Love is not an isolated explosion, it is a continuous resonance || Acharya Prashant (2016)
Acharya Prashant: See, it is quite pleasing to say and hear that Love is an explosion. It reassures us that there is something indeed very powerful, pleasant and redeeming that may happen to us. But if we pay attention to the word ‘explosion’ – explosions cannot keep happening every time. An explosion is significant only because it happens sporadically, infrequently, once in a while.
Do you want Love to come to you only like explosions come to a place?
Where do you live?
L1: I live in Lubiana , it’s a small village, near the forest, in Poland .
AP: That’s so beautiful. Small village, near the forest and not too far from the capital. So let’s take Lubiana , how frequently do you hear explosions in Lubiana ?
L1: (laughs) No explosions there.
AP: When was the last time that you heard an explosion in Lubiana ?
L1: In 1991, when there was civil war over there.
AP: Okay, in 1991, when there was a civil war. And we remember it, it was significant, right? We don’t remember other things. You remember explosions. Explosions appear very significant to the ego. So you remember them. Do you want Love to be like explosions? Significant to the ego but happening once in twenty years or thirty five years.
But if it happens that way, once in thirty-five-years then it would indeed be memorable. You would remember it right? Just like you remember World War 2. An explosion is significant precisely because you don’t have it every day, and when it happens then it is a mark, a stain, a dent on the mind. Do you get it?
You want Love to be like that? Or would you rather have Love like the Ganges , continuously flowing? Do you have a river in Slovenia ?
L1: Yes.
AP: What is its name?
L1: Sava.
AP: When was the last time, Sava was seen flowing? When does Sava flow?
L1: Every day.
AP: Ah! Everyday. How many hours a day? Eight-hours a day, ten-hours a day?
L: Twenty-four-hours a day.
AP: But it doesn’t explode twenty-four hours a day in Lubiana, right?
L1: Yes.
AP: What would you prefer then? Sava or explosion?
L1: Sava.
AP: Sava. Right? So Love is not something that will happen to you once in thirty-five-years. This, right here, is Love. If you remember what we said yesterday, “The very thirst and the subsequent movement of the mind towards Peace, Relaxation and Truth, that is Love. That is the very will of Love. That will itself is called Love.”
But everything happens with your kind permission. If you permit, it would happen every moment with every person at every place. And if you want it to be loud, memorable, historical, then it would happen only as frequently as do the significant dates in history. How many years in the last-century are going to be remembered three-hundred-years hence? Which all dates? Maybe three, four or five? And everything else fades into insignificance, as if those days, those months, those years never happened, and were never lived.
But you indeed did live them, right?
Life is not only about meeting a particular special person or coming to a special moment that simply makes you go crazy, awestruck and wild with astonishment. Life is every moment, is it not?
L1: Yes.
AP: The special moments are few and far between but life is continuous every moment. Love has to be continuous. The problem is, that goes against our notions of Love. For us, Love has to be like a very rare, a very seasonal and a very short lived flower.
We say, “It’s so beautiful!” And that also tells us something about our definition of beauty. If it is not rare, we won’t call it beautiful.
So by our own definition we have condemned everything that is omnipresent, and easily available, to be ugly. We are saying, “Only that can be beautiful which is rare.” The implication is that, that which is so easily available becomes ugly, by our own definition.
Now, life is so easily available, continuously with you.
L1: Yes.
AP: We wait for difficulties. We wait for that which is extremely impossible to obtain, and in the process we keep missing that which is so gently, so affectionately, just here. You would wait for your grand liberation, but you would miss out on the special moment that this is, that the next one is, that the one after that is.
Won’t that happen?
If you have to talk about something special, for example, have you seen how it has become a habit with us to close our eyes? What does this closing of eyes signify? This signifies that whatever is important, whatever is Real, whatever is Truthful, is not here. “I have to shut my eyes from this, I have to go somewhere else.” And where would you find it? “Oh! I am finding it in my heart, in my meditation.”
Do you see what it is doing to you? It is taking to you to your wonderland, your fairy land, your imaginary ‘lala’-land, and robbing you of that which is raining upon you right now.
It is sweet to wait for Love, is it not? That allows us to escape Love. It is sweet to wait for our grand moment of meditation, when you will sit in the Padmasana, control your breath, and go inwards. It is sweet to wait for mediation because that allows you to escape from the meditation that this is, right now.
Don’t you see how determined you are to never to meditate? That is why you assign one particular hour of the day to meditation. Now the remaining hours can be safely had to yourself. Is that not so?
Divinity does not come discreetly, it makes no distinctions. It is continuously there without a stop, without a break, without a gap. We have learnt a lot about closing our eyes; I am saying that Real meditation is about opening your eyes. Our eyes are anyway always closed, how can you close them anymore? Open. Won’t that be nice?
Love is an explosion, but a continuous explosion. And when an explosion is continuous, extremely continuous, then it is Silence. Whenever something is there without a cessation, in tremendous, unstoppable, unflinching continuity, that is Silence. That is meditation.
Hence only the present can be meditation. Because only the present has the characteristic of never being absent. Always being there. Always being here.
