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We are not loved because we don't know how to love. What is love?
The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it.
Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every
missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king,
I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I
love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished,
pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does
it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection
of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think
is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you worship
God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.
If somebody asks you to do something that you don't want to do in order to "prove" your love they do not love you the way you might think they do. When you love another person you don't ask them to sacrifice a part of themselves in the name of that love.
Love is not manipulative, it should not be used to get others to do what you want. You should never give in to demands based on the, "You would do it if you loved me!"
Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman.
Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the
divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many?
If I say,`I love you', does that exclude the love of the other? Is love
personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you
love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion?
Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don't they,
that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not
be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live.
