Intense Love - II

Anjali: Does it become a higher love depending upon the qualities of the person we love?.Swamiji: The emotion is the same in both the higher and the lower kinds of love. When we direct our love towards a higher, a more inspiring ideal, our minds expand, our faculties broaden, our vision deepens and our efficiencies multiply. When the same emotion of love goes towards external objects of pleasure, things or beings, it slowly shells us into a life of tensions and anxieties, into a prison of sorrows and excitements, pangs and sobs. It is then that we really ‘fall’ in love!.Anjali: How can we know that our love is noble?.Swamiji: We ‘rise’ in love when love is true and dynamic and there is a great joy felt in giving love rather than meekly hoping to receive. Love is its own reward. Such a person is not a beggar at love's temple-gate. Very few realise this; no one dares to live it in life. To give love is true freedom, to demand love is pure slavery..Anjali: What would you say is the highest moral advice?.Swamiji: Love is the highest moral truth and hence ‘love thyself’ is the greatest moral injunction if the seeker does not misunderstand the advice. It does not mean loving the body or obeying the mind meekly. The mind and intellect are gross matter envelopments that have come to seemingly limit the illimitable Supreme Consciousness which is the real Self in all of us. When the seeker's mind melts in the warmth of his single pointed love for God, the Self in us, the sublime fusion of the finite with the Infinite takes place.