Love Is Natural

There will be a few questions from Yoga Sutra 14.

SOME BHAKTI SECTS TEACH MEDITATION ON HIGHER ASPECTS OF LOVE: FIRST TO LOVE AN ORDINARY PERSON, THEN THE GURU, THEN A GOD, ETCETERA. IS BHAKTI METHOD?

Love is not a method. That is the difference between all other techniques and the path of bhakti, the path of devotion. The path of devotion has no methods. Yoga has methods; bhakti has none. Love is not a method – to call it a method is to misname it.

Love is natural; it is already there in your heart, ready to burst. The only thing that has to be done is to allow it. You are creating all sorts of hindrances and obstacles. You are not allowing it. It is already there – you simply relax a little and it will come, it will burst, it will bloom. And when it blooms for an ordinary person, immediately the ordinary has become the extraordinary. Love makes everybody extraordinary; it is such an alchemy. An ordinary woman suddenly is transfigured when you love her. She is no more ordinary; she is the most extraordinary woman that ever existed. It is not that you are blind, as others will say. In fact, you have seen the extraordinary which is always hidden in every ordinariness. Love is the only eye, the only vision, the only clarity. You have seen in the ordinary woman the whole womanhood – past, present, future – all women combined together. When you love a woman, you have realized the very feminine soul in her. Suddenly she becomes extraordinary. Love makes everybody extraordinary.

If you go deeper into your love… because there are difficulties to go deeper in love, because the more you go deeper, the more you lose yourself, a fear arises, a trembling grips you. You start avoiding the depth of love because the depth of love is just like death. You create barriers between you and your beloved, because the woman seems like an abyss – and can be absorbed into it – and she is. You come out of a woman; she can absorb you: that is the fear. She is the womb, the abyss, and when she can give birth to you, why not death? In fact, only that which gives you birth can give you death, so the fear is there. A woman is dangerous, very mysterious. You cannot live without her and you cannot live with her. You cannot go very far away from her because suddenly, the further you go the more ordinary you become. And you cannot come very close, because the closer you come… You disappear.

This is the conflict in every love. So one has to make a compromise; you don’t go very far away, you don’t come very close. You stand just in the middle somewhere, balancing yourself. But then love cannot go deep. Depth is attained only when you drop all fears and you jump headlong. The danger is there, and the danger is true: that love will kill your ego. Love is poison to the ego – life to you, but death to the ego. One has to take the jump. If you allow intimacy to grow, if you come closer and closer and closer and dissolve into the being of a woman, now she will not only be extraordinary, she will become divine because she will become a door to eternity. The closer you come to a woman, the more you feel she is a door of something beyond.

And the same happens to the woman with the man. She has her own problems. The problem is that if she comes closer to the man, the closer she comes, the man starts escaping. Because the closer the woman comes, the man becomes more and more afraid. The closer a woman comes, the man starts escaping her, finding a thousand and one excuses to be away. So a woman has to wait; and if she waits then again there is a problem: if she takes no initiative it looks like indifference, and indifference can kill love. Nothing is more dangerous to love than indifference. Even hatred is good, because at least you have a certain type of relationship with the person you hate. Love can survive hate, but love cannot survive indifference. And the woman is always in difficulty… if she takes the initiative the man simply escapes. No man can tolerate a woman who takes initiative. That means that the abyss is coming on her own near you! – Before it is too late, you escape.

That’s how Don Juans are created. Then from one woman to another they go on. They live in a hit-and-run affair, because if you are too much there, then the abyss will absorb you. Don Juans are not lovers, not at all. They look like lovers because continuously they are on move – every day a new woman. But they are people deep in fear, because if they remain with one woman for long, then intimacy will grow, and they will come closer, and who knows what will happen? So they just live for a certain amount of time; before it is too late, they escape.

Byron loved almost hundreds of women in his small span of life. He is the archetype, the Don Juan. He never knew love. How can you know love when you move from one to another, and another, and another? Love needs seasoning; it needs time to settle; it needs intimacy; it needs deep trust; it needs faith. The woman is always in trouble – “What to do?” If she takes initiative, the man escapes. If she remains as if not interested, then too the man escapes because the woman is not interested. So she has to choose a mid-ground: a little initiative and a little indifference together, a mixture. And both are in bad shape, because these compromises will not allow you to grow.

Compromise never allows anybody to grow. Compromise is a calculating, cunning thing; it is businesslike, not love-like. When lovers are really unafraid of each other and the dropping of the ego, they jump into each other headlong. They jump so deeply that they become each other. They become in fact one, and when this oneness happens then love transforms into prayer. When this oneness happens, then suddenly a religious quality comes to love.

First love has the quality of sex. If it is shallow, it will be reduced to sex; in fact it will not be love. If love becomes deeper, then it will have the quality of spirituality, the quality of divineness. So love is just a bridge between this world and that, sex and samadhi. That’s why I go on calling the journey, from sex to superconsciousness. Love is just a bridge. If you don’t move on the bridge, sex will be your life, your whole life, very ordinary, very ugly. Sex can be beautiful, but only with love and as part of love. Alone in itself it is ugly. It is just like this: your eyes are beautiful, but if the eyes are taken out of your sockets they will become ugly. The most beautiful eyes will become ugly if they are cut from the body.

It happened to Van Gogh: nobody loved him because he had a little ugly body. Then a prostitute, just to cheer him up, not finding anything else how to appreciate his body, appreciated his ear, that “You have the most beautiful ears.” Lovers never talk of ears because there are many other things to appreciate. But there was nothing – the body was very, very ugly, and so the prostitute said, “You have very beautiful ears.” He came home. Nobody has ever appreciated anything in his body, nobody has ever accepted his body; this was for the first time, and he was so thrilled that he cut his own ear, and went back to the prostitute and presented the ear. Now the ear is absolutely ugly.

Sex is a part of love, of a greater whole. Love gives it beauty, otherwise it is one of the most, ugliest actions. That’s why people move into sex in darkness: even they don’t like themselves to see the act being performed in the night. You see all animals make love in the day, except man. No animal bothers in the night – night is for rest. All animals love in the day; only man loves in the night. A certain fear that the act of love is a little ugly… And no woman ever makes love with open eyes because they have a more aesthetic sense than man. They always love with closed eyes so nothing is seen. Women are not pornographic, only men are.

That’s why so many nude pictures, paintings, of women exist: only men are interested in seeing the body. Women are not interested; they have a more aesthetic sense because the body is of the animal. Unless it becomes of the divine, there is nothing to see in it. Love can give a new soul to sex. Then the sex is transfigured – it becomes beautiful; it is no more sex – it has something of the beyond in it. It has become a bridge. You can love a person because the person satisfies your sex. This is not love, just a bargain. You can make sex with a person because you love; then sex follows just like a shadow, part of love. Then it is beautiful; then it is no more of the animal world. Then something of the beyond has already entered, and if you go on loving a person deeply, by and by sex disappears. Intimacy becomes so fulfilling, then there is no need for sex; love is enough unto itself. When that moment comes then there is the possibility of prayer dawning upon you.