CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Deepak Chopra
Title Page
Epigraph
1. REVIVING A LOVE ST ORY
2. THE P ATH
3. THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE
THE SECRET OF  ATTRACTION
INFATUA TION
TENDER  COUR TSHIP
INTIMACY : THE INNOCENCE OF  DESIRE
4. HOW T O SURRENDER
5. IS A TTACHMENT REALL Y LOVE? 6. WHY WE NEED P ASSION
7. ECST ASY
IN CONCLUSION:  “YOU ARE LOVED”
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
OceanofPDF .comABOUT THE BOOK
DO YOU NEED T O LOVE AND BE LOVED? In this groundbr eaking and helpful book, influential teacher and
physician, Deepak Chopra, explor es how our hearts have lost their
centr e and why love so often falls short of filling a deep, aching need
within us. He also explains how we can rediscover the love we long for, one which is
rich and meanin gful, satisfying and lasting – by restoring to love its missing
element: spirituality . In presenting the long-for gotten, timeless laws of love, together with
practical sugges tions for bringing them to fruition, Deepak Chopra shows
us how to transform our lives for ever – and the lives of those whom we
love. OceanofPDF .comABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deepak Chopra, M.D., has established a distinguished career as writer ,
lecturer and physician. He is the author of twenty-one books and thirty tape
series, including  the breakthrough bestsellers Ageless Body , Timeless Mind
and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success . From 1996 he has headed the
Chopra Center for W ell Being in Carlsbad, California. OceanofPDF .comAlso DEEP AK CHOPRA
Creating Health
Return of the Rishi
Quantum Healing
Perfect Health
Unconditional Life
Ageless Body , Timeless Mind
Journey into Healing
Creating Af fluence
Perfect W eight
Restful Sleep
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Return of Merlin
Boundless Ener gy
Perfect Digestion
The W ay of the W izard
Overcoming Addictions
Healing the Heart
The Love Poems of Rumi
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success for Parents
Everyday Immortality
OceanofPDF .comThe Path to Love
Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Love You Need
Deepak Chopra
OceanofPDF .comEVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS WITHIN YOU. ASK ALL FROM YOURSELF. —Rumi
OceanofPDF .com1
REVIVING A LOVE STORY
ALL OF US need to believe that we are loved and lovable. We began life with
confidence on both points, bathed in a mother ’s love and swaddled in our
own innocence. Love was neve r in question, but over time our certainty
clouded. When you look at yourself today , can you still make the two
statements every infant could if it had the words? I am completely loved. I am completely lovable. Few people can, for looking at yourself honestly you see flaws that make
you less than completely lovable and less than perfectly loved. In many
ways this seems right to you, for perfect love is supposedly  not of this
world. Yet in a deeper sense, what you call flaws are really just the scars of
hurts and wounds accumulated over a lifetime. When you look in the
mirror , you think you are looking at yourself realistically , but your mirror
doesn’ t reveal the truth that endures despite all hurt:
You wer e created to be completely loved and completely lovable for your whole life. In a way it is amazing that you do not realize this, because underneath
everything you think and feel, innocence is still intact. Time cannot blemish
your essence, your portion of spirit. But if you lose sight of this essence,
you will mistake yourself for your experiences, and there is no doubt that
experience can do much to obliterate love. In an often hostile and brutal
world, maintaining innocence seems impossible. Therefore, you find
yourself experiencing only so much love and only so much lovability . This can change.Although you perceive yourself in limited terms, as a mind and a body
confined in time and space, there is a wealth of spiritual teaching that says
otherwise. In spirit you are unbounded by time and space, untouched by
experience. In spirit you are pure love. The reason you do not feel completely loved and completely lovable is
that you do not identify with your spiritual nature. Your sense  of love has
lost one thing it cannot afford to do without: its higher dimen sion. What
would it be like to restore this lost part of yourself? Mind, body , and spirit would unite—this union cr eates the love you have to give. You and your beloved would unite—this cr eates the love you have to shar e.
In our deepest nature each person is meant to be the hero or heroine of an
eternal love story . The story begins in innocence, with a baby’ s birth into a
mother ’s loving  arms. It procee ds through stages of growth, as the young
child steps out into the world. With more and more experience the circle of
love widens, including first family and friends, then intimate partners, but
also taking in love of abstract things, like learning and truth. The ripening
journey brings us to love of giving, and the blossoming of higher values,
such as compassion, forgivenes s, and altruism. Finally there is the direct
experience of spirit itself, which  is pure love. The journey climaxes in the
same knowledge that a baby began with, although it couldn’ t voice that
knowledge: I am love. You know that you have fully experienced love when you turn into love—that is the spiritual goal of
life. Not many people find the spiritual goal of life. The aching need created
by lack of love can only be filled by learning anew to love and be loved. All
of us must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity , and
that being upheld in love every day, every hour, every minute is not a
fantasy—it is intended as our natural state. This book is about reviving love stories that should never have faded. The union of self and spirit is not only possible but inevitable. The spiritual
meaning of love is best measured by what it can do, which is many things. Love can heal.Love can renew . Love can make us safe. Love can inspire us with its power . Love can bring us closer to God. Everything love is meant to do is possible. Knowing this, however , has only
made the gap between love and non-love more painful. Countless people
have experienced love—as pleasure, sex, security , having someone else
fulfill their daily needs—withou t seeing that a special path has opened to
them. Socially , the “normal” cycle of love is simply to find a suitable
partner , marry , and raise a family . But this social pattern isn’t a path,
because the experience of marriage and raising a family isn’t automatically
spiritual. Sad to say, many people enter lifelong relationships in which love
fades over time or provides lasting companionship without growing in its
inner dimension. A spiritual path has only one reason to exist: it shows the
way for the soul to grow . As it grows, more of spiritual truth is revealed,
more of the soul’ s promise is redeemed. When you find your path, you will also find your love story . People today
are consumed by doubts about their relationships: Have I found the right
partner? Am I being true to myself? Have I given the best part of myself
away? As a result, there is a restless kind of consumer shopping for
partners, as if the “right” one can be found by toting up a potential mate’ s
pluses and minuses until the number of pluses matches some mythical
standard. The path to love, however , is never about externals. However
good or bad you feel about your relationship, the person you are with at this
moment is the “right” person, because he or she is a mirror of who you are
inside. Our culture hasn’ t taught  us this (as it has failed to teach us so much
about spiritual realities). When  you struggle with your partn er, you are
struggling with yourself. Every  fault you see in them touches a denied
weakness in yourself. Every conflict you wage is an excuse not to face a
conflict within. The path to love therefore clears up a monumental mistake
that millions of people make—the mistake that someone “out there” is
going to give (or take) somethin g that is not already yours. When you truly
