When love is not love – Lessons from Ramayana

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
as I mentioned not all love is actually love misdirected love can be misdirected in many ways there can be wrong object wrong method wrong result what do you mean by wrong object now Ravan thought that he was actually loving Sita but Sita was already married to Ram and he had to regulate it he thought I will make you my favorite queen and Ravan actually he thought I am offering Sita privilege in fact he did trash talked Ram he said Ram is just a pauper what is he giving you I will give you the wealth unparalleled in the world and he initially thought actually I am doing something good for Sita and he believed or at least he imagined that I will win Sita over after all I am so glorious what woman can refuse me and still he had some suspicion maybe she will refuse initially then I will abduct her so he thought that he was doing something good but he did not think that I am doing something wrong he had no moral sense he thought that so there are many people who may act out of selfish desire but they may think it is love so when some emotion is directed toward what do you mean by wrong object it is object that goes against the principles of dharma then that is not love it may seem like love but it is not love sometimes it may be the wrong method so Kaikeyi she loved Bharat and it was natural for a mother to want to protect the interest of her son but there was no threat for Bharat Ram and Bharat they had the best of relationship and Ram was not going to deprive Bharat of everything Ram did not see Bharat as a rival and Bharat did not see himself as Ram’s rival so she had loved Bharat and she thought she was taking care of Bharat but she went about it by completely wrong way so for a mother to love her child is not wrong but what we do because of that love that may be wrong at times now sometimes it can be wrong result Dhritarashtra was told that your son has demoniac characteristics those who are wise in those times they could see right from the birth what kind of characteristics a child has and especially because he was born with very inauspicious signs there were jackals who were making all kinds of sounds and there are all various inauspicious omens so Vidura said abandon this child you will have 99 other children just abandon this one child of course it is difficult for a father to abandon the child but he was not just a father he was a king he should have abandoned but he didn’t he thought I am loving my child but what happened in the name of loving his child he ended up pampering him he ended up unwittingly empowering the dark side within Duryodhana till Duryodhana became demoniac so now sometimes we may use the word attachment we may use the word lust we may use the word illusion these words are different but people who are doing it they may think it is actually love so it’s not love so we need intelligence to understand this it’s remarkable in this world that even people who do terrible things very few of them actually think that they are doing terrible things criminals when they are caught sometimes criminals there was one serial killer in America several decades ago he just went around killing so many people and finally he was caught and then that was the time when people were studying sociopaths the psycho has asked him to write his story why did you do all this and he wrote out the story in such a way that he thought that actually I did it for my loved ones I did it out of love killed hundreds of people and he thought he is doing it out of love so just because we think that we are loving that doesn’t necessarily mean we are loving we need to educate our intelligence to understand what is love so intelligence reveals what is love and exposes what is masquerading as love because love is such a powerful emotion the forces of illusion in this world sometimes put on that masquerade to be able to manipulate us and unless we are well we are astute we will not know what is actually love and what is