Great love; Greater Love || AP Neem Candies
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’.
Now, you look at yourself and you find yourself suffering, and you want to rid yourself of that suffering. Correct? That’s lower love. It is this lower love that expresses itself in your relationships with other people. This lower love, remember, is the highest kind of love that you can have on the planet. Are you getting it?
So, if you go to, for example, a truly loving person—for sake of tradition, let’s call him a saint—that saint exhibits two kinds of love. One is the saint's love for God, and the other is the saint's love for fellow human beings. And both these loves are very evident in the saint’s life. At some point, obviously, these two types are really one, but it can be seen that the saint loves both God and the people around him. Both these loves differ to an extent. The difference we have already explained. You love Him because He is your destination, and you love the other because you love yourself and the other is so much like you.
Therefore, real carnal love, real worldly love is not about trying to gain something from the other or trying to bring happiness to the other, trying to exchange pleasures with the other, but it is about seeing that the other is so much like you. It’s a bit intricate. Please understand.
You see that the other is so much like you. And who are you? You are the suffering one. Why are you suffering? Because you want That and you do not have That. The other too is just like you; he too wants That, and he does not have That. He too is suffering.
This realization of commonness between you and the other is love. Now, you are suffering, so what is it that you gift to yourself? Liberation from suffering. And if you see that the other is just like you and he too is suffering, then what do you give the other as well?
Questioner: Liberation.
Acharya Prashant: Liberation from suffering. That’s called loving the other.
Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/how-to-truly-love-others-on-bhagavad-gita-1_c2d7f84