find love, you find yourself. Therefore the path to love isn’t a choice, for all of us must find out who
we are. This is our spiritual destiny . The path can be postponed; you can
lose faith in it or even despair that love exists at all. None of that ispermanent; only the path is. Doubt reflects the ego, which is bound in time
and space; love reflects God, eternal divine essence. The ultimate promise
on the path to love is that you will walk in the light of a truth extending
beyond any truth your mind presently knows. I have structured the following chapters to lead the reader anew on the
path to love, from  the first stirrin gs of romance to the final stages of ecstasy . Falling in love feels like an accidental occurrence to many people, but in
spiritual terms it is not—it is the entrance point to love’ s eternal journey . Romance has several distinct phases for us to explore—attraction,
infatuation, courtship, and intimacy—each partaking of a special spiritual
significance. In the dawning of the next stage, romance turns into a committed
relationship, usually marriage, and the path changes. Falling in love is over;
being in love begins. Spiritually , the word being  implies a state of the soul;
it is this state that a couple learn s to nurture through surrender , the key word
in every spiritual relationship. Through surrender the needs of the ego,
which can be extremely selfish and unloving, are transformed into the true
need of the spirit, which is always the same—the need to grow . As you
grow , you exchange shallow , false feelings for deep, true emotions, and thus
compassion, trust, devotion, and service become realities. Such a marriage
is sacred; it can never falter because it is based on divine essence. Such a
marriage is also innocent, because your only motive is to love and serve the
other person. Surrender is the door one must pass through to find passion. Without
surrender , passion is centered on a person’ s craving for pleasure and
stimulation. With surrender , passion is directed toward life itself—in
spiritual terms, passion is the same as letting yourself be swept away on the
river of life, which is eternal and never -ending in its flow . The final fruit of surrender is ecstasy: when you can let go of all selfish
attachments, when you trust that love really is at the core of your nature,
you feel complete peace. In this peace there is a seed of sweetness
perceived in the very center of the heart, and from this seed, with patience
and devotion, you nurture the supreme state of joy , known as ecstasy . This, then, is the path to love outlined in the following pages, although it
isn’t the only one. Some people do not fall in love and enter into
relationships with a beloved. But this does not mean that there is no path forthem, only that the path has been internalized. For such people, the Beloved
is entirely within themselves from the very outset. It is their soul or their
image of God; it is a vision or a calling; it is a solitariness that blossoms
into love for the One. In its own way, such a love story is also about
relationship, because the final realizations are the same for all of us. To
realize “I am love” is not reserved only for those who marry . It is a
universal realization, cherished in every spiritual tradition. Or to put it most
simply , all relationships are ultimately a relationship with God. I wanted this to be a practical work as well as, hopefully , an inspiring one. Each chapter includes exercises (titled “Loving Practice”) that will enable
you to ground yourself in the insights discussed in the text. Following this
comes a love story (titled “In Our Lives”) to amplify the text in a more
personal way. I am involved in all these stories, usually as a sympathetic
listener to friends, patients, and fellow seekers. Sometimes I step beyond
that role to function as counselor or adviser , but I do not set myself up as a
professional therapist. I only want to open the way to insight, acting as its
midwife; it is up to every person to actually give birth. But before embarking on the love stories in this book, let me tell a bit of
my own. Spirit is always leaving clues about its existence, although we may
not be on the lookout for them, and I remember the first clues given to me
by my cosmic grandmother . She was my paternal grandmother , married to
an old sergeant  in the Indian army who had blasted his bugle from the
rooftops the morning I was born. To look at her, this tiny woman didn’ t
appear cosmic. Her idea of contentment was to pat flour dough into
perfectly round bread for my breakfast or to wend her way before dawn to a
dim temple where the thousand  names of Vishnu were chant ed. But one
day, as I sat waiting by the charcoal stove for my breakfast paratha  stuffed
with potatoes and spice, she let me in on a piece of cosmic wisdom. We had a neighbor down the street in the cantonment of Poona, a Mr.
Dalal, whom nobody liked. He was stooped and gray, very thin, and he
greeted everyon e with a sour, pained expression. Curiously , he had a small,
vivacious wife—his exact opposite—who adored him. They were always
together , and if I happened to pass them on the way to school, Mrs. Dalal
would wave to me from underneath her blue sari, all the time keeping aloving eye on her husband, who would be tapping his way down the
sidewalk with his cane. “They are like Rama and Sita,”  my grandmother said admiringly behind
their backs. This I very much doubted, since Rama and Sita were divine
incarnations of man and woman, and the most perfect lover s in Indian
mythology . Whe n Rama strung his bow it caused lightning and thunder ,
while Sita was beauty itself. Being eleven and obsessed with cricket, I had
little time for either Rama and Sita or the Dalals, until a shadow passed over
our household. Mr . Dalal lay dying just a few doors away from us. My grandmother paid a visit to his bungalow and came back looking
somber and pale. “Only a few hours,” she told my mother . Small boys can
be callous about death, and I resented Mr. Dalal for the time he had poked
his cane at me and ordered me to pick up a package he had dropped on the
sidewalk. Years later, when I had entered medical school, I realized that Mr.
Dalal had been suffering from angina, and his weak heart had not permitted
him even to bend over. Severe chest pain accounted for the twisted
expression on his face, and now it had brought him to death’ s door . Of course Mr. Dalal’ s dying was the talk of the neighborhood. That day
my grandmothe r informed us that Mrs. Dalal had decided to die in her
husband’ s place . She was praying fervently for this wish. Our family was
stunned, except for my father , who was a cardiologist. He kept quiet, only
assuring us that Mr. Dalal had no hope of recovery from his infarction. A
week later this prediction was confounded when an extremely frail Mr.
Dalal and his wife appeared again on the street. Mrs. Dalal, very much
alive, waved from beneath her blue sari, looking as cheerful as ever, if
somehow changed. My grandmother waited, and only a few months passed before Mrs. Dalal
fell sick. A minor cold turned to pneumonia, and in those days when
penicillin was not so readily available or believed in by common people,
she died, suddenly , in the middle of the night. “Like Rama and Sita,” my grandmother murmured, wearing a look on
her face that could be mistaken for triumph. She described the last scene
between husban d and wife, when Mr. Dalal took off his prayer beads and
laid them  tender ly around his wife’ s neck before she passed. “That is a real
love story ,” she said. “Only love can work such a miracle.”“No,” I proteste d, standing impatiently by the stove. “Mrs. Dalal is dead. You call that love, but now they both have nothing.” My father had already
told me, in his measured, clinical voice, that Mr. Dalal’ s survival had been a
fluke, not a miracle. He could be expected to die within the year . “You just don’t understand,” my grandmother reproached me. “Who do
you think gave Mrs. Dalal her wish? When she loved her husband, she was
loving God, and now she is with him. Every real love story is a love story
with God.”
