BENGALURU : We always want to get a result in return for doing something. This desire for a result, which is another form of conclusion-seeking, prevents understanding. When you ask, “What good will it do me if I dissociate the feeling from the word ‘love’?”, you are thinking of a result; therefore you are not really inquiring to find out what that feeling is, are you? “I do want to find out, but I also want to know what will be the outcome of dissociating the feeling from the word. Isn’t this perfectly natural?”
Perhaps; but if you want to understand, you will have to give your attention, and there’s no attention when one part of your mind is concerned with results, and the other with understanding. In this way you get neither, and so you become more and more confused, bitter and miserable. If we don’t dissociate the word, which is memory and all its reactions, from the feeling, then that word destroys the feeling; and then the word, or memory, is the ash without the fire. Isn’t this what has happened to you both? You have so entangled yourselves in a net of words, of speculations, that the feeling itself, which is the only thing that has deep and vital significance, is lost.
“I am beginning to see what you mean,” said the first one slowly. “We are not simple; we don’t discover anything for ourselves, but just repeat what we have been told. Even when we revolt, we form new conclusions, which again have to be broken down. We really don’t know what love is, but merely have opinions about it. Is that it?”
Don’t you think so? Surely, to know love, truth, God, there must be no opinions, no beliefs, no speculations with regard to it. If you have an opinion about a fact, the opinion becomes important, not the fact. If you want to know the truth or the falseness of the fact, then you must not live in the word, in the intellect. You may have a lot of knowledge, information, about the fact, but the actual fact is entirely different.
Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows; and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.