# The Unclear Journal: 13 There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a room when someone has just spoken an unwelcome truth. It is not the silence of peace, nor of agreement. It is the silence of collision—where words have met the world and left a crack. I was thinking about this when a friend asked me, without warning, whether I believe in anything anymore. The question hung between us like smoke. I wanted to answer quickly, to brush it away with a quip or a deflection. But something in her eyes held me still. Do I believe? In what does one believe? In God, perhaps—that ancient bargain we've been striking since we learned to fear the dark. In people? That seems too easy now, having watched so many disappoint themselves before disappointing others. In progress? The word itself feels like a joke we tell ourselves, a story we invented to make sense of suffering. But then she said—and this is what I cannot forget—"I think belief is not about certainty. It's about direction. It's where you're facing when you don't know what comes next." And I realized that my silence, my refusal to believe, was itself a kind of belief. A belief that nothing matters enough to stake yourself on. A belief in emptiness. Perhaps the unclear journal exists precisely here, in this space where we cannot name what we hold. We move through our days half-convinced of things we dare not speak aloud. We love people we tell ourselves we don't trust. We hope for futures we claim to have abandoned. The clarity I once sought now seems less important than the courage it takes to live within ambiguity—to say "I don't know" and keep walking anyway.

Eighty-five.
We must remake ourselves now, from this moment forward—we must break open our own minds and convince them to speak with us alone, or else we shall never reach our true roots. Even if we were to visit every house of worship on earth, we would still never find our Creator. Though we follow the teachings of all the world's scriptures, though we pray and perform rituals without end, though we labor behind a thousand other pursuits, still—after all of it—we cannot reach the Creator. Only the prayer of love can carry us to our Creator. If love alone dwells within us, we need not even pray; it will happen of itself. Even if we say nothing, the Creator understands us, hears us. A person rich in love, though they may lack great learning, becomes capable of acquiring true knowledge and wisdom of life. Real love teaches us to bow. If we learn only to bow before love itself, then love comes willingly and surrenders to us. For this is the truth: love is not cultivated anywhere, love cannot be bought in any marketplace—love can only be earned through love itself.

In the kingdom of love, there is no distinction between rich and poor, between king and minister. In the kingdom of love, a wealthy person and a beggar walk always in the same row. Love has but one law: if we desire love, we must bow our heads. To possess love, a person may have to lose themselves, may have to sacrifice themselves for love—may have to surrender their ego, their family, their masks, their sense of self, all of it. To bow before love means precisely this surrender. If we examine this sacrifice more deeply, we find it has two dimensions. First, we must step outside our ego. This is bound to our brain; it creates within us a sense of self. And so we must always bow our heads to those around us. But why? Why must we bow only our heads to others, and not some other part? Because only our brain holds all our ego, all our sense of self. This is why, when we strike someone before us with words, when we insult them, we are truly wounding their ego.

If we shed our ego, then among us there no longer exist distinctions of rich and poor, white and black, educated and uneducated. Then we are all bound together in one fellowship, all finding shelter together in the shade of one love. Had love been something to purchase in the marketplace, it would certainly have created a vast gulf between rich and poor, for with their abundant wealth, the rich would easily buy up love, while the poor would forever remain impoverished in this regard too. Love has no conditions; it is priceless. Apart from our mind, apart from our sense of self, there is no other way to lose love. A person truly rich in love dissolves their entire being for another, to save another’s life. Often, this sense of self prevents us from shedding our ego. Often, when we attempt to shed our ego and bow before another, our sense of self whispers from within—even if the entire world were destroyed, we would not step away from our self, and so bowing one’s head becomes quite out of the question. This very mentality is what distances us from love. What distances us from our own true nature.

Eighty-six.

When we say we love our companion or partner, we wrench them from their personal freedom, from their likes and dislikes, and in the name of love, compel them to live as we do, to move according to our thoughts and beliefs. We cling to their every action like a shadow, as though they are committing some wrong; we grow angry because they are not living as we wish! When something about them displeases us, we drag forth their entire heritage and lecture them—just as we do when we speak in the names of entire womankind or entire mankind, saying things like: “This is what men are like,” or “This is how women are.” Thereafter, that man or that woman abandons all their freedom, their individuality, their own thoughts to please the person they love, and begins to follow instead the preferences, desires, and beliefs of their beloved. In married life, the degree of quarrelling between man and woman is so severe that no other relationship in the world experiences conflict to such a terrible extent. Women become fierce trying to conform to their husband’s wishes, while husbands become fierce trying to control their wives. Many astounding events occur in the world and come to an end, but the quarrels of husband and wife continue endlessly at the same pace, by the same pattern. Why is this so?

