From Chemistry to Love And Vice Versa

Sadhguru: Every emotion that you go through has a certain chemistry behind it. Whether you become joyous or sad, tense or calm, your chemistry is happening in different ways. It works in both directions – an emotion can change your chemistry, and changing your chemistry can change your emotion. For different states of experience that we go through, our chemistry naturally goes through certain changes. Or, because our chemistry is going through changes, we go through different levels of experience. For example, if you get excited, your blood will move faster and your heart will pump faster. But if your heart starts pumping faster, you will also get excited unnecessarily. Both are true.

Hallucinatory drugs have been produced on this very basis. Treatment for psychiatric problems also works this way. When someone is very agitated, they give him a drug – a tranquilizer – and he becomes calm. These drugs somehow bring down the tension chemically. Any drug-taking is manipulation on the level of your chemistry. Whatever the experience is, there is a supporting chemistry. Whatever is the chemistry, for that there is a resultant experience.

Can We Create Love Chemically?

Can we create love chemically? Suppose if I change my chemistry, can I become love? Yes, that is what we do in yoga in terms of sadhana or practices. The difference between bhakti yoga and whatever other forms of yoga – especially hatha yoga and kriya yoga – is just this: with kriya yoga and hatha yoga, you are trying to change your inner energies in order to change the chemistry, so that your inner quality or your experience will change. With bhakti yoga, you are trying to change the quality by being loving, so that someday your chemistry becomes love.

Without a proper chemistry, any amount of trying to become something will not lead you anywhere. No matter how much you say, “I want to be peaceful, I want to be peaceful,” if your chemistry is agitation, no matter how much you try, you will not settle down into peace. It is impossible. With pranayam, asanas and meditation we are changing the chemistry. This must be understood that with meditation, we are not trying to become peaceful. We are changing the chemistry into that kind of chemistry where peace will be the natural way of being.

What it means is, if with proper practices you change your chemistry into peace – a kind of chemistry that will make a person joyous – then your natural state will become like that. Another way to do this is, by creating an object of love, maybe a God, a Guru or some other object for which you have tremendous feeling, if you create tremendous amount of love towards that, then also your chemistry will change. Both ways are true.

Love: Not Just A Tool of Reproduction

When biologists talk about love and chemistry, it is totally different. If you look at all activities in nature, everything is aimed only at reproduction – nothing else. Flowers are not blooming out of their love for you. You may think so and poets may say so, but they are simply blooming so that pollination can happen, then a seed will come and one more plant will grow. That is their only interest.

When the biologist talks about love, he is actually talking about reproduction. This is just a trick of nature to keep things going. Nature wants to perpetuate itself. That is what is known as maya. It has its own inbuilt systems to perpetuate itself. Nobody has to do anything. It does not even need the Creator’s interference; that is the beauty of creation. Even the creator is not needed; everything is automatic. That is the nature of maya.

But what we are referring to when we use the word “love” is, once you really experience love within you, your biology and the body becomes very minimum. If your biology is too active then love has not happened to you. When bhakti enters a person, his body becomes of least importance to him. He is willing to throw it and go; he is in that state. This love is not one that binds you into the process of maya, it liberates you from it.