Where does our longing for love come from?
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Transcript
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Where does the longing for love come from? It comes from the soul.
The soul, the Atma, as the Bhagavad Gita says, has an eternal relationship with God, with Krishna. And presently, we are in a state of spiritual amnesia. So, we, there are actually, you could say there are two levels of ignorance.
Let me take an example first of, say, intoxication. Sometimes, if people drink too much, they realize, I am drunk now, too much, I have to be careful. I can’t drive myself.
Ask somebody else to drive me home. But, sometimes people drink so much that they don’t even realize they are drunk. Everything is alright.
I am okay. I am okay. I can’t even say that, but I think I am okay.
So what happens? When we are so drunk that we don’t even realize we are drunk. So like that, we as souls, we are in illusion. Sometimes we are so deep in illusion that we are not even aware that we are in illusion.
So, the soul has an eternal longing for love. And, just like initially, when a person is a little drunk, that person understands, okay, something is wrong. I have to take some precautions.
So like that, in our lives, sometime or the other, we come to situations when we perceive there must be something more to life. Yes, I have many career goals, and I am pursuing them. And I may get some of them, I may not get some of them, but there must be something more to life.
Our society is largely a part of a rat race, a lot of competition. Now, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win the race, you still remain a rat. That means, we don’t get out of that competition.
We may just achieve something which is significant, but still we are still in that competitive circle. So, there must be something higher to life. So that sense that there is something higher to life, that is actually the soul’s prompting for transcendence.
But sometimes we get so covered, that we don’t even realize that there is something higher. We are completely caught in pursuing the same things again and again and again, and yet again. So the soul’s longing for love, our longing for love, it is actually the soul’s longing for God.
But when it is very distorted, then that longing gets misdirected towards worldly things. And worldly things also, there can be various degrees. It’s not that everything worldly is necessarily undesirable.
There can be fascination for ideas. So science, literature, art, and that leads to products which can be good, which can be ennobling in certain ways for humanity. And sometimes it becomes so distorted that people become destructive, malevolent.
So all these are the spectrum over which the original longing for love is misdirected. But it comes from the soul, and when it is directed towards Krishna, then it brings lasting fulfillment. Thank you.