# Because both of them, in some way or other, wish to control each other. They bear children and seek to exert the same influence over them—and thus one person’s control is forcibly imposed upon another. Parents believe that whatever they say is truth. Therefore their children are compelled to obey, and if they disobey, they are forced to comply by any means necessary. Yet the parents themselves do not know whether the path they wish their children to follow is the right one. They themselves have been forced to live lives controlled by others, and now, in steering their children the same way, they are poised to ruin their lives! We parents typically tell our children: I am your father or I am your mother, therefore whatever I say is truth, and you must obey it. If you do not heed my words, you will face terrible punishment. Sometimes we frighten our children by saying: if you do not obey me, you will be turned out of the house, your allowance will be cut off—or if the child is very young, we threaten them with the cane, confine them to their rooms. In short, we do whatever is necessary to make them bend to our will.

In this way, we transform them not into human beings, but into objects. We kill their freedom of thought, their sense of self-respect, everything. The result is that children who are lifeless, spiritless, timid, lazy—they are praised by their parents for their obedience. While children who are vital, cheerful, fresh, enterprising, active, who never fear to rush headlong into solving any problem, who are always running about here and there—these are usually subject to endless complaints from their parents. Then something astonishing occurs. The obedient children become a burden to their parents, while the mischievous and wayward ones do something brilliant. These children shine, for within them lies power—a vast, abundant vitality. Despite all our cunning, despite all our control, they become our teachers.

# The Art of Love

The art of love consists of rendering the ego invisible within ourselves. If we truly love our children, we must learn to bow before them. Only then can we save ourselves from becoming egocentric parents. If we can bow to our children, we will see how they repay us in kind. When we shed our ego in their regard, our children too will learn to shed theirs in ours. Then we can draw close to one another, exchange our thoughts freely, without fear or hesitation. But if we do not bow before them, our children will perpetually feel something amiss; they will remain subdued, forever seeking an escape from this unease. Inwardly, they will speak to themselves thus:—*One day our parents will grow weak, but we will be strong. Then we shall settle accounts for all they have done to us. One day we will truly unleash upon them all the resentment we have harbored, for they have compelled us to obey them endlessly. They have robbed us of our lives, our freedoms, our birthright itself.* And then we will believe our children have strayed from the path, that they are lost.

We are receiving precisely what we once taught them. When they were small and weak, dependent upon us, we oppressed them in just this way. And as time passes, when we grow weak and they grow strong, will they not oppress us in the same manner? Is this not the natural order? This is the immutable law of our deeds—we harvest what we have sown, what we are sowing, what we shall sow. When we shed all our ego before our children, they alone, by nature’s law, will shed theirs before us in our moments of weakness. How beautifully, how easily we destroy and ruin others’ lives in the name of love. In the name of discipline and obedience, how effortlessly we kill! Each time we seize control of another under the guise of love, we indulge our ego all the more, reinforcing the habit of repeating this act again and again.

Eighty-Seven.

The eternal law of life is this: without love, no joy is possible. Where love is absent, life is mere inertia. And where love dwells, the ego surrenders itself. Even if the person we love is younger or lower in station than we are, no ego stirs within us—for then our ego has already surrendered to our love. If she is our wife, we bow our head before her, we do not lord over her, because there is no ego there, only a love that has given itself. Husband and wife are neither above nor below each other; both bow instead to the Creator’s love. Then no one shoots arrows at the other, no one sees the other as lesser or subordinate, but both give themselves to one another. It is our brain that first births the ego, then come the thoughts. Our brain is a kingdom of all thoughts—relevant and irrelevant alike. Our mind is nothing but an endless marketplace of thinking. This realm of ours stirs perpetually with countless thoughts. Even as we sleep, it remains fully conscious, laboring ceaselessly. And we pour so much of our time and energy into these thoughts that we have scarcely any left for love. We have no control over them; they can turn in any direction at any moment, for good or ill.

