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How to truly love others? || Acharya Prashant, on Bhagavad Gita (2020)
Scriptures and Saints
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1 year ago
Love
Suffering
Compassion
Prakriti
Liberation
God
Consciousness
Ramakrishna Paramahansa
Description

Acharya Prashant explains that the human desire for the ultimate, infinite, or God is the deepest and most real desire shared by all. He distinguishes between two types of love: higher love, which is the love for the ultimate destination, and lower love, which is the love for oneself. This lower love is the foundation for how we relate to others. He clarifies that real worldly love is not about exchanging pleasures or seeking happiness from another, but about recognizing that the other person is suffering just as we are. He uses the analogy that loving God is like loving health, while loving another person is like loving a fellow patient in a hospital. Therefore, the responsibility of love is to help the other person move toward the ultimate truth or liberation from suffering. Addressing the questioner's struggle with hating others due to their perceived fakeness, Acharya Prashant points out that if we look closely at ourselves, we find the same fakeness. If we can still want the best for ourselves despite our own flaws, we should extend that same wish to others. He emphasizes that at the level of nature or Prakriti, all human tendencies like anger, lust, and ignorance are the same, differing only in degree. True compassion arises when we realize that the suffering of all beings is identical. He concludes that there are only two right kinds of associations in the world: relating to someone at a higher level of consciousness to be uplifted, or relating to someone at a lower level to uplift them. Any relationship that does not serve this purpose is considered meaningless.