Pujya Swamiji says it’s essential to discover that we are loving and compassionate.
Intrinsically every individual is a loving person whether one knows one’s self or not. And that love transforms itself into various emotions such as compassion, sympathy, giving, sharing, and understanding. These are considered virtues and values that are to be cultivated.
We are preached at all the time, “Be loving! Be compassionate!” What can we do about that mandate? If we are loving, then all of those emotions such as compassion, sympathy, giving, sharing, and understanding are manifestations of that love. And it is that same love alone in a distorted form that is discerned as hatred, jealousy, and so on. We have to discover that we are loving and compassionate.
If we understand the reasons that inhibit and stifle the expression of that loving person and are alive to that understanding, we can safeguard that uninhibited love from various habitual emotions. Neither do we like to have those habitual emotions, nor do others like to see them in us.
One of the most powerful factors that inhibits our love and stifles the expression of that loving person is lack of trust. Trust is one of the most eroded things in our life.
Many a good relationship is broken because of this incapacity to communicate. Love works only in the form of trust. If we trust, we can love. If we don’t trust, then what happens is the discovered love gets stifled and mutilated by this lack of trust. We find later that it is all due to one’s own unconscious. One cannot relax in that discovered love.
There is also a psychological order. That I am not able to love is because of that order. It is not that I have to discover a new loving person; I am a loving person. Then what is it that denies me being that loving person? Well, there is a psychological order, which we have to understand; and that order is not separate from the Lord. There is also a cognitive order, an order that really makes the difference in our life. That is the basic order for a self-conscious human being. This world is like a jigsaw puzzle. Things have to fall in their own place. And to make things fall in their own place is cognitive. It is because of the cognitive order that we know, we explore, and we inquire. Whether we inquire into the cosmos scanning the sky, or we inquire into this micro world of particles, electrons, and their behaviour, still that is the cognitive person. That is the person who has to understand, basically, what the whole thing is. There is an order of memory, too, which includes the unconscious. It is all memory—feeling memories; feelings with-words memories; feelings-without-words memories. All these come under the same psychological order alone.