Our brain is in truth a consuming force. It absorbs all manner of thought. Through these thoughts, our mind drains our energy in such a way that it never reaches the heart. Ninety-nine parts of all our thoughts are useless and unfit for purpose. If we could cast away these unnecessary thoughts, we might escape much harm. Have we ever sat in stillness and consciously asked ourselves whether even one of the thousand thoughts that circle our minds each day—the very ones that occupy us endlessly—holds any real necessity? We most often indulge the thoughts that are harmful and needless to our lives. Scientists have demonstrated that the energy we expend in digging earth all day is far surpassed by the energy we waste through thinking—four times over. Our work does not drain us as much as our thoughts do. Those whose inner life is most contracted—whose mental labor is least—can pour themselves most fully into physical work. Our thoughts know no interruption. They circle endlessly, day and night, in the chambers of our brain. Our body may rest, but our brain knows no rest. It does its work with terrible subtlety. Our brain will not allow our energy to flow elsewhere. It absorbs all the power our body possesses.

On the other hand, our heart is not aggressive like our brain. Our heart plants love within itself in such a way that whenever it is nourished, it spreads its efficacy all around. The seed of love in our heart lies dormant always. Our ego, our thoughts, stop us from watering our heart, and as a result we lose the power of love. If we cannot shake off the various thoughts of our brain, our ego, then the path of our love closes of itself. Among us there are many who read books merely to gather information. Such people spend their whole lives reading, yet never acquire true knowledge. For there is really no connection between information and wisdom. We can accumulate millions upon millions of pieces of information in our brain without becoming wise at all. The human brain has vast space for information, which is why we read so many books and absorb so much data. We know much information, but in truth information does not give us the real education of our lives. There are many who have read abundantly yet failed to awaken their own hearts. Those who have stuffed their heads with information gathered from books may become information-rich, yet need not become wise. A society that looks upon the parrot and the sage with the same eye cannot advance along the path of progress.

Alas, we live in a time when merely absorbing some information is enough for people to call us wise. Sometimes in trying to retain so much information we become genuinely ill. A person drowning under the weight of information must learn even what love is through reading. Yet by memorizing two words about love, one can never truly know love. Only by establishing love in life, by living in love, is it possible to know love. The person who knows how to love need not acquire knowledge of love through books. But for one who has no direct experience of love, it is impossible to gain even a single piece of true knowledge about love, no matter how many thousand books in the world one reads. It matters not how much love we scatter around us, how abundantly we love those we hold dear, or how completely we pour ourselves out in love—still it will never feel sufficient to us. We shall always feel that somewhere something falls short. However much we strive for our own peace of mind by loving the people we love a little more, still something, somewhere, shall forever seem to us incomplete.

Why is it so? Because love is incomplete, the capacity of love is infinite, it has a beginning, but it has no end. Love is like our Creator. Just as our Creator’s power knows no limit, so too is love infinite. And whatever is infinite has no decay, no death. Everything finite in this world is bound to die, but love is boundless; it has neither beginning nor end. No one in this world can say precisely when love began, for it was as it is now from the very dawn of creation, and it continues in that same way even today. So however much we love those around us, those we love, it will never bring us contentment. Have we ever heard anyone say, “I am satisfied with having loved them so much”? Never. Since love never runs out, it too has no death. This is why, when we love someone, we feel as though we have loved them with only half our heart. If only we could love a little more, ah! This is why love is always incomplete. No matter how hard we try, it is impossible to make it whole, for this is the nature of love, this is the very essence of love.

Twenty-eight.

Every time we go to love those we love with our utmost, every time we love them with our utmost, each time we love them more than the time before, and yet our dissatisfaction seems to grow at a constantly accelerating rate. Each dissatisfaction leads us toward the next. Every time we love those we love, we pray that the next time we might love them even more. Love is not a drink that quenches our thirst. Rather, love is a drink that, each time we drink it, doubles our thirst compared to before. When a person loves those they love, their thirst grows twofold, yet their joy multiplies manifold beyond that. The victory of love is a victory where there is no limit to joy. The joy of love is as boundless as love itself. A lustful person is satisfied, but a lover is never satisfied. For lust has a limit, but love is infinite.

