presence of the other, when we are brought out of our narcissistic, closed world under the open sky.
Love is an open sky. To be in love is to be on the wing. But certainly, the unbounded and limitless sky creates fear. And to drop the ego is very painful. We have been taught to cultivate the ego. We think the ego is our only treasure. We have been protecting it, we have been decorating it, we have been continuously polishing it, and when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego. This is certainly painful. It is your whole life’s work, it is all that you have created — this ego, this idea that “I am separate from existence. ” This idea is ugly because it is untrue. This idea is illusory, but our society exists, is based on this idea that each person is a person, not a presence. The truth is that there is no person at all in the world. There is only presence. You are not — not as an ego, separate from the whole world. You are part of the whole world. The whole world penetrates you, the whole world breathes in you, pulsates in you, the whole is your life.
Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not our ego. Love gives us the first lesson that we can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of our ego. If we can be in harmony with a woman, if we can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if we can be in harmony with our child or with our mother, why can’t we be in harmony with all human beings? And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if we are in harmony with all human beings? And if we can be in harmony with all human beings, why can’t we be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another. Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, but it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.
Modern man is living in a dark cell’ it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind. And then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere. They simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess.
Love creates problems. We can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered. They have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love.
If people don’t go into love, as many people have decided, then you are stuck with themselves. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean’ your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing. A river remains clean because it goes on flowing. Flow is the process of remaining continuously virgin.
A lover remains pure. All lovers are pure. The people who don’t love cannot remain pure. They become dormant, stagnant’ they start stinking sooner or later — and sooner than later — because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead. That’s where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken the world by storm. It is no more that a few individuals are psychologically ill’ the reality is the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis.
And that neurosis is coming from the narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with one’s own illusion of having a separate self. This is when people go mad. And this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative. We may not commit suicide by taking poison or jumping from a cliff or by shooting yourself, but you can commit another kind of suicide which is a very slow process, and that’s what happens. Very few people commit suicide suddenly. Others decide to go for a slow suicide’ gradually, slowly, slowly they die. But almost, the tendency to be suicidal has become universal. The tendency to lose hope on life has creeped in into each human. This is no way to live, and the reason, the fundamental reason, is we have forgotten the language of love. We are no more courageous enough to go into that adventure called love.
Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky.We have seen a tremendous increase in casual relationships which have now progressed to casual sex and even sex with strangers. It is momentary, we don’t get involved. Love is involvement’ it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when we are intimate does the other become a mirror. When we meet sexually with a woman or a man, we have not met at all.  In fact, we avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other’s original faces. When true intimacy happens with love as the supporting pillar, you longer are two bodies or souls. You live in her/him and vice versa. Thats the beauty of love and intimacy. This is what our ancient scriptures talk about as well. The perfect union of the almighty shakti with the mortal shiva. The proper time when the kundalini chakras in us are activated and a state of bliss is experienced.
Love is painful, but don’t avoid it. If we avoid it we have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy and bliss. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, we will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as a non ego, you will be born as God, as a Buddha. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.
The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All that they are saying is that their life has missed love. Sure life is meaningless when its all about being in the moment and you choose to stay locked in a dark cell with your past. Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach to a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes. It is only through the pain that life comes across on the planet and life is nothing but love.
My whole approach here is that of love. I teach learn and spread only love and only love and nothing else. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God — not the God of theologians. Love is a tariqa, a method, to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean, but for that we will have to pass through the door of love.
And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts, because one has been thinking, “I am this, and now this is going. I am dying. ” You are not dying, but only an illusion is dying. The illusion that you are a dew drop is what thats dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration.
It is for us to keep the vibes and spirits high. No one else will do it for us. The secrets are love, peace, understanding and respect. The more the people realise this, the better place the world will be to live in. Remeber that certain things in life can neber make sense looking forward. The dots in life always make sense when we look backwards and connect them. You will then realise the true intention and purpose of those dots and the reason they entered your life. Always connect the dots looking backwards.

AUM SHANTI....