An old woman with a cosmic mind is a good place to begin to talk about
love. For this story isn’t about Mrs. Dalal. A Westerner would be skeptical
that she had achieved anything of value by dying for her husban d, assuming
that was what  had happened. The point of the story lies in my
grandmother ’s deepest beliefs:
A man and a woman can r eflect divine love in their love for each other . Loving your beloved is the way you love God. Human love survives death. If you could hold the same beliefs, your love would contain a profound
power and meaning. Actually , I shouldn’ t deprive Mrs. Dalal of her own
meaning. The neighbors whispe red that she was murmuring “Rama” when
she died. Anyon e who can say God’ s name at such a moment might well be
wooing her lover . Looking back, I now realize that for her, death itself was
a healing. How many modern people in the W est can say the same? Despite the fact that love is important to everyone, few of us could deny
that love is in a crisis—no deeper crisis exists. Either love isn’t a powerful
enough force to save us from our darker nature or something has happened
to turn us away from love. Perhaps love was never the answ er we were
looking for . Any of these possibilities could be true. If they are, however , to be
human is truly tragic. In his last major work, Civilization and Its
Discontents,  Sigmund Freud painted a picture of human nature that is
grimly unloving. Humans, he asserted, are motivated by an instinct for
sexual gratification that society can barely keep in check. They  are born to
take sadistic satisfaction in the plight of enemies; they will use ruthlessviolence to obtain money , powe r, and sex; and only the threat of retribution
from someone more powerful keeps this violence in check. According to
Freud, Christ’ s injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is a psychological
impossibility . Every adult has seen enough of life to agree at least partially with this
devastating assessment, and modern psychology , by and large, is based on
it. The famous Milgram pain experiments from Yale in the 1950s
demonstrated that when ordere d to give electric shocks to strangers in a
laboratory settin g, average people would follow such orders willingly , even
when the subjects screamed in agony and begged them to quit. Where is
love in all of this? The dir ect experience of spirit is the only lasting foundation for love. Despite all the evidence to the contrary , in some profound way we were
created for love to the very depths of the human soul. This spiritual vision
of huma n nature  has prevailed against all odds. Its roots go back in India
more than two thousand years to the Vedic scriptures. Veda is Sans krit for
“truth” or “know ledge.” The hymns of the Rig Veda are considered to be
humanity’ s oldest devotional expression, but as it expanded into thousands
and thousands of scriptures, Veda continued to emphasize the same point:
the human being is a mirror of God. Our being and God’ s Being are one. In the Vedic view we are not passive observers of reality but creators, as
God is. The mask of matter disguises our true nature, which is pure
awareness, pure creativity , pure spirit. Like light streaming from a bonfire,
reality streams from us, and our choice is to emanate love or non-love. Contrary to Freud’ s dark view , the Vedas say that it is much more natural
for us to create from love than non-love. They declare that humans “are
born in bliss, sustained in bliss, and return to bliss again after death.” This is
a drastic shift in perception from modern psychology , and yet to be truly in
love always brings a new perception—everyone can validate the sudden
ecstasy and bliss that makes romance so sweet. But to have a complete
vision of love means being willing to under go a much more total shift of
perception. When you per ceive yourself as spirit, you will not simply feel love—you will be love.In spiritu al terms, to be love is only natural. It is our departure from love
that is unnatural . The ancient scriptures recognized man’ s violence and saw
it clearly : one of the most important teachings of Veda is the Bhagavad-
Gita, which is set on a battlefield before a murderous war. Yet in the Vedic
tradition an unbroken successio n of saints, seers, masters, and sages have
seen beyond violence and expressed themselves as follows:
Life is love and love is life. What keeps the body together but love? What is desir e but
love of the self? . . . And what is knowledge but love of truth? The means and forms may be wrong, but the motive behind is always love—love of the me
and the mine. The me and the mine may be small, or may explode and embrace the
Universe, but love remains. The voice is that of a South Indian master , Nisar gadatta Maharaj,
speaking to followers in the late 1970s. The expression “life is love and
love is life” has such ancient roots that no idea is more venerable . Yet this is
a love we have lost contact with in our own age, distracted as we are by
sexual attraction, unstable emot ions, and religious dogma. Love based on
the experience of spirit gives rise to the possibility that we can return to our
true nature, throwing aside our unloving behavior as a bad and very long
dream. A love based on “higher” values espoused by the world’ s religions
seems, as Freud pointed out, impossibly ideal. The scriptural injunctions to
love the Lord with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might  are legion. Yet there is sober truth in Emily Dickinson’ s mournful little poem:
Sometimes with the Heart
Seldom with the Soul
Scarce once with the Might
Few—love at all. If all our attempts to find a spiritual foundation for love have shown
themselves to be so wanting, where can we turn? Spirit can only be called on when it is real, and it can only be real if it is
real for you . In other words it has to be you. This is exactly what the Vedas
teach. Rather than “soul,” they equate spirit with “Self,” not the everyday
self with its thoughts, wishes, needs, and drives but a higher Self that is
silent and eternal. The difference is explained in a classic Vedic metaphor:every person is like a piece of gold. If you were a gold ring, a gold watch, a
gold chain, you could say “I am a ring, a watch, a chain,” but these are
temporary shapes. In truth you are just gold—that is your essence, no
matter how the shape changes. In the same way, we each have  a self, defined in modern psychology as
an image developed over time. It is a mysterious fusion of ego, personality ,
and memory that everyone amasses between infancy and early childhood. Being complete ly personal, your self is also completely isolated and
separate from every other self. Yet, if you saw yourself truly, you would no
longer identify with this haphazard, ramshackle thing, your self. In truth
you are the Self, created from the same spirit that in infinite form is called
God. You are one grain of gold, compared to which God is all the gold that
exists, and yet you can rightfully say , “I am gold.”