Love knows no walls. Whatever we long to do, it never brings us satisfaction. We only ever wish to do more, more and more! Just as the Creator is infinite, just as the Creator’s power is limitless, just as the Creator has neither beginning nor end, love bears that very image of the Creator. Love infuses the human being with a superhuman power. Love is the image of the world’s Creator, and the nature of love is the nature of the Creator. Love is infinite because the Creator is infinite. If our Creator’s power were finite, then our nature, this universe, everything would have ended long ago. But because the Creator’s power is limitless, the boundaries of this universe expand day by day. Whether we join our strength to the Creator’s or whether we see our strength as separate from the Creator’s, the Creator’s power will not change in the slightest. Whether we reject the Creator or doubt the Creator’s power, the Creator remains the Creator. As the Creator was from the beginning of creation, so shall the Creator remain until the end of creation. What the Creator is, the Creator is.

# On Love

It is the same with love. Love was as it is at the beginning of creation, and so it shall remain until creation’s last day. Whether we accept love or deny it, it shall remain dormant in our hearts until that final day. Even if we exhaust it a thousand times over, it knows no depletion, no diminishment. Nothing connected to our heart has an ending. Our body, our mind—these have death, but the heart knows no death. That love which gradually tires is not true love; it is merely a bodily need. And bodily need ends the moment the body reaches its limit. Every path with rest has an end. Love’s path has no rest—it is an endless, destinationless journey toward the infinite. Between giver and receiver, love is an invisible bridge, unseen from without, yet within it, passage never ceases. At love’s beginning, two people exchange love, but gradually it transcends those two and becomes love itself.

Then the giver feels he has emptied himself, and the receiver feels similarly emptied—yet the truth is, there is no longer giver or receiver between them! Only love remains. Love itself transforms two people into love. Thus giver, receiver, and love—these three become one entity, called the essence-of-love, nothing else. These three cannot be separated, for if one is removed, all three perish together. And when we bow before the Creator in profound love, between Creator and Creation there remains only love. Every drop of water that merges with the ocean remains a drop; it never becomes the ocean. The ocean never becomes a mere drop—it stays the ocean. The distance between this drop and the ocean is love. Love is what draws the drop and the ocean toward each other. When these two unite, it is neither drop nor ocean. Then it becomes boundless love, forever uniting the drop with the ocean. When one drop merges with the ocean, can it ever be separated again? Or the ocean from that drop? When two people become one in love, neither can ever be divided. There is no distinction between them.

Ninety-Nine.

Creator and creation are thus. When we love, do we lose anything at all? We obtain the one we love exactly as we obtain ourselves, and along with that, we obtain love itself. What a miraculous discovery! What a miraculous journey! In love, two things happen together—one, we become empty, having lost everything; two, we become empty, having gained everything. In love, there is nothing in between. It always brings us the sensation of either giving our utmost or losing our utmost. Yet in the end, what love gives us is never empty; all of it remains within us. What sorcery this is! In love, through the greatest gift, our vessel miraculously remains fuller than before, so that we may empty ourselves again. We who carry the origin of love within our hearts—how do we search for it blindly in sacred texts or temples, keeping our own hearts at a distance, as if we had never awakened them? Our heart is our greatest temple; our heart is the finest scripture of the world, if only we know how to read it rightly. A person with a holy and pure heart is the most righteous soul on earth.

If we do not know how to enter into ourselves, then even our greatest teacher cannot make us know ourselves. We must ourselves, through our own effort, open the door of our own love. For we have kept it closed for so long that thick layers of filth have accumulated upon it. We must slowly, patiently, clean away that grime. Then there will come a day when all the dirt from our heart is washed away and the door of love swings open. On that very day, we shall taste our true love. We shall find that deep chamber within the mind, which has for so long given us a vast sense of emptiness. Until we ourselves can open the door of our own heart, we cannot know what love truly is. To receive love, to know love, we must first find that love hidden within ourselves. Whoever cannot do this work—no prayer of theirs will bear fruit. The first condition of worship is to awaken one’s own heart.

