Throwing Yourself Into Love

Juhi Chawla: Sadhguru, today’s subject is “Love and Life,” and I would like to know, some spiritual teachers and Gurus say, “You must love, but you must be detached.”

Sadhguru: A simple way of getting you to keep coming back is to give you a teaching that you can never follow. “You must love, but you must be detached” – now you have to keep coming back for consultation, endlessly. I would say, throw yourself into your love affair. If you are willing to die into the process, something worthwhile will happen. This goes for anything – whether it is your love, your life, your work, or whatever. If you do not throw your entire self into it, you will never really know it. “Love, but be detached” – why do you want to love then? You love only because you want to include someone as a part of yourself. If you try to love but be detached, you have to come back for consultation every day. It is like a psychiatrist’s job – every day, you have to come and sit on the couch. You need treatment and there is a fee.

Juhi Chawla: So you can love and be attached?

Sadhguru: I didn’t say that… Let’s look at where this need for love in a human being comes from. Human beings constantly long to be something more than what they are right now. If this finds a simple physical expression, we call it sexuality. Sexuality means you are physically trying to make something which is not a part of yourself. For a few moments you may succeed. If you try this mentally, it gets labeled as greed, conquest or maybe shopping. Some people go for conquest with swords and guns – some people go with cheque books, cash, and credit cards!

Whether you want wealth or something else, the whole effort is to make something that is not you, yours. If you try this on the emotional level, we call it love. You are trying to make someone a part of yourself, emotionally. If you do it consciously, we call it yoga. Yoga means union. All the other methods to include someone or something as a part of yourself have their own beauty but also their own limitations. There is nothing right or wrong about it – it is just that it will only work briefly, not for always. When you realize that, you consciously try to include. When you consciously become inclusive, if you sit here and you experience everything as yourself, then you are a yogi. This is a love affair that is successful.