“Love is not a passing emotional state or a spontaneous impulse. It is a form of knowledge that allows us to discover what remains hidden in ordinary experience. To love is not to possess, but to understand without needing to control. In this attentive openness, one of the highest capacities of human beings is revealed: the ability to shift the focus away from our own interests and recognize in others an irreducible presence.
In The Symposium, Plato defines love as the movement of the soul that ascends from the sensible to the intelligible. It does not imply rejection of the body, but rather the education of desire toward its fulfillment. For Plato, to love is to reactivate the memory of the eternal. Genuine love is not exhausted in appearance, but rather passes through it in search of what remains.
St. Augustine put it succinctly and decisively:
“Dilige et quod vis fac.”
“Love and do what you will” (In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos, Tract. 7,10).
When love is true, the will orders itself. It requires no external norms, for it is guided by the truth that dwells within it. No law is superior to just love.
In the Hebrew tradition, the fundamental ethical principle is not an imposed obligation, but a commandment of the heart:
וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
This statement demands a radical openness: the self does not attain its truth in isolation, but in the active recognition of the other as a constitutive part of itself.
In Mahayana Buddhism, Shantideva states:
“All the happiness that exists in this world comes from the desire for others to be happy.”
Love does not consist of attachment, but of lucid compassion. Desiring the good of others without seeking gain requires constant inner vigilance and deliberate discipline of thought.
Rumi, an Islamic mystic, expressed it with sober precision:
“Your task is not to seek love, but to find within yourself all the barriers you have built against it.”
The obstacle does not come from outside, but from the defensive mechanisms that one has assumed to be natural. To love means dismantling these constructs to allow the real to enter.
Despite cultural and doctrinal differences, all these traditions converge on the essential: love is not an emotional outpouring or an irrational impulse. It is a stable disposition, a lucid presence, a sustained choice that requires inner training. It does not confuse, it clarifies. It does not chain, it liberates. It does not invade, it accompanies. In its highest form, loving does not mean seeking in another what one lacks, but allowing the best of oneself to emerge by renouncing the desire to impose oneself. Then love ceases to be a need and becomes a gift. And yet, even in its most demanding form, love remains that which makes a single glance, when it is true, enough to illuminate an entire day.
Prabhuji