A teacher can only awaken within us the thirst to discover love, or push us again and again to turn inward—but if we ourselves do not strive, if we ourselves do not attend to what lies within, we shall never find it. The principal means of discovering love within ourselves is to lay bare our own nature before our own heart, to be utterly honest with our conscience. So long as we do not reveal ourselves to ourselves, so long as we cannot fully know ourselves, it is impossible to know love—for to lay ourselves bare to ourselves means to open the door of our own heart. If we cannot open that door, how can we possibly enter within it? We wander about madly, forever searching for the Creator, and we even ask: Does the Creator truly exist? We search ceaselessly for proof of the Creator’s existence. When we do this, when such thoughts arise within us, we ourselves do not know what nonsense we are uttering—for there is only one path to finding the Creator, and that is to lose ourselves. Having lost ourselves, we must awaken our heart step by step, beginning from absolute emptiness.

Just as we must lose ourselves completely, become utterly void, in order to receive love, so too must we surrender entirely to find the Creator, must bow in love before the Creator. If we seek the Creator while leaving ourselves unchanged, we shall never glimpse the Creator. To find proof of the Creator’s existence, we must first allow all our identities to fall away. We are searching for the Creator—and this very fact means we do not yet have the Creator. To put it more plainly: if we remain as we are in this moment, the Creator will remain distant from us. Therefore, to transform ourselves into a necessary new being, we must utterly shatter our present being. In this, we must step outside all our stubbornness, our logic, our experience, our ego—and act from beyond them. When we have become completely unknown to ourselves, when nothing remains that we can call our own, then the Creator Himself will manifest and appear before us. No alphabet can lead us to the Creator unless we ourselves gain true experience of the Creator. No book can give us the feeling of the Creator unless we first prepare our own heart for that feeling.

# Ninety

As water, light, and air are indispensable for a tree’s growth, so too, if we wish to attain the Creator, we must have a purified heart—or rather, the grave of our past existence. Love hangs above our heads like fragments of cloud, and the moment our heart’s door swings open, love will pour down upon us like rain. As heat is the nature of fire, as beauty is the nature of flowers, so too is love the nature of our heart, and the Creator is the nature of our entire being. There is no way to separate it from ourselves. To see love, to perceive it, we must look at it with the eyes of our heart—yet we have turned those eyes away, and so we do not see love. There is another great reason for this: our mind has turned our consciousness in another direction. Love is always around us, but we do not see it. And when love knocks at the door of our mind, we are asleep; we think perhaps we are dreaming; love calls to us again and again, yet we do not answer. In time, it departs on its own. We wake from our sleep and realize that love did indeed knock at our door, and we never knew. Then sleep seems to us like death itself.

Love leaves its footprints at our door, and when we finally perceive that love had come, it is too late, for by then love has departed from us. All of this happens because of our faithlessness. We think love does not exist, and when it comes and goes, we cry out in lamentation. As the Creator exists all around us, in our hearts, everywhere, so too does love exist everywhere within us. May we never lose faith in love; may we never lose faith in the Creator; may we wait with patience in supreme love for the Creator, for love—for when the time comes, the Creator Himself will come to our door, love itself will come to us. Then may we not be asleep; may we receive love the very moment it arrives at our threshold. It is like a strange wave that, unless received at the right time, in the right way, in the right heart, passes on to another who is ready to receive it. Love drifts above our heads like a wisp of cloud, always circling, and when those cloudlets gather and condense, they become a downpour that drenches our heart and brings it peace—as if we have been parched for ages, and our thirst was never quenched.

# The Heart’s Wild Garden

Our heart is unto itself a complete nature. It is savage, overgrown with weeds. It is uncouth, primitive as a jungle. We may polish our intelligence through society’s friction, yet this heart—this can never be polished. None of us can polish it, no human being is capable of such work. Only the Creator dwells in our heart, and only the Creator can transform it by the true path. The further we distance ourselves from ourselves, the more this jungle of the mind grows barren and parched. But if we tend it regularly with love, the forest of our heart gradually becomes verdant, fresh, and alive. If we could imagine our final day today, we would see how wastefully we have squandered our life, how we have spent it ceaselessly in illusion alone. The Creator dwells in our prayer, in our love. The more we invoke the Creator’s name, the more we surrender to the Creator, the more love wraps around us from all sides. A quiet, composed atmosphere dwells perpetually within us. Only when we bow our heads do we see the Creator all around us.

