Our first love shook the ground beneath us and left us speechless. The sky felt bluer, the grass greener, the air mysteriously perfumed. No one seemed more handsome, more beautiful, more tailor made-for-us than the object of our affection. Such an overwhelming emotion had to be true. And it had to last forever, we were certain of it.
But for some of us, perhaps many of us, it did not. Perhaps, stranger still, the broken pieces of our heart healed faster than we would have imagined possible. And as one relationship followed another, we began to wonder and maybe even despair, would we ever find true love? Were we capable of recognizing it? Were we looking in the right places and meeting the right people? What if there was something wrong with us?
Sadhguru responds to a question about what true love is: “People think relationships are all about love. No, relationship is an enormous amount of management. If you don’t manage it, it will die. Most love affairs are like this. Only first few days it is joy, after that only anxiety. Some, total disaster, all right?”
“I would like to give you a key, where you can turn your emotion sweet by yourself without anybody’s help. Are you interested?”
Speaker (Nisha): “You know, it’s like a button these days that you get to meet someone, you fall in love and then you say, “No, this is not the right person,” and now you fall with the person or other. So, what exactly is true love and can real love really happen twice, thrice? So, I was really wanting to understand this.”
Sadhguru: “See there is something called as love and there’s something called as a relationship, all right? Relationship happens between two people. That’s a different matter. It’s a transaction of a certain nature. What level of relationship? Unfortunately today, if you utter the word relationship people are thinking all body-based relationships only. No, if you have a brother or a sister, you have a relationship with them, but this doesn’t mean it’s body-based. You have parents, you have relationship with them; you have friends, you have relationship with them. Well, you have these… all these radio people, you have a relationship with them. All the people that you talk to, you have a relationship with them. So, it is not necessary the word relationship has to be hijacked by only body-based relationships, but unfortunately, that’s how it is being used in this generation. It was not being used like that when we were growing up, but today, a relationship means people think you’re having an affair with somebody. So, a relationship is a different matter because it involves two or three or ten people. Right now, all of you have some kind of a relationship here. This is a group of people having a relationship, a family is a group of people having a relationship, all right?”
“So, that is a transactional matter. Transactions can go right, can go wrong, you know. Any transaction, however well-cultivated it is, sometimes it goes wrong, sometimes it goes wonderfully well because in transactions, two different people or ten different people are involved. Even if the transaction is only between two people, the rest of the world in some way is participating in that transaction. Many times human relationships are destroyed not because of the two people, because of the third, fourth person somewhere else, who will (Laughs) do something else to it, okay. So these things happen.”
“But now talking about love, let’s separate love from relationship. Love is what happens within you. Relationship is something that you do in the world. What you do in the world is always subject to various forces. Whatever transaction we do in the world is subject to various realities. Once you’re involved in the world, something happens right, something doesn’t happen right, because there’s a whole lot of management. People think relationships are all about love. No, relationship is an enormous amount of management. If you don’t manage it, it will die. If you don’t manage it, it’ll crash. But love is what happens within you. This is not subject to external forces. But right now, people are allowing it to be that way, unfortunately. But actually what happens within you, the sweetness of your emotion should not be determined by somebody else, isn’t it? What happens within you must be determined by you. What happens in the world, you can’t determine everything. You have some role, but there are so many people playing a role in that. Or if there are two people, the other person also has a 50% role in that. So, how they will take it, what will happen, situations, variety of things are there. But what happens within you must happen the way you want.”
“So, what you call as love is something that happens within you, but unfortunately, people have told you, “Love is in the air.” That means it’s a polluted air. It must be in Delhi. Even Delhi is having pure air these days, that’s what they’re telling me. I’ve not been there though for some time. (Laughs) So it is not in the air. It is something that’s happening within you. Your emotions have taken to a sweet form for whatever reason. So, now you’re using an external stimuli, you’re using the other person as a key to turn your emotions sweet.”
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