We all draw upon the higher Self for identity , life, awar eness, will, and love. The Self that Lord Krishna teaches about in the Bhagavad-Gita  is an
eternal aspect of human nature that transcends all individuality , all change
in time and space. Speaking of the immortal “dweller in the body,” Krishna
declares,
Weapons cannot cut him,
Fire cannot burn him,
Water cannot wet him,
Wind cannot blow him away . . . . He is eternal and pervading everything,
Subtle, immovable, and ever the same. What is important here is that the Self is a real experience. It is not an
ideal, far removed from ordinary reality—which is how most of us think of
the soul—but as close to you as breath. The Self is love’ s source, and
therefore it is more real than the things that block love—anger , fear,
egotism, insecurity , and mistrust. Those qualities, however widespread they
may be in socie ty, are temporary; they grow up over time and have to be
learned. The Self, by contrast, is secure in peace and safety; it knows only
love because its experience is only of love. When you interact with another person, you are free to feel anything,
from the deepest hatred to the deepest love. You may be repelled orattracted; you can convey rejection or acceptance. But at the level of the
Self, you always meet another person in love. The person you love r eflects your shar e of universal love. If you learn to look deep enough, you
will see that your r eality is only love. In a famous passage the V edas declare,
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm,
As is the atom, so is the universe. As is the human body , so is the cosmic body ,
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. This verse can be simplified to a few words: you are the univers e. Whatever
a person sees in his or her surroundings, from the smallest detail to the
largest panorama, is that person. Reality is a mirror of the soul. The Vedic tradition divided the world into reality and illusion. Illusion, or
Maya , is composed of transient forces and events. Reality is formed of
spirit. Thus the task set for every  person was to pierce the veil of illusion in
order to discover the spirit in everything. The same task is set before us
now. Materialism has no room for an assertion like that. After having written
more than a dozen books about the conjunction of mind and body, which
seemed radical a few years ago, I now find myself witness to the weakness
of materialism on all fronts. What is a healing prayer but a successful
attempt to abolish the distinction  between inner and outer reality ? What is a
spontaneous remission of cancer but the material body’ s obedience to wisps
of intention entertained by the mind? Einstein’ s physics tells us that
everything that appears solid to our senses is actually 99.999 percent empty
space. The classic Eastern metaphysical description of a spiritual reality
standing behind an empty material illusion suddenly seems very plausible. My cosm ic grandmother was the person who taught me that the angels
eternally pull against the demons. In her worldview the angels always win
—the world of love is ultimately the one we are born to live in. My
experience has also given me hope that this is true, and out of that hope I
decided to write this book about love.Darkness, however terrible, never fully extinguishes the spark  of light. One of the most moving love stories I’ve ever read happened between two
enemies in the Holocaust. A devout Catholic was suffering in a hideous
medical “experi ment” being conducted at Auschwitz. She was a young
woman, and as it happened the doctor who presided over her clinical torture
was also a woman, which somehow made her sadism all the more
horrifying. Death came slowly , but at last it came. The young woman
whispered unint elligibly , and the doctor , assuming she was uttering a curse,
drew back. The young woman reached out. She struggled to lift something
from her neck and managed at the last moment to hold it out to her
tormentor . “For you,” she was whispering as she handed her rosary to the
doctor , a last blessing as she departed the world. Such a story arouses a surge of hope amidst the tears. We woul d all like
to believ e that one redeemed soul can help redeem another , even in the
depths of terrible darkness. If that is true, then love’ s power is as great as
spiritual teaching tells us it is. I am not proposing in this book that we simply go back in time and adopt
Indian metaphysics—that would be impossible, given the vast changes in
culture over the past few thous and years. Instead I propose that the Vedic
sages were the first to map a path to love, which they called a Sadhana . A
path implies a beginning and an end. In this case the beginning is a reality
in which love is longed for but uncertain, swamped by fear and anger ,
overwhelmed by the counterforce of hatred. The end is a reality where
nothing exists but love. What r emains now is the deepest healing of all, the healing of love. OceanofPDF .comLOVING  PRACTICE
Making a Soul Bar gain
HEALING THE SPLIT  between love and spirit is the goal of this book, and
periodically I will give practical suggestions to that end. Usually these
“loving practices” are directed  to the reader , but I recommend, where
possible, that you and your beloved both try them. The first loving practice address es doubts you may have about whether a
“higher” love has any kind of accessible reality . To someone who has never
fallen in love, you cannot prove that the experience exists. There is no
power in words to evoke passion ate romantic love, just as the fragrance of a
rose is meaning less however beautifully you describe it. How much more
alien, then, is the love promised by union with spirit? Look at the following
list of things that love is suppo sed to accomplish, expanded from the list
that appeared earlier in the text:
Love is meant to heal. Love is meant to renew . Love is meant to make us safe. Love is meant to inspire us with its power . Love is meant to make us certain, without doubt. Love is meant to oust all fear . Love is meant to unveil immortality . Love is meant to bring peace. Love is meant to harmonize dif ferences. Love is meant to bring us closer to God. Even if this list strikes you as unrealistic, or wildly overblown,  I want you
to make  a bargain with love—a soul bargain— that any or all of these things
will come true for you . Take a piece of paper and write down what you want from love. If it is a
real force, if it is attuned to who you are, love will respond. Make your listas comp lete and specific as you can. I suggest writing down every entry
from the preceding list and beside it just what you want. For example:
Love is meant to heal. I want to heal my anger toward my father . I want to heal the love I
couldn’ t give to my children when they needed it. I want to heal my hurt
over losing my friend X. Love is meant to r enew . I want to feel renewed enthusiasm for my work. I want to renew the
sexual feelings I have for my wife. I want to renew my sense of being
young. Love is meant to make us safe. I want to feel safer with other people. I want to feel safe when I go
outdoors for my morning run. I want to feel safe from having X reject me if
I tell him I love him. Love is meant to inspir e us with its power . I want my love to be powerful. I want to use all my own power with love. I want to express love when I feel it and not give in to lower emotions like
fear and anger . Once you are satisfied that you have detailed everything you want—and
don’t feel afraid to ask too much—the bargain is complete. Put the piece of
paper away in a safe place. You have announced to your soul what you
want, and it is up to love to respond. Love is intelligent and aware; it knows
you better than you know yourself. Therefore it has the power to fulfill its
side of the bargain. Rest easy and be attentive over the next few months. Don’ t dwell on your list or try to make it come true. There is nothing you
need to do except this:
When you feel love, act on it. Speak your heart. Be truthful. Remain open.This is how you align yourself  with love. At the end of a few months,
take out your list and read it over. Ask yourself how much has come true. I
won’ t say that you will be amazed at what love has actually done—although
many people are—but you will certainly be surprised. Actually asking for
love is one of the most difficult things for anyone to risk, and by risking it
first in your heart, you open a door that will never close again. OceanofPDF .comIN OUR LIVES
There’ s Somebody Out There
“I KNOW WHA T you’re thinking ,” Delaney said. “You think I’m too choosy ,
right? But I don’t think I’m asking that much. It’s not that she has to be
drop-dead gor geous or a Ph.D.”
“You just have standards,” I suggested. “Right. I think of it as a package. If the whole package is right, the details
don’t matter all that much.”
“Assuming that she, whoever she is, likes your package,” I said. Delaney
nodded. He was amazingly immune to irony , and I knew it wasn’ t fair for
me to aim it at him. He really did want to fall in love—it was his biggest
goal in life—and since Delaney had succeeded at all his other goals, it was
frustrating how elusive this one was turning out to be. Once he and I had
done a residency together in Boston, where he had been raised in a
working-class family , and we later moonlighted at the same suburban
emer gency room to make ends meet. It had been fifteen years since he set
up his cardiology practice, and only now, in his midforties, did Delaney feel
he could make time to find a mate. It was hard for him to hide how
confused about it he was in his own mind. “Thank God I’m not one of those guys who’ s dumping his wife of thirty
years for a sexy twenty-someth ing girlfriend,” he said. “For me this is a
fresh start. I’m optimistic, I’m patient, but I guess—”
“What?” I asked. Delaney looked away , a faint cloud of doubt on his face. “I don’t know . Maybe I’m too old,” he muttered. “Or too demand ing,” I said. “Isn’t a sexy twenty-something part of the
package you’re looking for? Be honest.”