Hardly any of us wish to contemplate or imagine our last day. We think there is still much time left, we believe we have come into this world to stay much longer. Then suddenly one day death knocks at our door, and we realize it is too late! We open our heart’s door and look back—how many times the Creator has come to our threshold—we see the Creator’s footprints at our door, yet alas, by then it is far too late, that day has already passed, we have no time left to turn back! When death suddenly appears at our threshold, we think: if only I had a little more time, I could use the hours I have wasted in life to better purpose. Life offers us much opportunity, yet we carelessly let every chance slip from our hands. We do not truly fear death. Why? Because we do not know what death is, or those who have died—none of them have ever returned to tell us. So we cannot know whether anything exists after death, what death feels like, or what the journey toward it truly is! When a person is ignorant of something, no matter how sweet or terrible it may be, they do not fear it. When death comes to stand before our face, only in that moment do we understand what death is, but what good is knowing then? Will we be given the chance to return that day? Will we be given the chance to perceive the Creator again?

# On Life, Love, and the Reckoning

One day we shall know—truly know—how utterly we have squandered our lives. Only those who have embraced within themselves the Creator, righteousness, the ultimate truth of existence, love itself—only they will greet death with joy. We must forever seek the path where our hearts dance with gladness, where under what circumstance our souls become saturated with love for the Creator. We must be vigilant that the span of our living is not wasted on pursuits hollow and vain. For death rushes toward us always, and when it finally touches us, there will be no time left to turn back. Death grants no reprieve, no negotiation—it comes like a sudden flash of lightning, severing the soul from the body and carrying it away. We must continually search for the pulse of our own hearts. Until we have fully claimed that pulse as our own, we must persist in this search. When we bow before the Creator in love, when we discover a quietude within His name, then we know we walk the right path. But this does not mean we must chatter His name all day like a parrot. When we truly love the Creator, when we can perceive His love alive within us, then in His name we find a peace that deepens our love itself. Real understanding requires no empty repetition.

When the heart becomes drenched in love through the Creator’s name, that feeling rains down upon us as rain cleanses the earth—the Creator’s name purifies our heart, makes it verdant and alive, fresh as nature itself. Yet if we cannot hold the Creator in our mind and heart, if that sublime sensation of love does not quicken our pulse, then even should we pronounce His name ceaselessly, write it on every wall of our home, broadcast it constantly for others to hear—that supreme feeling will awaken nothing in us. The more truly one perceives the Creator, the more silent one becomes. The more the Creator dwells on the lips, the less He dwells in the heart. First, one must feel the Creator and love for Him within the heart; then, when it emerges outward, it radiates a light that surrounds us, deepening that feeling. People understand such a presence without words, without proclamation. Love clarifies the heart; the awareness of the Creator begins there and spreads outward, and beyond this inner radiance, such truth can never truly be found. And a heart full of love—in it, the Creator’s name speaks itself, spontaneously, ceaselessly.

Ninety-One.

Many of us proclaim the Creator’s name aloud, wanting to show others how much we love Him. And we, in turn, often praise such proclamations of love, coaxing the proclaimer onward with encouragement—as if the Creator were something so cheap that by uttering His name a hundred times, we might pocket a thousand rupees, a thousand merits! But this is never the true path. To display our love for the Creator before others may perhaps elevate us somewhat in their eyes, or at best earn us a little pity—or else convince them that I am a good man, an honest man. But does the Creator care one whit for such opinions held by others? What we truly harbor in our hearts, only we know. Only our heart knows—only our Creator knows—how genuinely we have been illuminated by His love, by the true light of that love. If we are saturated with love, surrendered to the Creator, and even if we try to hide it from those around us, even if we do not let them see it, we cannot keep that light hidden—it will radiate everywhere with every step we take. Only then can we love everyone and everything around us, when the Creator’s boundless love stirs within us, when that love overflows from our heart.

