Love can be impure, then it creates bondage

• Love can be impure, then it creates bondage. When it is pure it brings freedom. The whole process of sannyas is of purifying your love-energy. It is mixed with many things, because our society makes every child a mess. There is lust, which is not love but millions of people think that is love; it is just a biological instinct. It is just nature trying to continue the race. It has nothing to do with you; it is almost impersonal.

• Love is not possessiveness; many people think that’s what love is: you possess somebody totally. To possess somebody is to destroy all possibility of love. Possessiveness can be hate but cannot be love, it can be fear but it cannot be love.

• One has to drop possessiveness, one has to drop the very idea of dominating, one has to give freedom if one wants freedom. Whatsoever you want for yourself give to others. And if you cannot give even to those you love, to whom else can you give it? And the only gift worth giving is freedom. And the miracle is that the moment love gives freedom it becomes pure, absolutely pure. And in that purity it rises to its ultimate height. That height is prayer. At that height you start meeting, merging with the eternal, with the infinite.

• Nothing else is needed if one can go on watching all those elements which made one’s love impure and drop them so ultimately only love is left. Then love is just fragrance — so sweet and of such grandeur that one cannot imagine it, there is no way to imagine it, one can only experience it. It is of the beyond, penetrating the thick layers of the earthen existence. It is like a ray coming from the ultimate source. Jesus says god is love — and he is right.