He shrugged sheepishly . “A guy can hope.”I felt a sudden  uneasiness about Delaney and his newest project,
immediately followed by a wave of sadness. The fact that our culture
teaches us so little about love was staring me in the face. We had been
talking about a man’s “love life” for an hour, and yet we hadn’ t touched on
anything even remotely resembling love. “Have you ever fallen in love before?” I asked. “Really fallen?” Delaney
looked startled,  apparently not expecting our conversation to get this
personal. He hesitated. “Well; I’m not coming from nowhere on this thing,” he said. “I’ve had
some really sweet times, and lots of women want to go out with me.” I
nodded. “Listen, we don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go,” I said
quietly . “But I think you’re feeling a little lost.” He stiffened, and I could
see him retreat inwardly . I said, “That wasn’ t an accusation. It’s natural to
feel lost. Especially if you’re not looking in the right places.”
“I hate the places where I go,” he said angrily . “The bars? Ever yone hates those places,” I said. “But that’s not what I
meant. You’re not looking in yourself—that’ s the place where she is,
whoever you hope to find.” Delaney stared at me as if I was indulging in
paradox, but I pressed on. “You’ve had a lot of accomplishment in your life,
and basically you’ve used the same approach every time. You see a
challenge, you muster your resources, and with enough confidence and self-
assurance you win what you’re after. That’ s right, isn’t it?” He agreed. “Accomplishing anything important involv es risk,” I said, “and therefore
fear. But if you let the fear dominate, you’d never take any risks, and
therefore you wouldn’ t accomplish anything.”
“Are you saying I’m afraid to fall in love?” he asked. “Then why would I
be looking for it?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” I replied. “But love and fear very often touch,
and people like you, who have undertaken very difficult thing s—going to
medical school on a shoestring,  opening your own practice, raising money
for expa nsion and new ventures—have to learn how to keep fear out of the
picture. And not just fear—self -doubt, confusion, despair , hopelessness—
most of the common human frailties, in fact. Keeping your frailties out of
sight becomes extremely impor tant if you want to amount to anything in
this world, but that is exactly the opposite of what love demands.”Delaney flinched. I could tell he didn’ t like the word demand . “I have
weaknesses, like everybody else,” he said grudgingly . “What do you want
me to do—go around parading how vulnerable I am so that some woman
will take pity on me?”
“You’re exaggerating because you hate the idea so much,” I said. “No,
you aren’t out to attract pity. What I’m trying to get at is that ‘normal’ life
requires everyone to appear as strong as possible, and this tactic, which may
work in other areas, fails miserably when it comes to love.”
Like most people, Delaney had never considered how his inner world
was constructed , but everyone creates psychological divisions as a means of
survival. We wall off inner compartments, and into them we shove all the
undesirable things about ourselves—our secret fears, weaknesses, and
flaws, our deep sense of doubt, our belief that we may be ugly or unlovable. Everyone has these dark chambers of the soul. “Do you think you’re lovable?” I asked Delaney . “My God, what a question!” he blurted. “It’s not anything I think about. I
just want to get married, you know , like everyone else.”
“That question would take most people aback,” I said, “but why? Is it
embarrassing to feel lovable? The discomfort arises because love can feel
too personal, even for ourselve s; it pokes into those compartm ents where
our nega tive self-image is stored. Unfortunately , to fall in love means going
there—that’ s what love demands.”
True love is more dangerous than most people are willing to admit. It
arouses the same discomfort as in dreams where you find yourself naked in
a public place. If falling in love meant going into all the dark chambers of
the soul, none of us would risk it. On the other hand, to love another person
involves openin g up your whole  being. What makes the risk possible is the
ingredient of spirit. Spirit is the real you, beyond all divisions into good and bad, desirable
and undesirable, lovable and unlovable. Love exposes this reality , which is
why falling in love is a blessed  state. For many people it is the only one
they will ever know in a lifetime. The spiritual overtones of romantic love
are unmistakab le. First there is a tremendous emotional opening, a
liberation. Your whole being flows toward your beloved as if the two of you
share the same feelings, the same likes and dislikes, almost the same breath. The secondary effect of this inrush of delight is a release of cares andanxiety; the cloud of infatuation  swallows up worries over such trivialities
as money , career , and the fate of mankind. Even if you had no spiritual
background at all, you would have tasted the soul’ s sweetness by falling in
love. As the great Persian poet Rumi says,
When love first tasted the lips of being human,
It started singing. This blessing of falling in love comes from spirit, but it can be blocked by
ego. Ego is responsible for protecting your self-image; it creates the
compartments where everything undesirable about you has been hidden. What blocks love is not the presence of these shadow energies but the
division of the psyche that came about when your ego started building inner
walls. Love is a flow , and walls keep the flow out. In spiritual terms, this is the problem of duality . By dividing good from
bad, right from wrong, we essentially insist that parts of ourselves are
unlovable—why else would we keep them out of sight? We turn ourselves
into packages, exactly the kind Delaney talks about. The packa ge seems to
contain only good and worthy things, but if another person ventures to love
us, the whole package spills open, and a lot of what it contains isn’ t so nice. The cruelest consequence of duality is that we believe in the rightness of
shutting love out. “Being open ” is equated with “being weak.” “Being
closed” is equated with “bein g strong.” And society reinforces these
dualities by reminding us, day in and day out, that this is not a world where
love is safe. As with most people, I don’t encounter much love except inside my
home. On waki ng I see my wife’ s face beside me, and many mornings I
marvel at the ineffable love this sight inspires, something far more delicate
and moving than I can put into words. Yet beside my bed also lies the
newspaper I read to get to sleep, and in it is all the hatred anyone could
imagine. On every page I confront the catastrophic failure of love. There is
personal failure  in the overwh elming amount of divorce, litigation, and
social bitterness we’ve learned to live with. There is public failure in the
war, street crime, and oppression we all go to bed praying will not strike us. Although no one can say where  love went, it is a dangerous sign that we
are surrounded by so many imag es pretending to be love. Every day we aresaturated, drow ned with images of romance from books and films,
bombarded with sex from advertisements, and goaded on all sides to
become more attractive in order to win attention from a “perfect” lover . Delaney was struggling in the swamp of non-love, as we all are, trying to
find something he really couldn’ t name. “What if you sat down and imag ined the perfect woman waiting out there
for you,” I told him. “You’ve probably done it many times, only to give up. Well, I think you’re going to find that woman, and it will happen the instant
you can let go of her image. It sounds like a paradox, but letting go has to
be the first step in finding someone to love you, because love is never an
image. Love doesn’ t depend upon external values at all.”