To give with both hands full, emptying oneself entirely—only one who possesses abundance can do this. The person whose heart overflows with love cannot remain still without spreading it all around; they must become empty again out of their own necessity, and from that emptiness comes even greater abundance. A person bereft of love, bereft of the Creator, cannot dispense love. To spread love, one must first possess more than one’s own need. But if we ourselves are empty, how can we give to others? We are reduced to such utter emptiness that we cannot even imagine sharing love with anyone. We wander like beggars seeking love; our parched hearts are dying of thirst for it. We return home exhausted, weary, always searching for just a crumb of love. When someone gives us even a morsel of love, when someone looks at us with eyes full of affection, we think: today moonlight has entered my house, a ray of sun has blessed my courtyard, a fountain of joy flows through my home! But when that meager scrap of love fades within moments, we slip back into our former state, and once again we take up our beggar’s bowl, going from door to door seeking a little love from others.

Sometimes, we wish to buy a fragment of smile with money, and that fragment becomes our entire life. But even this smile does not last long. And so we live, begging love from one another. Yet do we truly possess the capacity to give love to anyone? No, we do not. For we have nothing to give, in truth. We merely distribute hope to one another, and that is all we are capable of doing. We are all beggars; we go from door to door of one another, asking alms of love. When we give love to someone, we fancy ourselves kings in our hearts, yet we remain at another’s threshold, begging the very wherewithal to govern our own kingdom! Whether we admit it or not, this is the reality. Only the Creator possesses the power to give love; to receive love is to receive the Creator. We love someone because if we do not receive from them, we expect it from elsewhere, all the while harboring that hope. We wish to empty ourselves, to become void, driven by the desire to get double in return, the greed to be somehow better than another.

Yet if we think deeply, we will see that we are all merely extending our hands at one another’s doors—we are all beggars. We gaze upon those near us, upon those we love, and we imagine them full of love. But the moment we look toward their purse, the moment we scheme to snatch it from them, we see that they too sit empty-handed like us. That purse we long imagined full was as hollow as our own. We promise each other love; we promise to wipe away each other’s sorrows. But in truth, we beg love from one another, for we are both empty. We possess neither the power to give love nor the power to receive it from another. We all stand with empty hands, gazing upward. We are all beggars.

Sometimes, a mere fragment of laughter from the one we love sustains us, brings us mental peace, if only for a moment. We teach our beloved to laugh, so that she might laugh all the more, for her laughter brings the joy of living back into our lives. And in keeping her happy, we too harbor a certain selfish interest. But after some time, she discovers the secret behind her laughter. Then she reduces its frequency. She laughs only when she needs something from the one she loves. But that laughter is no longer pure and untainted as before—it has by then become a laughter of exchange. In truth, she has learned to exploit the power of laughter. Now she laughs merely for show. Yet behind that show lies some hidden purpose. Perhaps she too wishes to see a smile bloom on the face of the one she loves. If her smile failed to make her beloved smile, she would not smile either.

# On Purpose, Love, and Wisdom

Every action we undertake carries within it some purpose or other—sometimes the pursuit of material contentment, sometimes the longing for peace of mind. Everything moves on the axis of intention. It is purpose that compels us toward the deed. If we perceive no gain ahead, we do not venture forward.

Love renders a person speechless, still. When we taste true love, a shadow of contentment perpetually rests upon our eyes and face—something that can never be captured in words. In that very moment, we fall silent, hushed, absorbed entirely in the flavor of love. This is love’s truest expression in the human heart. A wise person typically stands illumined by love’s radiance in such a way that merely beholding them awakens within you an inexplicable, nameless warmth.

When we approach a wise person, fear often grips us first. Perhaps they will speak something harsh; perhaps their words are simple enough, but to us they seem impenetrable, incomprehensible. If we could observe them with sufficient depth, we would discover that what a wise person utters differs from something else—something they never speak aloud. We must read from their very presence those unspoken utterances, those sentences they leave suspended in silence. For the feeling of true love, the feeling of the Creator, can never be conveyed through any language. It can only be grasped through each person’s own wisdom, intuition, and lived experience. To sit at the feet of a guru, to sit at the feet of a wise person—this is what it means to be in *satsang*, in the company of truth. If we could understand them—if we attended more to their gestures than to their words, if we could align ourselves with their emotional depth, if we could learn the rhythm of their breathing, the movement of their eyes, the subtlety of their bearing—then we too might touch those profound feelings they embody. Rather than straining to catch every word they speak, we must attempt to understand *them*. Only then can we move further along that illuminated path of the heart, in our search for love.