True Love

Source: AvatarMeher.org, AMB Hyderabad Center

True love is very different from an evanescent outburst of indulgent emotionalism or the enervating stupor of a slumbering heart. It can never come to those whose heart is darkened by selfish cravings or weakened by constant reliance upon the lures and stimulations of the passing objects of sense.

Even when one truly loves humanity, one longs to give one’s all for its happiness. When one truly loves one’s country, there is the longing to sacrifice one’s very life without seeking reward and without the least thought of having loved and served. When one truly loves one’s friends, there is the longing to help them without making them feel under the least obligation. When truly loving one’s enemies, one longs to make them friends. True love for one’s parents or family makes one long to give them every comfort at the cost of one’s own. Thought of self is always absent in the different longings connected with the various stages of pure, real love; a single thought of self would be an adulteration.

-Path of Love, p67