Love and Happiness: Immortal Love is Within Reach

By Sri Sri Ravishankar

What is the purpose of life? What do we want? Some say the purpose of life is to ensure that one doesn't come back to this planet - because it is bereft of love. When love is there, it is painful.

By taking a multilateral view of life, one can begin to see the purpose of life from all angles. Then we come to realise that we want a love that doesn't die out, a love that doesn't cause pain, a love that grows and stands forever.

Suppose you were immensely successful and you had all the riches at your command and you were famous - but love was absent from your life. Then life would not really be worthwhile; it would appear barren.

From every angle we would come to the same conclusion - that all we long for in life is love; a divine love, a love that is ideal. The purpose in life is to bloom in that ideal love.

Why then do we lead a loveless life? It is our ego which is obstructing our path towards achieving love. What is ego? Ego is like a dream. A dream exists until it doesn't exist. You can't call a dream real but you cannot call it unreal either, because you have the experience.

Ego is simply being unnatural. If the ego is so unnatural why does every human being have an ego? The reason we have the ego is because it is necessary in some way for our growth in life.

A seed has a covering or shell over it, and when you soak it in water, it sprouts, and then the cover peels off. Similarly, the ego is a necessary unnaturalness that develops in you as a child of two or three years. Before that, you are in a state of total, innocent, blissful love.

Then the ego forms a cover. What knowledge does is to uncover this shell from you and make you again like a child, natural, simple and innocent. When you are natural, simple and innocent, there is no ego.

The ego is not a substance; it is a non-substance, much like darkness. Darkness is only lack of light. There is nothing called an ego that has substance. You could say it is just a lack of maturity or a lack of pure knowledge.

How can the ego be overcome? Through observing oneself and by going deep into one's self in meditation.

A sutra in the Narada Bhakti Sutras says: "Knowledge is one of the aids to discover the naturalness". Half knowledge brings ego in the first place. When knowledge is full, when knowledge has matured, the ego drops and simplicity dawns. Ego is just a lack of total development, a lack of total understanding. That doesn't mean it should not have been there from the very beginning. The ego has been necessary, but now you can grow out of it.

Knowledge is an aid to develop our innermost layer, which is love. Everyone is made up of a substance called love. The purpose of knowing, the purpose of every civilisation, is to facilitate the opening of love.

Through understanding, and through meditation, you get over these barriers and become simple, natural and innocent, which leads to love.

We have been educated in many disciplines. We may know how to operate a complex computer, but we falter when faced with the forces that make up life.

No one teaches us how to live life. We need to make that extra effort to learn more about our own mind and ego, and find out who we are and why we are here. And only love can help us widen our knowledge and understanding of life and the world around us.

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)