There are many confusing teachings regarding the idea of love. Must we be detached or love unconditionally? Many spiritual teachers will give you something that is impossible to do so that you keep coming back. Rather than doing this, Sadhguru says, “Throw yourself into your love affair and die into it. Something will happen. Something worthwhile will happen if you are willing to die into the process. Not just anything, whether it’s your work, or your life, or your love, or whatever. If you do not know how to throw your entire self into it, you will never know the taste of what it is.”
Sadhguru goes on to explain, “A human being is longing to be something more than what they are right now. If this finds a simple basic physical expression, we call this sexuality. Sexuality means just this: physically you’re trying to make something which is not you, a part of yourself. For a few moments you may succeed. If you try this mentally, it gets labeled as greed, conquest, or maybe simply shopping.” However, he says, “If it happens emotionally, on the emotional level, if you try this, we call this a love affair.”
“If you do it consciously, we call this yoga – yoga means union.” Sadhguru further explains, “When you consciously become an inclusive process, if you sit here, if you experience everything as yourself, then we say you are a yogi, okay? So this is a love affair, successful.”
“Now what I’m saying is, I want you to look at this, whether love happens to you, or hate happens to you, anger happens to you, misery happens to you, joy happens to you…it only happens within you, isn’t it?” Sadhguru says, “Because you are feeling very pleasant in your emotions, suddenly air feels vibrant. It’s always been, you missed it all your life, now you’re beginning to feel it… So, whatever human experience – love or hate, whatever, whatever – happens only within you.”
He goes on to explain that what happens within us happens by choice. “Love is not a relationship, a relationship is a different thing. Love is a certain sweetness of your emotion.” Whatever you look at, if you look at it with a sweetness within yourself, it can become something more. “Love is not something that you do, it is something that you can become,” he says.
Sadhguru explains, “If your mind becomes pleasant, we say this is joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we say this is love. If your very life energies become pleasant, we say this is blissfulness, this is ecstasy. If your surroundings become pleasant, we call that success. Now you’re calling your success with somebody as love – that’s a mistake.” He says love is not about somebody, “It’s not an action. It is not something that you do, it is something that you can become.”
He says, “We’ve done certain things to manage our health. Similarly, if you do certain things, you can manage the pleasantness of your mind. If you do certain other things, you can manage the pleasantness of your emotion. If you do certain other things, you can manage the pleasantness of your very life energies… Now, what you can do internally, you’re trying to manage externally. What can be done here within you, you are trying to manage by creating an atmosphere around you, which is a very difficult thing to do because outside will never happen 100% the way you want it. To some extent we can manage, we can’t do all of it by ourselves, because there are many forces involved.” The practice of yoga allows us to become more conscious of these forces within us, so that we are able to be blissful even when things do not go our way externally.
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