Q : How to overcome the craving for love and how to overcome loneliness?
Aditya Sharma
Answer The craving for love is an absolutely wrong word. You can say that I am craving for attention, I am craving for appreciation, I am craving for sex and I am craving for people to talk to me. Love has nothing to do with this. Love never comes from any source from outside.
Love always comes from within and if you don't have this love in your heart then you will never experience it from outside. People say that I feel good because my wife, my husband, my girl friend, my brother, my friend loves me but the truth is, they don't love you, they are attached to you. They are deriving some satisfactions through you, that is why they get along with you. The satisfactions could be financial, emotional, physical or sexual.
You are satisfying their needs and they are satisfying your needs. So, it is a mutual attention and mutual covering up of needs of one another. You wrongly interpret the symbiosis as love. It is not love.
I would say, just for sake of experimentation, stop giving money to your wife, stop taking your girl friend for a ride or a cinema or for an outing, then you for will see, for how long she would stay in a relationship with you.
If mother stops caring for her children, doesn't prepare their food, clothes, doesn't help them in their school home work and stops taking her children to picnics, outings and shopping, then you see if the kids still love their mother. The kids will hate you, so will the wife, husband, girlfriend and boyfriend hate the ones whom they are attached to. They will hate each other. Isn't it right?
Do it, then you will come to know. All those people who say that no, this is not the case, I have many people who love me. Please put your love to test or else how would you know whether it is love or not. And, if they really need you and may be if they have the patience they would wait longer and one day when the patience is gone, they will kick your butt and throw you out.
These days in most of the metropolitan cities one girl is having more than three or four boy friends and one boy is having more than three or four girl friends and they call it an open relationship. "We are open; we can see as many partners as we want, we should taste and test the waters, we must check out the happenings around us. One day we will make a decision of getting married and even then, we will make the things clear that although we will be married but still we will be open to be in more relationships."
Can you understand what they mean? They imply that officially you will be my wife yet I can see any woman. Officially you will continue to be my husband but still I can see any man. Is this love? Do you think it is love? It is indeed not love. So in name of friendships, sexual interactions, business interactions, people propagate love.
Know this for sure that no one can give any love to anyone because love is not a commodity which can be given to someone. Love is deep in you.You have to go inwards to experience love and if you don't know how to go inward then you will never ever experience what love.
The other part of your question, how to come over loneliness?
As long as you are afraid of your own mind, you will be looking for someone to be with you. And this desire, that I need someone around me, creates slavery. And slaves can't be happy people. So if you don't want to live in loneliness then learn love to your aloneness.
But you don't know how to be alone; being alone is a punishment for you. Learn to be alone and learn to do some thing creative in aloneness. Painting, poetry, dancing, music, reading or emptying your mind, Yoga asana, Yog Nidra, Pranayam. Do all these things when you are alone. One day you will begin to love this aloneness. And then you will never be lonely…………you will love this loneliness. And, then even if you will be in a jungle yet you will not be lonely.
Gurumaa
