Sadhguru on the mechanics of an intoxicating emotion

By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

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.

Love is just one aspect of life. We have given so much importance to it simply because for a long time, in most people emotion has been the strongest part. Even today, though people consider themselves intellectual, still emotion is the strongest part in most of them — not their intellect, their body or their energy. So, making that pleasant is very important. Otherwise, it will find unpleasant expressions. If you are feeling very pleasant, suddenly you become like a flower. When somebody is in love, if you look at their faces, suddenly they look like a flower because they are feeling so pleasant within themselves.

Whoever you are in love with, they may not even be aware of it — it does not matter. You are in love, that’s all that matters. It is your emotion. It is the way you are.

Love is not something that you do. Love is something that you are. So, either you can use somebody as a support to make yourself loving, or you can simply become loving. After all, it is not somebody else’s quality, it is your quality. You are using the other person as a key to open this up. But you can also open it up from inside without the help of the other person. Then it is definitely more enduring because when you open it with the other person’s help — nobody on this planet is 100% reliable.

If you are trying to extract joy, love and pleasantness out of somebody, this is going to be disastrous for both the people. I am not saying it is better to live alone. I am saying the way you are should be determined by you. If this is so and you are here to share your love with people, if you are feeling wonderful and you want to share this with somebody, then it will be very beautiful.

[Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]