“I know  that,” he said, with sudden and surprising gentleness . “I felt I
had no choice but to have some  kind of image in mind. Otherwise, it was
like looking in the dark.”
“Most people have that worry ,” I said. “It reflects their own secret belief
that they are not all that desirable themselves, and also their fear of
loneliness. At least they have an image to keep them company . There’ s a
deeper issue here, though. Does love ever come from outside ourselves?”
“Of course it does,” he said. “Go into it more deeply ,” I urged. “All of us believe in duality , which
creates the perception that people are separate. You and I seem separate,
sitting here in this room. We have separate bodies, separate minds, separate
memories and backgrounds. Separation is the foundation of our whole
existence. But part of you hates living in separation—it hates the fear,
loneliness, suspi cion, and alienation that come with being totally isolated. This part of you calls upon love to solve its pain. If only you can find
someone to love you, perhaps the separation will be healed.”
“You don’ t make my life sound very pretty ,” Delaney mourned. “No,” I said. “But in their heart of hearts most people feel the pangs of
separation; it’s not a secret. Let me ask you, Do you really belie ve there’ s a
perfect somebody out there waiting for you? As common as that myth is,
the reality is different. The somebody waiting for you is always a reflection
of yours elf. Out of our loneliness, all of us seek a source of love that will
fill up the lack we feel inside, and that’s exactly what happens, no more and
no less.”
“I don’ t know how to respond to that,” Delaney said.“If you observe yourself closely  enough,” I said, “you’ll see the patterns. Most men, for example, feel a lack of tenderness, which they hope to find in
a woman. Most women feel a lack of strength, which they hope  to find in a
man. Whatever the need is, the person who fills it becomes the source of
love. “The question is, how do we keep this going? Can the person who
happens to match our needs continue to make us feel loved? I don’t think
so. We all have too much hidden inside; there is too much healing to do. So
in time the outside source of love fades; it stops being effectiv e. And then
certain truths dawn:
“You can never r eceive mor e love than you ar e prepared to r eceive. “You cannot give mor e love than you have to give. “The love reflec ted from another person has its source in your own heart. The reason love from outside sources stops working is that you haven’ t
solved separation, only papered it over .”
“So then what?” he asked. “You stand at a crossroads. You can go out again and search for love
from some new source, you can make do with what you have, you can turn
to satisfactions other than love, or you can be totally honest and give up the
search for externals altogether .”
Here we had reached a critical point. The path to love begins when you
realize that separation, loneline ss, and the pain of isolation are real. Not
many people want to face this fact, and therefore they resign themselves to
a sadly constrict ed amount of love. As a healer , love knows no limits, but
you must be willing to bring your whole being to it. Only then does the
balm of love flow . “There’ s something I really admire in you,” I told Delaney . “I think
you’ll be surprised what it is. You haven’ t settled for imitations. In some
part of yourself, you are waiting  for the real thing.” Delaney met my eyes;
he nodded ever so slightly . “It’s such a hard thing to talk about,” I said,
“this nameless longing that only love can fill. What are we waiting for? What is the real thing, if not the flood of images about roman ce, sex, and
endless pleasure  that the ideal lover is supposed to gift us with? In reality
we are the gift and we are the giver . “Duality is and always has been an illusion. There is no one out there
waiting for you. There is only you and the love you bring to yourself. Inspirit you are united with all other souls, and the only purpose of separation
is for you to rejoin that unity .”
“Which makes love the only blessing,” Delaney said quietly . We sat for a
moment, letting  his words sink in, for it was as if he spoke from my heart
too. “Yes,” I said. “Love is the only blessing, and that means  all love. If
love is the ultim ate reality , as the great teachers tell us, then the slightest
gesture of connection is a gesture of love. To reach across the wall of
separation, whet her to friend, lover , family , or stranger , is to act in the name
of love, whether we consciously realize it or not.”
We had reached a special mom ent, which we both wanted to appreciate
in silence. We had been talking in Delaney’ s office in suburban Boston, an
ordinary room, but for a moment not ordinary . The path to love always
opens unexpecte dly. Our world contains such chaos and confusion that it is
a miracle there is a path at all. Yet as long as there is separation, there will
be a bridge. “I think you’ve gotten at one of my secrets,” Delaney said after
a pause. “I had lost faith that anybody out there really would love me as
much as I wanted her to.”
“Love doesn’ t take faith,” I said. “Because separation is an illusion,
believing in it is what takes faith. Love is real. It can be held, nurtured, felt,
learned from, and depended upon. So abandon your faith. Stop wishing and
hoping, and turn your efforts to what is real. Duality is so flimsy that it is
ready to fall apart at any moment. In our imaginations we believe that love
is apart from us. Actually there is nothing but love, once we are ready to
accept it.”
OceanofPDF .comTHE PATH
IN THE WEST  what we generally call love is mostly a feeling, not a power . This feeling can be delicious, even ecstatic, but there are many things love
is meant to do that feelings cannot. When love and spirit are brought together , their power can accomplish
anything. Then love, power , and spirit ar e one. There has never been a spiritual master—not Buddha, Krishna, Christ, or
Mohammed—who wasn’ t a messenger of love, and the power of the
message has always been aweso me: it has changed the world. Perhaps the
very immensity of such teachers has made the rest of us reticent. We do not
accept the powe r love can create inside us, and therefore we turn our backs
on our divine status. India is a society where every person is divine, but only a few realize it. Strangely , the same can be said of the West. The only difference is that you
can see holy men bathing in the sacred rivers of India, while our holy men
go unnoticed, hidden from sight in monasteries or the grave. “Let them be
rich in the West,” my friend Lakshman would say loudly . “There, saints
have to be dead to be real. Ours are walking around outdoors!”
