Acharya Prashant: We want something, right? We want the Ultimate. There’s nobody who wants to stop at something small. We want something as big as possible, right? That’s the nature of desire, correct? It doesn’t want to stop anywhere. Probably it can stop only when it gets something immeasurable, infinite. That’s what we want. And that thing that we all want is sometimes referred to as Truth or the Ultimate; colloquially has also been called as ‘God’. That’s what we want. That’s our shared and deepest and real desire. Correct?
So, there are these two. That which you want, which is very difficult to describe because it is immeasurable. If it is immeasurable, then it becomes difficult to name it or talk of it or tell its story. Correct? It’s infinite—how do we really talk of the infinite? So, there is That; That which we all want.
And then there is us; the ‘I’ that wants. There are these two, correct? You want and there is that which is the object of your want. There’s you and there is that which you want.
Fine. You want something. But why do you make efforts to achieve it? You make efforts to get what you want because you love yourself. If you do not love yourself, why will you want to do good to yourself? And isn’t it an act of the greatest good to gift to yourself that which you really want? Correct?
So, there are two kinds of ‘love’ here. Love for that which you want—the effect and result of that love is that you move towards That—and your love towards yourself. The result of that love is that you allow yourself to move towards That, you put your energies in moving towards That. The love that you have for that ultimate destination can be called as ‘higher love’, and the love that you have towards yourself can be called as ‘lower love’.
