Love is not attachment. Love is not attachment. Love is satisfaction. Probably you wonder what does he mean? What do you mean by satisfaction? Love is also appreciation. Appreciate the individual or article or things. When you appreciate, that is the basis of love. Dissatisfaction and not appreciating is not love. Even though people will say, if you are a close friend, “Point out your faults.” It is true. But if you do point out the truth, nobody likes it. Nobody will appreciate it. So love is appreciation. If there is no appreciation, there is no love. So love is something that we all like. We all love it. We all want it. We are all happy with it.
But true love, we don’t know. Not only we don’t know true love, we just don’t know the love truly. When we don’t know the true love, then we will measure the love with our own desire. So we bring our own desire to try to measure with the other person. So when it’s not matching, then you want to change it. You want it changed. So we say, ‘I love you, you are wonderful, but I wish your hair was a little longer. I wish your hair was a little shorter. It looks better on you. For me it doesn’t matter, but it looks better on you. We say, right, but for you. Or I wish, I love you, you are great but I wish you’d fix your tooth, you shouldn’t look that way. While all these are coming, the critiques/criticism is coming in. Although we think as a friend we should truly criticize in order to improve. Yes, it is true in one way, but it is not true in another way because the moment you see the faults, you begin to have dislike. It is anti-love.
So good old Western saying – like,” I love you as you are, I love you what you are.” These are at least giving you an idea of what love is all about. So again, love you have to develop on a slow process. You can’t be loving for everybody else, which will be almost impossible. That also has to be developed on the basis of one individual even. So first, develop love within your family, spouses. Then try to develop with other people that you are not necessarily connected. When you are doing well with that, then you can think of the mother-in-law. So if you think of the mother-in-law right from the beginning, you are going to shut your door completely. So it begins, love begins at home with the family, spouses, husband, wife, children. Children are the easiest way to develop love because they are cute, they are sweet, they are wonderful. They are kind. l So it is really…. and they are innocent. So it is very easy to develop love on the basis of the children.
So, then the moment the person becomes judgmental, it is very difficult to develop love because the person becomes judgmental, very judgmental. Right? So, all of those. So we all know about love. We live in love. We enjoy love. But again, love/attachment . Love without attachment. Pure love. All these are love but in different categories and what the spiritual path is looking at is pure love – true, genuine, appreciating – not only appreciating but even desiring to seek that quality for me. Not only I appreciate you – looking at you, but I would like to act myself in that manner.
When you see somebody dressed very well, then you’d like to copy that. When you really like it, you try to copy it – color combination, matching shape, or design, everything; you try to copy that, right? Because you like it. That’s why you want to copy. You don’t want to copy because you dislike it. So nobody does that.
So the true genuine love, not only appreciates, but you would like to be that one. You yourself…. And we do have that very much within our system. And that’s why those commercials will exploit everything, the clothes, the dress shops will put out the beautiful, young, or old but beautiful. Now, not only the beautiful things, but also the beautiful heavy, all of them dressed beautifully, dressed attractively, and all those young and old, thin and people with a little bit of weight. They put on the beautiful dresses and do fashion shows or whatever. So you are doing that and you also have the models that are not only young and thin but also mature and dignified. So you are having all of those today because of how the desire of people is. To fulfill, to satisfy the desire of the people, that’s what they chose. So we are very much known about this love.
Love is not a strange thing. Love is great. Love is perfect. Love is smooth. Love is wonderful – but desire or attachment may not necessarily be. Because pure love brings joy and happiness; attachment brings suffering -because attachment is selfish-oriented. Pure love is pure appreciation. No self-interest. The moment we bring self-interest, the good old Western saying – “Don’t put your dirty nose in these clean affairs.” That’s what we are doing. We put our dirty nose in it. Making that pure impure.
To make pure impure is very easy. To make impure pure is difficult – needs a lot of processing. Pure making impure is so easy. Put your dirty nose in there and it becomes impure. Have mud on your finger and put it in your pure glass of water. There you are. It is impure. So becoming impure is very easy. But pure will be, then you have to throw that water out, wash the glass, filled up anew – or then if you use the same old water, then you have to do a lot of filtering processing. So many things, right? So many things.
So just like that pure love makes a lot easier for life, for joy, for happiness. When Buddha is talking about love, Buddha is talking about pure love. When we are looking at love and compassion, the basis of the compassion is love. Love is based on equality. If you don’t feel equal, how can you feel love equally? If there is rough ground you cannot have smooth at all. Sort of the pure ground of equality has to be moisturized by love and then we can put the seed of compassion.
~ Gelek Rimpoche, Jewel Heart Netherlands, April 28, 2013