by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar Book Presentation Overview General

Today I am expected to speak about, “Love, the Force of Life”. Every one of us has an idea about love, just as every one of us has an idea about beauty. According to Pythagoras, “There is no one in this world who does not have an idea of beauty and love”. According to some great poets like Shelley and Keats, love and beauty are equated to truth. According to the ancient most scriptures of India, the Vedas, the whole creation comes out of poise which is called love or beauty and exists on the plane of poise.

Everyone has his own disturbance away from the poise and tries to recapitulate the one poise which is lost and the journey through the span of life is the effort to recapitulate the one that is lost. Some living beings can recapitulate and find out what they lost before they leave this physical body and thereby enjoy what is love in its original form; what is beauty and what is truth in its original form. But some people are so restless that they miss it every moment. They are very restless to get at the happiness of beauty and love and their restlessness to be happy makes them miss the happiness they wish. The desire and the wish to be happy is the only thing which makes us miss the happiness required. The more we desire happiness and the more we are restless about happiness, the more we are restless and the more we cannot be happy.

Once this game is understood and when a living being gets at the ease and comfort of knowing what is love, what is truth and what is beauty, then he begins to live in love. His life becomes happiness. Instead of trying to purchase happiness with other things like money or property or job or business, he begins to know that everything can be purchased by love and nothing can purchase love. Love is happiness. Happiness is such a valuable commodity that everything we achieve in the world is cheaper than love and every attempt to purchase love with some other thing becomes a failure. People try to purchase happiness with money, forgetting that if they are happy only, then money contributes to happiness. Anything on this earth which is achieved by man has its own significance and meaning only when a man is happy.

If anyone thinks that something is more valuable than happiness, he loses happiness and life is something other than happiness. This is because what we call happiness is nothing but what we call love. Everyone has his own idea of love, just as everyone has his own idea of beauty and happiness. But, the understanding of love depends upon the concept, just as the understanding of the sky depends upon the window through which we look at the sky. We are in our body just as we are in our house. We are peeping through this body into the outer world just as we peep through our window. We have mainly five windows. That is the hearing, the sight, the sense of smell, the sense of taste and the sense of touch. Through these five windows, we are looking to the outer world which we call objectivity, just as we look at the sky through one of the windows of our house.

To everyone, this sky is visible through his own window, but the dimensions of the sky depend upon the dimensions of the window. Those who have narrow windows will have a narrow sky. Those who have broader windows have a broader sky. This is only the sky as seen through the window and not the sky in itself. Every one of us looks at love according to our own concept and it is what we understand that we experience, but not what is there that we experience. If I know you intimately for ten years, I know you only through my understanding, but I do not know you according to yourself. Every one of us exists in this self-conditioning and according to this self-conditioning, what we see around us in this world is not what is there in truth, but what we know as it is there around us. There is a lot of difference between the two. What is around us is something different from what we know it.