Love & Inquiry

My friend (who is all love whether she knows it or not at any given moment), in comparing the path of love with the potential dryness of inquiry wondered, ‘what is love?”  I am certainly no expert, and as the word love has been used to describe so many states of experience who isn’t confounded by the definitions? I responded with what came up for me when I read her musings, from that illusive momentary place of ‘glimpsing’ the entirety of it all…"I don’t see a difference between love and inquiry."

"What is love?” Isn't it simply our natural state? In my experience this natural state occurs when the "I" I imagine myself to be (this woman, with these attributes) isn’t obscuring it with the insistence that this person and the world are alone real, to be managed and formed into some fixed personal ideal.

It is not an emotion though it manifests as emotion, just as it manifests in and as everything.  One way to move toward it (though it is the core of who we are) is to question what we think of as reality when we're looking through the eye of personality.  Through earnestness, and inquiry into the nature of the self we can also realize the love that we are.  I don’t find inquiry lacking in love.  In fact, in order to be vigilantly involved in the continuous inward looking there has to be a sincere earnestness.  To me earnestness in this endeavor is driven by love itself.  It could not happen without love.  AND, I feel my Sai's hand in it all.

 “Sit quiet for a moment and inquire what is it that stays and what is it that does not.  You are now eager to learn about the news of the world, changing fortunes of peoples and nations, of “isms” and movements.  But you have no thirst to know the conditions and conflicts within you happening against the permanent back drop of the pure unaffected Atma, which is your innermost Reality.  Know ‘THAT’, and everything becomes known.  Possess ‘THAT’ and all things are possessed by you.”

                                                            Sri Sathya Sai Baba