There are many different types of love, but the only one that really matters is the unconditional kind.
When Ram Dass met his guru, he was aware that guruji could see everything hidden within him - the good and the bad, the shame and the guilt, the deepest, darkest hidden secret things - his guru saw all of this. What was equally evident to Ram Dass was that guruji loved him anyway, wholly, completely and without needing the slightest thing in return.
This is the real meaning of true love: a love that knows you are lovable, right here, right now, exactly as you are in this moment. We are all full of doubt and mistakes, but we are all made of love and deserving of it.
This love is satchitananda (sat=truth/chit=consciousness/ananda=bliss) and as Georg Feuerstein writes:
… this bliss is not a state of mind, but the condition that remains when all psycho-mental phenomena have been transcended.
Satchitananda lies behind everything, always.
There is nothing we can do to earn or find this love.
Our work is only to remove all the barriers that we have placed between ourselves and it.
Oh, those barriers are sticky! The quest to be worthy of love, the nagging self-doubt and rehashing of past mistakes. We think we are unworthy; we are wrong. The work of yoga is to connect with unconditional love and once connected to let it run through our veins. It is not enough to receive it, we must be able to give it too. And we can’t have one without the other. If you think you can easily love everyone, but you don’t love yourself just the same, then you have a little more work to do.
By its very definition, unconditional love cannot belong to some and not to others; it can’t be possible for them, but not for you.
This is how Larry Brilliant describes the wonder of Neem Karoli Baba's love:
what ... staggered me (was) not that he loved everybody, but that when I was sitting in front of him, I loved everybody.
For all cynics who think that all of this sounds a little bit narcissistic, I ask you: if everyone loved unconditionally and felt themselves worthy of love would they be grabbing on to power and prestige to prove themselves? Would they be talking badly of others and being unkind? Could they hurt anyone or anything?
No, people who understand this wisdom and embrace it, live in kindness, live in peace.
Sarah x