Love Without Motive

Audio Transcript

So today we will be talking about love. And I think the word has been so overused. The meaning has been so distorted over the years.

Distortion of Love

So for example, you might say, I love my car. I love this ice cream. And the next moment you will say, I love my children. I love my parents. I love my husband or wife. And one wonders, is the scale of love the same as loving your car or your dress? Or an ice cream? Is it the same as loving a human being? Probably what you want to say is, I like my car very much or I like ice cream very much. Maybe that would be an appropriate way of expressing your feelings rather than clubbing everything with love.

Modern Expressions

And in the past few years we have another prefix to love and that’s totally, and I keep hearing that, I totally love this and I totally love that. But do we actually totally love something? Do we love something or is it just expectations and sensual fulfilment, sensual pleasures, expectations, demands?

Narrow Love

And today we are not talking about love in a very narrow meaning. So what that means is say a parent, they love their children and they love their children to the bits. And if the child has a small hurt, the mother or the father will go to the end to heal it. But what happens if someone else gets hurt? Someone, a neighbour or someone dies somewhere else? That intensity of feeling is never the same. So though that love is very intense, it’s very narrow and it’s very limited to the me and the mine. What does the me and the mine mean to myself and to everything that is mine? My children or my partners, my parents or the ones I love? And someone who is not me and mine doesn’t share that love.

Fleeting Emotions

And this narrow love has its seasons and most of us have experienced that when you fall in love. It is so intense, it’s so beautiful. What happens after a year, two years, six months? That same love is not there anymore. In some instances it fades, sometimes it turns into hatred. So it’s more of a fleeting emotion. We are not talking about that as well.

Societal Impacts

And if you look around our social structure or what we are right now, there is so much division, there is racial tension, there is conflict between relationships. And this newer generation, and probably it’s because of the digital age, is very impatient. There is more self-centredness, there’s more individualism, rather than connection, rather than giving, rather than loving. And in the absence of love, you’ll see violence, you’ll see hatred, you’ll see suffering, you’ll see divisions. All these things come up, self-centredness. And to take an extreme example, a psychopath, you know, they have no empathy, they have no love and so even if they kill a hundred people, they don’t feel anything inside, they are okay with it. So absence of love gives rise to all these different things.

Love Without Motive

So can we truly love without any motive? So a mother loves or a father loves their children because there is some motive, they are their children. They can’t love similarly someone else’s children. But can we love without any kind of motive? The love has no tally. You see, we always keep an internal tally in our head. I have done this much for this person and that person has been ungrateful. He or she has been so ungrateful, they have done this in spite of me doing this, this, this for them. Is that actually love, keeping all those accounts in our heads? Love does not keep a tally.

Unconditional Love Example

I share a very beautiful story. So when I was seeking in the Himalayas, I was at a place called Gangotri, that’s around 10,000 feet and that’s the place from where the Ganga, the river Ganges, it originates. So someone told me there is a great sage who lives, you know, I think 20-30 kilometers from there, why don’t you go and see him? So I went to see him and this person, he was 65 to 70, quite old. He lived in a small, it was kind of a hut shanty on the side of the road. And when I went in, I was surprised to see him making tea and fritters, so in India you would call them bhaji or pakoras, so they are vegetable fritters, you have to fry them. And this person did that the whole day. And whoever came to him, he served that tea and fritters with love. And that’s all. He didn’t speak. He didn’t expect anything from anyone. If people came in, they smiled at him, he smiled. They walked away, it’s fine. They gave something and they donated something, he didn’t care. And he was quite old, I could see his body weathered, his beard, hair was white, he had lost one or two teeth. But when he smiled and when he served that tea, you could sense that unconditional love from where all his actions were coming in. And he did that every day. That was his routine from morning till night. That was my first experience with someone whose love was unmotivated, had no reason, absolutely no reason, no rhyme, no expectations, no demands. And when you sat in his presence, you could feel that. You could feel overflowing love, all embracing love.

Loss of Capacity to Love

But we have lost this capacity to love. Our love is replaced by expectations. So let me ask you a question. Can you love someone who has insulted you, who has hurt your ego, who has said nasty things about you? Or who has hurt you financially, emotionally? Is it possible to love someone who has hurt us? Think about it. Give it a moment. Forget about deep hurt. We can’t even love someone. We walk into a store and the person doesn’t answer us properly. You see how upset it makes us. How much hurt and pain and the ego demands that acknowledgement, that respect. But with all that, even if the ego gets that acknowledgement and respect or whatever, what does it feel at the end? It’s still suffering. It’s still empty. It still wants.

Patience and Forgiveness in Love

And love is very patient. Love is very forgiving. If you go back to the time when you fell in love for the first time, if you remember that time, you will recall how forgiving you were of the other person. It didn’t matter if they made mistakes. How patient you were. How kind you were. For some time, for how long that love lasted. But there was this capacity to forgive. There was this capacity to be patient, to give. Of course, that wasn’t unmotivated love. That wasn’t unconditional love. But whatever love that we experience is a reflection of that limitless love. There are reflections of it, there are glimmers of it. But then it is mixed and distorted with all these different expectations and desires and the me and the ego, etc, etc.

Pure Love and Consciousness

So is it possible for us to love someone without a motive, without any kind of give and take, any kind of tally up here, nothing? Without any demands, expectations. And that love can only be in the present. It cannot be a thought. Can we do that? And that love cannot have seasons. It cannot be seasonal meaning it’s good today and tomorrow it just goes out of the window. It is. When I was seeking, I saw many, many sages and monks who functioned from that state of pure love. And when I realised this consciousness, and I’ve talked about this many times in my talks, I realised that the quality of it is love. Pure love which is timeless, which is without cause, which embraces everyone. It doesn’t care what colour, nationality, gender, religion, status. It doesn’t care about anything. It doesn’t care if the other person has been good to me or hurtful or angry or respectful. This love just knows to give. This love sees the same self in everyone. It sees this unity. And out of that love it tries to bring in harmony and balance in all its actions.

Love in Action

And I’ve been speaking for almost two years now. And that speaking is also out of this love. There has been no motive, no demands. And those who have been with me for a long time, they know that. And we all have that capacity. We all have that potential. The seed is there. And one of these aspects of love is acceptance. This love gushes forth when there is acceptance of where we are of the present moment and also of someone else. Because if we are not accepting, we are trying to mould the person according to our expectations, our demands, our likes and dislikes. But when there is acceptance, true acceptance, you are alright. You don’t fight. There is no conflict. And if you see, this loving-kindness is a very core foundation of Buddhism as well, metta as they call it, where they cultivate this feeling of loving-kindness first towards the ones they love and then towards people who have been a little… I’ve hurt them a bit and to people who have really hurt you, etc.