Love is not natural, Love has to be learnt || Acharya Prashant, at BITS Goa (2023)
Questioner (Q): I think this is a follow up question of one of your videos, in which you described physical love, and you concluded with a statement that, “Love has to be learnt”. I wanted to learn more about this and how I can cultivate this kind of love in my own life.
Acharya Prashant (AP): Whatever comes naturally to you must be taken as problematic. I am saying this with a lot of responsibility and intent, instead we have been taught to accept natural things as beneficial as all right just because they are natural. That which is natural that is exactly that keeps you in bondage. That which you usually call love is just a natural attraction, belonging to the domain of attachment, āsakti, lust. One has to look at it with attention, is it love? Real love cannot be something so cheap that it starts coming naturally to you, the day you are fourteen.
“Now I am fourteen, my hormones are active, my glands are overactive, there is puberty, so I am in love.” And I couldn’t have been in love at the age of 10 or 11. Ever seen somebody falling in love at the age of four, six, five or something? Keep medical tragedy aside. You have stuff of that kind, somebody is generating a lot of testosterones even at the age 4, those kinds of cases can be ignored. How is it so that the love of the kind that we know of happens only after you cross a certain age? Obviously, that’s not love, that’s something of the body and if certain hormones are taken away from the body, that kind of love cannot happen right?
What love is that? That’s just iron and magnet? Sodium and water? A chemical reaction? That’s what that love is. But unfortunately, even very, very intelligent people, brilliant in their fields of occupation, brilliant in dealing with the objective world, when it comes to love, they do not know their mind. They do not know what is happening within and then they make disastrous life choices. In terms of choosing a person, choosing a residence, choosing a vocation, those who have researched into it. Those who have known something, they have said please understand what the mind is. They have said the mind is a thirsty entity. The mind is an entity that is always in want. Therefore, what is love? That which quenches the mind’s thirst is love. The mind is always in a state of attraction, it is attracted to something that would bring peace to it.
