Love is food: food for the soul. When a child sucks at his mother’s breast for the first time, he is sucking two things, not only milk — milk is going into his body and love is going into his soul. Love is invisible, just as soul is invisible; milk is visible just as body is visible. If you have eyes to see, you can see two things together dripping into the child’s being from the mother’s breast. Milk is just the visible part of love; love is the invisible part of milk — the warmth, the love, the compassion, the blessing.
If you love, love with awareness. If I was going to teach you I would not tell you whom to love, how to love. That is all nonsense. Love is your intrinsic quality. You are born with it, just as hate is also there. I will teach you, be aware. Before anything happens to you — love or hate, anger, passion, compassion, anything — be aware. Let everything arise out of your awareness.
Whatsoever the situation, the love is unconditional; it doesn’t depend on conditions.
Don’t judge people.
Rather, love people.True love means the fight has disappeared, the two have become one. Their bodies exist separately but their being has mingled. The boundaries are lost, there is no division. There is no ‘I’ and no ‘thou’, no one exists.
This is the whole essence of Buddha’s message. Peace is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness. Love is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness. Righteousness is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness.
The higher you reach, the more unburdened you need to be. So a miser cannot soar high. A miser cannot soar in love, or in prayer, or in God. He remains clinging to the earth, he almost remains rooted in the earth. Trees cannot fly. If you want to fly, you need to be uprooted. You need to be like a white cloud, with no roots anywhere — a wanderer
My message of love is not the message of that love which is the polar opposite of hate. My message of love is of that love which is capable of absorbing hate and transforming it.
To me, love is a by-product of a meditative mind. It is not related to sex; it is related to dhyana, meditation. The more silent you become, the more at ease with yourself you will be, the more fulfilled you will feel, and the more a new expression of your being will be there. You will begin to love. Not anyone in particular. It may happen with someone in particular, but that is another thing. You begin to love. This loving becomes your way of existing. It can never turn into repulsion because it is not an attraction.
In love, there is gratitude, there is a deep gratefulness. You know that the other is not a thing. You know that the other has a grandeur, a personality, a soul, an individuality. In love you give total freedom to the other. Of course, you give and you take; it is a give-and-take relationship — but with respect.
Love can never possess. Love is giving freedom to the other. Love is an unconditional gift, it is not a bargain. But to your mind love is nothing but less hate, that’s all. At the most you think, ‘I can tolerate this person; I cannot tolerate that person so I cannot love him. This person I can tolerate.’ But the valuation remains negative.
Love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not in love, one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love — but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.