Outdoors, but not always that easy to find. Countless seekers have
traveled through India without meeting any genuine saints. Or rather they
did not perceive them to be holy. Thanks to Lakshman, a man who
combines boisterous exuberance with deep reverence, I’ve had occasion to
feel the presenc e of yogis and sages in their Himalayan caves or rickety
wooden ashram s on the Ganges . Lakshman told me a story about how he
gained his first belief in saints. We were sitting in a café in La Jolla,
California, worlds away from our origins, watching the blue Pacific roll in
the sun. “For a long time, Deepak, I wasn’ t a believer in these so-called saints. Half of them are scoundrels, idle beggars wandering from door to door,
taking advantage of people’ s innocent faith to get a handout. One suspectsthat the rest are probably psychotic. Or so I thought. My family in
Bangalore is very Westernized; we started a computer software company
ten years  before the explosion of technology in South India. We keep up our
daily puja prayers at the altar in the dining room, but it’ s a formality . “I live in an old part of the city. From my window I can see medieval
Shiva temples being blackene d by fumes from thousands of scooter
rickshaws and battered lorries. Old India and new India come together in a
war zone of screeching sensory  assault—that is what I wake up to every
day. “One morning I couldn’ t bear to fight the traffic, so I decided to walk to
work. My parents’ factory is not far from the center of town. You know
how the sidewalks are in India— impossible! Ten minutes from home I was
totally frustrated, pushing my way through a sea of peddlers, beggars,
layabouts, and twenty thousand  other working people trying to get to the
same place I was. The image of a dry Ganges flowing with humanity came
to mind. Well, it came to mind later, since all I felt at the time was irritation
and exhaustion. “Rounding a corner I saw a knot of people gathered around something. Of course they blocked the whole sidewalk, and this being India, traffic had
stopped while taxi and lorry drivers got out to have a look too. Something
in me snapped, and I furiously pushed through, shouting for everyone to get
out of my way. No one did. In five seconds I was embedded in a pack of
shoving bodies, unable to escape. “You can’t imagine how it felt. Of course you can, having been there
yourself. But there I was, on the verge of screaming, when I suddenly felt
everything in my mind stop. My anger and frenzy , my preoccu pations, the
constant flow of associations—the whole baggage simply disappeared,
leaving behind an empty mind. I’m no fool; I had read scripture s and knew
all that stuff about an empty mind being the silence of God. But on the
streets of Bangalore! Somehow I managed to push my way forward. There
in the middle of the pack was a small woman in a white sari, sitting with her
eyes closed. She must have been about thirty , I suppose, and something
about her told me she was from a country village. “To this day I have no idea why she had stopped in the middle of the
sidewalk like that. She sat completely still, not minding the crush around
her. Actually , the crowd was acting quite respectful on the whole; she wassurrounded by a ring of people on their knees. I got a little nearer , and the
most remarkable thing happened. My empty mind began to have something
in it, not a thought but a sensation. Mother . That’s the only way I can
describe it. It was as if all the mothering feelings that women give to their
families were inside me, but with much greater purity and clarity . “I wasn’t thinking of my own mother . There was just this feelin g. It grew
stronger , and I saw, like a revealed truth, that this woman on the sidewalk
was emanating the energy of ‘mother ’ from its very source. I also saw with
complete clarity  that my own mother had been trying to express this same
energy. However imperfectly , she was connected to a reality that doesn’ t
depend on this mother or that mother . It is just ‘mother ,’ the endless love of
the feminine toward everything in creation. “The next second I was on my knees, only a few feet from this saint on
the sidew alk. She had her eyes open now and was smiling at all of us. Her
smile somehow  made my experience far more intense. I had a flashing
glimpse of thousands upon thousands of souls wanting to be here on earth
to experience the preciousness of being a mother . “What came to me then was forgiveness: I realized that all the people
who can’t love, even the most evil and criminal ones, are trying to express
this divine energy. We are all on the path, and despite our differences, being
on the path makes us much more similar than we realize.”
Lakshman’ s voice trailed off. Although his encounter had lasted only a
few minutes, its effect was permanent. He remains awed that the mere
presence of a saint can uplift  ordinary awareness (this effect is called
Darshan  in Sanskrit). More important, he became convinced that a path to
the divine is real, since he had now met someone who was at the end of that
path. I can speak from  experience too. I never had the startling breakthrough
Lakshman did, but my parents were devout, and my retired grandfather
frequently spent  his afternoons on the veranda soaking up the darshan of
swamis and saints. A boy doesn’ t grasp much of the deeper meaning of
such experiences; that came only when I was an adult, after sitting myself
with strange, otherworldly recluses and feeling utterly loved in their
presence. Their surroundings were some times appalling, with nothing to eat or
drink but a dipper of greenish water. There would often be no recognitionthat I had walked into the saint’ s presence, no smile or encourag ing gesture. Yet the moment I closed my eyes, I was in a remarkable space. I had been
welcomed to a dance, the play of the universe, which was takin g place not
as whirling stars and galaxies but in pure silence. A blissful coolness
penetrated my body , and I lost awareness of the sticky shirt clinging to my
back and the suffocating trappe d air. The sensation was one of peace, but
there was an extraordinary vibrancy to it, as if thrills of invisible energy
were running through me. At times it was almost more than I could bear. My inner space seemed to be exploding. I was suspended in emptiness that
was not empty but teeming with everything ever created or to be created—
the womb of the cosmic mother . And it was all in me . These are memo ries that make me sure that our current concept of love is
not adequate. We all use the word love to mean many things, and to be in
love is often a complex, confusing state. Yet what I exper ienced was
incredibly simple:
Love is spirit. Spirit is the Self. Self and spirit are the same. Asking “What is spirit?” is just a way of asking
“Who am I?” There isn’t spirit outside you; you are It. Why aren’ t you
aware of It? You are, but only in a limited way, like someone who has seen
a glass of water  but not the ocean. Your eyes see because in spirit you are
the witness to everything. You have thoughts because in spirit you know all. You feel love toward another person because in spirit you are infinite love. Restoring the spiritual dimensio n to love means abandoning the notion of
a limited self with its limited ability to love and regaining the Self with its
unbounded ability to love. The “I” that is truly you is made of pure
awareness, pure creativity , pure spirit. Its version of love is free from all
memories or images from the past. Beyond all illusion is the source of love,
a field of pure potential. That potential is you. WHAT IS THE PATH? The most valuab le thing you can bring into any relationship is your spiritual
potential. This is what you have to offer when you begin to live your lovestory at the deepest level. Like the seed needed to start the life of a tree,
your spiritual potential is the seed for your growth in love. Noth ing is more
precious. Seeing  yourself with the eyes of love makes it natural to see
others that way too. You will be able to say of your beloved, as the poet
Rumi does:
You are the secret of God’ s secret. You are the mirror of divine beauty . The path to love is something you consciously choose to follow , and
everyone who has ever fallen in love is shown the first step on that path. The unfolding of spiritual potential has been the chief concern of all the
great seers, saints, prophets, masters, and sages in human history . Theirs
was a carefully charted quest for the Self, a far cry from our notion of love
as a messy , emotional af fair. In India, as I’ve mentioned, the spiritual path is called Sadhana , and
although a tiny minority of people give up normal life to wander the world
as seekers of enlightenment (these are monks, or sadhus ), everyone, from
those in the most ancient civilization of Vedic India until today , considers
their life to be a sadhana, a path to the Self. Although the Self seems
