Skip to main content

On Love

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar describes three kinds of love in his book Celebrating Silence:

There are three kinds of love: the love that comes out of charm, the love that comes out of comfort, and Divine love.

The love that comes out of charm does not last long. It comes out of unfamiliarity or out of attraction. In this love, you lose attraction quickly, and boredom sets in, like most love marriages. This love may diminish and bring along with it fear, uncertainty, insecurity and sadness.

The love that comes out of comfort and familiarity grows. You are more comfortable with an old friend who is a familiar person, rather than with a new person. But this love has no thrill, no enthusiasm, no joy or fire in it.

Divine love supersedes all other love. Divine love is always new and the closer you get, the more charm and depth you experience. Divine love brings comfort, familiarity and enthusiasm. There is never boredom, and it keeps you alert and aware.

I have been told more than once that my expectations from marriage and relationships are quite unrealistic and likely to do me more harm than good in the long run. It seems that I have been seeking (and failing to find) the third kind of love. It describes exactly what I have never experienced. I am familiar with the feelings of fear, uncertainty, insecurity, sadness, lack of thrill and enthusiasm while in "love" which appears to come with the territory of mortal love. Sometimes, words of wisdom don't help you come any closer to the answer.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
whatever anyone says is going to sound like preaching - actually it is in a way.

Would like to understand the meaning of marriage from your perspective - is it two people living the life of one (including compromise / sacrifice by one or the other all the time), living togather because they have to?

take care.
5:20 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more