Love is something that happens inside you. It's a sweetness of emotion. Love is really not about somebody else – though it may be inspired by somebody or something else. You may love your work, you may love your family, you may love your partner...but essentially the emotion is all happening inside you. There is bliss within you. So I say, why should it not happen by choice? When you regulate your mind you can feel this bliss all the time. On the other hand, if you depend on someone else, like a partner, you will without exception be disappointed.

People go about saying, “love is the core of the universe.” Love is not the core of the universe. Believe me, love is just a human emotion. It is a human need that two human beings can fulfill for each other. It is a certain sweetness of your emotion that you call as love.

Love essentially means somebody else has become far more important to you than yourself. That may be distressing — your existence is threatened. The moment you say "I love you" to somebody, you will lose all your freedom, you will lose everything that you have...When there is no love, people are rigid. But when you really love somebody, you are willing to surrender everything — your personality, your likes, your dislikes. Suddenly, when you fall in love, you are willing to twist yourself any way you need to, which is a fantastic spiritual process because you are becoming flexible, you could even attempt yoga. Love is definitely self-annihilating; that is the most beautiful part of it.

What you are referring to as love is basically the sweetness of your emotion. If you look at this carefully, naturally your innermost longing is to be free of every human being on the planet, to be free of everything so that you can be just the way you want to be. Once a human being becomes more aware of his own nature, he begins to experience love, blissfulness and ecstasy.

Love is a quality. It is not something to do with somebody else. Love is never between two people. It is what happens within you, and what happens within you need not be enslaved to someone else.

You realize love is not something that you do; love is the way you are.

Love is not something that you do. Love is something that you are. Either you can use somebody as a support to make yourself loving or you can simply become loving. After all, it is not somebody else’s quality, it is your quality. You are using the other person as a key to open this up. But you can also open it up from inside without the help of the other person. Then it is definitely more enduring because when you open it with the other person’s help – nobody on this planet is 100% reliable.

I happened to attend a lecture at Stanford University where the speaker held the view, “You must be compassionate to yourself.” I said, “To like, love and be compassionate, you need two entities. If you create two entities within yourself, you are either schizophrenic or possessed. Either you need a psychiatrist or an exorcist.”

Who told you, you are not already in heaven? Is there any confirmation that you are not already in heaven? No. So why do you think there is another place which is better than this?

If you want to experientially approach this, the only doorway to the Creator is the creation, and the closest piece of creation to you is yourself. With everything else there is a certain distance. If you want to approach the Creator, definitely turning inward is the best way, but what means do you have to turn inward?