Love is our deepest longing

• Love is our deepest longing. Just as the body needs food the soul needs love — it is nourishment, spiritual nourishment. Without the food, air and water, the body will deteriorate; without love the soul starts shrinking. And everybody is living with a very small soul for the simple reason that they have not loved.

• And why have they not loved? If you enquire into the question you will be surprised, because for the whole of their life everybody is trying to get love. But people are trying to get, not to give, and the law of love is that you get only when you give. Giving comes first, getting is only a consequence.

• And people are asking the impossible; they want first: “Give me love.” Everybody, in a thousand and one ways, is saying “Give me love”, but love comes only when you give; you cannot demand it. Hence the whole world is suffering; everybody is full of love, the world can become a very loving place, but it is just the opposite of it — full of hatred, anger, rage, violence, destruction, for the simple reason that everybody is full of love and nobody is giving. They are asking and demanding and trying to force and snatch away.

• Now, love is not a thing that you can force, love is not a thing that you can possess, love is not a thing that can be snatched away in any way. It is beautiful only, alive only, when it is given without any demand on your part, when it comes of its own accord. And it comes on its own accord whenever you give; in fact it comes a thousandfold.

• So give as much love as possible and you will get so much in return that you will not be able to believe it in the beginning. It is absolutely unbelievable that the whole existence starts pouring love towards you.

• You just show the gesture of giving, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, no expectations, let your joy be in the giving itself — love for love’s sake — and you will be in for a great surprise: thousands of windows suddenly open and the sun and the wind and the rain and the whole existence starts flowing towards you. It floods you, and that flooded life is the life of a buddha, that life is the goal of a sannyasin.