Young people often confuse the word love to mean romantic love. That would be a very restrictive and limiting interpretation. In fact love is a very wide term and it encompasses every good feeling that we have for the humanity and the universe around us.
“Love is not an emotion, it is our very existence”, that is how the Guru Sri Sri Ravishankar explains love.
It takes some maturity and wisdom to understand the concept of love, which comes out of compassion for all, which is boundless and generosity is its hallmark.
A Buddha Story On Love
To understand the nature of love, there is a lovely story from Buddha’s life.
It is said that once a man went to Buddha and expressed his desire to be his disciple. Buddha told him that he must first start loving everyone, the whole mankind. The man replied that he can do so, but he cannot love one of his neighbors, who was very wicked. Apart from this neighbor, he can love everybody. Then Buddha said, “I will make your task simpler. You do not need to love everybody. Just love this neighbor and I shall accept you as my disciple.”
What this story illustrates is, picking and choosing people whom we can love is not a big deal. That is not love, but our selfishness. Love is something that is divine and comes straight from our heart. Love does not distinguish, but is meant for everyone. That kind of true selfless and divine love is that makes life truly beautiful and worth living. The love for the whole of humanity, every living being and the universe is life.
Love Changes Life
A person devoid of love in his heart will never find happiness and joy in life. But when the heart is full of love, life seems beautiful. This is everybody’s experience. This feeling of love inside a person changes everything for him; it even changes fate and destiny.
The feeling of love need not necessarily be for living things. It can be even for inanimate objects or for that matter, any ideals or values. Let us think of a job which you do not like. What happens is you will not rise in that profession. Every working day will be a drudgery and you will feel miserable. But once you develop a love for the job, everything looks so easy and wonderful. The hours of work will fly away, you will become more productive and the output will increase in quantity as well as quality. This is reflected in the saying, when you love your work, you will not have to work a single day!
The same thing goes for the brave soldiers who defend the country. The love for their motherland makes them fearless and ready to lay down their lives.
Love Makes The World Go Round
Love is the most beautiful of all emotions. It makes the world go round. Imagine a world without love, and it becomes a living hell. A mother who does not love her children, no love lost between siblings, no love among friends and well-wishers; will make this world a veritable hell. The value of love is not just in giving it to others selflessly, but also in what it does to the giver. Giving love brings about a wonderful change in the whole personality and it repairs the body, spirit and soul of the giver. The most beautiful people are those who give love unabashedly, without hesitation. Their very nature becomes divinely attractive. The bottom-line is; when you give love, you receive love and you also receive abundance.
Written By: Raj Kumar Hansdah
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