Love is Absolutely Necessary If We Ever Expect to Get Full Realization Lester Levenson Speaking to Students in California, February 25, 1965
I thought tonight I might talk on the subject of love. Love is one word I seldom use, mainly because it's so misunderstood. I also believe that through this method of growing or only through growth do we understand what love is; that by defining it we just add some more words to the usual words and it doesn't really convey the meaning of the word love. But love is an absolutely necessary ingredient on the path, if we ever expect to get full realization. We must increase our love until it is complete. Now, the love I talk about of course has nothing to do with sex. Sex is a body gratification. However, we have confused it, most of us, very much with love. And the majority of us still tie it in with love. Although, when you see what sex is and what love is, you'll see they're two different things. They can be tied together, but they don't have to be. The love that we talk about
here is the love of Jesus Christ. It's the love complete, which expressed in the extreme is "Love thy enemy." I think the best definition of the word, as it seems to me, is love is a feelingness of givingness with no expectation of receiving for the giving. It's a very free giving. And it's an attitude that is constant. Love doesn't vary, at least the type of love we're talking about. The amount we have, we apply to everyone. We love our family as much as we love strangers. This might sound odd but this is the truth. To the degree we're capable of loving strangers, to that degree we're capable of loving our families. The concept of possession is just the opposite of the meaning of love. In love there is never a holding on to, a fencing in, or anything like that. Love has a sense of freeing the ones we love. When we are giving, we have an attitude, we want the other one to have what the other one wants. I guess the best example of this type of love is the love of a mother for a child and sometimes a father. A mother will sacrifice and give everything to the child without considering herself.
There are many other definitions for love, I'm just trying to think what they are. I think acceptance is a good word. When we love people, we accept them the way they are. If we love this world, we accept the world the way it is. We don't try to change it, we let it be. We grant the world its beingness, the same way we should grant every other person his or her beingness. Let them be the way they want to be. Never try to change them. Try to change them is injecting our own ego. We want them to be the way we would like them to be. So love is a feeling, first of all, of oneness with, of identity with the other one or all other ones. When there's a full love you feel yourself as the other person. Treating the other person is just like treating your very own self. There's complete identity.
Love is not only a feeling, love is a tremendous power which is so little understood in the world today. We have an example of this type of love being expressed today by Martin Luther King. No matter how much he's attacked, he will give out nothing but love to his attacker. He teaches non-violence. Now, the biggest demonstration of this type of love was Mahatma Gandhi's winning a war against Britain
without any arms. Through teaching, the British are our brothers, we love the British, non-resistance to the British and to the British soldiers, only love for them. Gandhi understood this and was able to win over enough followers in India to make this effective. |