Words from the Master

Yes… Anyone wants to clarify anything?

Swamiji, what about love between a mother and a child? Is it not self less love?

Even motherly love comes with expectations, ma. Many times, people have confronted me with arguments when I say this. Let me tell you, a mother loves her son alright. But at the end of the day, there is a non-perceivable, unwritten expectation written on that love. If the son rubs her on the wrong side just once, the first words that would come out would be those telling the things that she had done for him since his childhood. A small dent in the relationship is enough to bring the whole thing out.

Real love, is the expression of the Existential Energy in you and this love can never think of any such arguments. It only knows to flow without a reason. It doesn’t know to maintain any track record. It doesn’t know to keep track and connect with the past and argue. It flows because it overflowed, that’s all! It never questions because it does not know to question!

The moment you cite incidents from the past, it means that expectations were always there hidden behind your love and when it is this way, it can never be real love. Understand that.

It is the same way when it comes to the son also. The son loves the mother, expecting her to look after him, expecting her to wake up at five and pack his lunch for him, expecting her to maintain his clothes for him, without missing a single day. He adores the mother because he enjoys the care and concern, the luxury.

A small story:

A boy was learning fractions in his school.
One day, the teacher asked him, “If there was a cake and we divided it into 5 portions and gave it to each of your family members, what fraction of the cake will you get?”
The boy replied, “2/5 Ma’am.”
The teacher asked, “How? Haven’t you studied your fractions well?”
The boy replied, “Ma’am, my mother will give her piece to me if I like the cake.”

You see, mothers want to sacrifice for their children, alright, but the attitude with which they sacrifice is what we are talking about. They should do it out of simply an overflowing in them, not out of any hidden expectations. These events will never get recorded in them if they do it out of overflowing. And even if they get recorded, they will not surface with a vengeance when things like this happen. Only when they do it as a duty-bound love, they will record these incidents and recall them also.

Common love always thrives on expectation. No one can deny this, although everyone may vehemently try to. The expectation in love is so well woven into it that it is hard to perceive it and very hard to believe when someone talks about it.

Actually, as long as things go smoothly, it is difficult to believe this. But we hear of so many cases where sons and daughters are written off from the family for simple reasons! Simply because they married outside the community, or simply because there was some feud in the family. Where did all the love disappear suddenly?

Until such incidents happened, the son or daughter would have been loved very much in the family. The so-called love would have reigned supreme. What happened suddenly? Why did it suddenly disappear? How can it suddenly disappear if it was real love? This is not the kind of reaction that real love will generate. Real love can never confuse itself with anything else because nothing can make it stop from flowing! It is not bound by any cause-effect cycle.

Even in subtle family issues, if you are deeply aware, you will understand how bound your love is. Just try to re-arrange a few things in your life, and watch how your own family will react to it.

With your children, as long as you provide for them in the name of love, they also enjoy living out of your graciousness, in the name of love. As long as you don’t rub each other the wrong way, it is alright. If either of you behaves in an unexpected fashion, the mood of the love changes; the whole flavour changes. It doesn’t take much time or effort for the flavour to change, because it is not a natural flavour; it is an artificial flavour with an artificial colouring!

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.