Love is a basic emotion, yet you can’t plan to fall in love or create conditions for being in love. It is something over which you have no control. Either you fall in love or you do not. It is ordained. Ramakrishna explains this with the following analogy:” when a huge tidal wave comes, all the little brooks and ditches become full to the brim without any effort or consciousness on their own part”.
However, there are some criteria for judging whether one is in love or not.
The first test is that you do not want exclusive possession of the object of your love. You wish the world to know of your love. You could declare your love from rooftop. And you with to do or say whatever makes the person you love happy.
MK Gandhi said:” Love and exclusive possession can never go together. Theoretically where there is perfect love, there must be perfect non-possession.”
The second test of love is that there can be no bargain.It does not recognize reward or punishment. Love itself is a merit, and itself its own reward. Beyond itself love seeks neither cause nor outcome; the outcome of it is one with the practice of it.
You love something or someone for its own sake and not because you want or desire a favour in return. Love is not a means to some ephemeral or non-ephemeral end, but is an end in itself. Love is not a response to a certain positive situation. You can to on loving. For when you give your love it comes back millions of times more.
The notion of giving is so consequential to love that.” if you do not give it, it goes, it becomes dead, it becomes dead weight on you. It becomes hatred- it turns into its very opposite. It becomes fear, it becomes jealousy, and it becomes possessiveness”
The third test of real love is the annihilation of the ego. It obliterates the distinction between the self and the other by an unconditional surrender to the other; rather it is a total merger, a complete synthesis with the beloved.
In true love the lover and beloved are one. The sense of your own identity and individuality vanishes. The other, therefore, does not place a limit on the lover’s freedom; rather, communion with beloved leads to unbound freedom. It frees us from limits imposed on us by our ahamkara – ego.
The fourth test of real love is that it knows no fear. Fear could be of unfulfilled desires. If your love springs from fear of punishment, or from your desires being fulfilled, then it is no love at all. Love and fear are incompatible, because in love there is no place for desire.
The fifth test of love is that you love what you consider to be the best. Therefore, the beloved person, object, or ideal is unique. It is the highest from the perspective of the lover; from theirs’ perspective it may not be so. For others some other ideal could be higher that this one. But for the lover the beloved is the best.
The sixth test of real love is that the lover does not so much believe in pedantic and powerless reason, which merely argues but is not able to establish a direct contact with the beloved.
The lover gives up the fruitless intellectual groping in the dark, and trusts his own direct contact with the beloved.
The lover gives up the fruitless intellectual groping in the dark, and trusts his own direct experience. He does not give reasons and arguments, nor depends upon inference but depends on direct perception and lived life experience.
- The writer is head, Department of philosophy, Delhi University.
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