separated from us, it is actually intertwined in everything a person thinks,
feels, or does. The fact that you do not intimately know your Self is
amazing, if you come to think about it. Looking for your Self, the Vedic
sages declared, is like a thirsty  fish looking for water . But as long as the
Self has yet to be found, sadhana exists. The goal of the path is to transform your awar eness fr om separation to unity . In unity we per ceive
only love, expr ess only love, ar e only love. While the inner transformation  is taking place, every path must have
some outer form to sustain it. In India a person’ s nature leads him to the
style of path appropriate to reaching fulfillment. Some people are naturally
intellectual and are therefore suited to the path of knowledge , or Gyana . Some are more devotional and are suited to the path of worship, or Bhakti . Some are more outwardly motiv ated and are suited to the path of action, or
Karma .The three are not mutually exclusive; ideally , one would include  in one’s
lifestyle daily periods of study , worship, and service. All three approaches
would then be integrated into a single path. It is, however , entirely possible
to be so taken with a single approach that your whole existence may be
centered on reading the scriptures, contemplation, and scholarly debate—
the life of gyana. Or you may spend your time meditating, chanting, and
participating in temple rituals— the life of bhakti. Or you could do social
work, apply yourself to menta l and physical purification, and do God’ s
bidding in daily activity—the life of karma. Even in the most traditional
sectors of India today , these paths have broken down, giving way to modern
lifestyles in which study and work have little or nothing to do with spiritual
aspirations. What does this mean for a Westerner who has never been exposed to
sadhana? I propose that being on the spiritual path is such a natural and
powerful urge that everyone’ s life, regardless of culture, obeys it. A path is
just a way to open yourself to spirit, to God, to love. These are aims we all
may cherish, but our culture has given us no established, organized way to
reach them. Indeed, never in history has a seeker been confronted with such
a disor ganized and chaotic spiritual scene. What we are left with is relation ships. The desire to love and be loved is
too powerful ever to be extinguished, and fortunately a spiritua l path exists
based upon this unquenchable longing. The expression path to love is not
simply a metaphor; it reappears throughout spiritual history in many guises. The most ancient version is the bhakti or devotional tradition from Vedic
India, in which all forms of love ultimately serve the search for God. The
Sufis of Islam have their own devotional lineage. Rumi, whom I quote so
often, was more than a poet; he was a great teacher of this path. To him God
was the sweetest, most desirabl e lover , whose touch he could feel against
the skin:
When it’ s cold and raining,
You are more beautiful. And the snow brings me
even closer to Y our Lips. The Inner Secret, that which was never born,
You are that freshness, and I am with Y ou now .Christ initiated another version of the path in his supreme teaching, “Love
thy neighbor as thyself.” Jesus always spoke of God as a loving father . The
Christian version of the path is therefore a relationship not so much
between lovers as between paren t and child or a shepherd and his flock (we
shouldn’ t forget, though, the image of Christ as bridegroom and the
worshiper ’s soul as the bride). So it isn’t the tradition that is lacking. One might more fairly say that in
most religions the teaching of love, as originally presented, seems to have
faded, to have become more an ideal than a practical reality . But amidst all
the confusion and breakdown of traditional teaching, there is still the spark
of love that brings two people together , and out of that a path can be made. Like the tiny spark of fire that consumes a forest, the spark of love is all
you need to experience love in its full power and glory , in all its aspects,
earthly and divine. Love is spirit, and all experiences of love, however
insignificant they seem, are actually invitations to the cosmic dance. Within
every love story hides the wooing of the gods and goddesses. In a different age the most fleeting of infatuations had spiritual meaning;
the nearness of God in the beloved was taken seriously . Since the advent of
Freud, however , psychologists have assured us that falling  in love is
illusory; the sense of ecstasy that is part of falling in love isn’t realistic. We
must learn to accept the tempo rary nature of romance and disregard the
“projected fanta sy” that we might be as immortal and invulnerable as
passionate lovers feel. We would therefore have to be skepti cal of Walt
Whitman when he rapturously declares,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know .) And W. H. Aude n would have to be seen as indulging in hyperbolic fantasy
when he says, in the first rapture of love,
. . . in my arms I hold
The flower of the ages,
And the first love of the world. The sense of delight, uniqueness, and blessing felt by lovers has its own
reality , but you must find it within. Romance and spirit are both states of
inner truth. In this book I am proposing that the two can be joined. Thedramatic psycho logical shift that occurs whenever we fall in love is actually
a tempo rary state of spiritual liberation, a glimpse of who you really are. The ecstatic feelings that flow between lovers, their sense of being uniquely
cared for and protected, their belief in a timeless state of being—all these
are spiritual realities. The East has tended to retain the spiritual dimension
of falling in love, even at its most passionate, as in this line from Rumi:
Love is the way messengers from the mystery tell us things. In this vision of love, which expands far beyond two people and their
infatuation, the acts of love join us to a reality that we yearn for but do not
know how to reach—the “mystery .”
In this book I will use the phrase  “spiritual master” to designate someone
who has achieved command over spiritual reality . Despite the huge cultural
differences betw een a Sufi mast er, a yogi, a Christian saint, and a Chinese
martial artist of the highest proficiency , all can perceive spirit as clearly as
you or I see the earth and sky. The spiritual masters were not idly setting
forth idealistic goals when they taught the path to love. In a very practical
sense the path enables two people to escape the trap of separation and
suffering. In its place are peace and ecstasy . The freshness of life is love and
nothing else. When two people can grow into that knowledge, the promise
of lasting happiness becomes real. LOVE, PLEASURE , AND HAPPINESS
Naturally the question arises, “Why should I choose a path at all?”
Relationship, with or without romantic love, has existed for a long time. Being in love with someone hasn’t required making any conscious spiritual
choices other than which church to go to, perhaps, and in the case of
parenthood, what faith to raise the children in. Insisting upon the spiritual
dimension of love may sound uncomfortably exalted to some people, who
are content to enter a relationship for happiness and security . Therefore it’s
worth asking how happiness is actually achieved, and whether we can really
attain security without embarking upon the spiritual journey . On the surface the absence of spirituality seems to make little difference
to what people perceive as happ iness. I was surprised to discover recentlythat happiness is not a rare commodity . In opinion polls when people are
asked if they are happy , roughly 70 percent say yes. This response is
amazingly consi stent. The same percentage holds for every age-group, from
the very young to the very old. It does not vary widely from country to
country or year to year. The one striking exception occurs among
impoverished people. The very poor tend to be less happy , and in Asia,
where vast numbers of people  do not have their basic needs met, the
pollsters’ question “Are you happy?” is often met with a blank stare. On the surface, then, love hardly seems indispensable given how many of
us already say that we are happy . I think this is an example of a word that
appears to be self-defining when it really isn’t.
The_Path_to_Love_by_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Deepak Chopra
Title Page
Epigraph
1. REVIVING A LOVE ST ORY
2. THE P ATH
3. THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE
THE SECRET OF  ATTRACTION
INFATUA TION
TENDER  COUR TSHIP
INTIMACY : THE INNOCENCE OF  DESIRE
4. HOW T O SURRENDER
5. IS A TTACHMENT REALL Y LOVE. 6. WHY WE NEED P ASSION
7. ECST ASY
IN CONCLUSION:  “YOU ARE LOVED”
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
OceanofPDF. comABOUT THE BOOK
DO YOU NEED T O LOVE AND BE LOVED. In this groundbr eaking and helpful book, influential teacher and
physician, Deepak Chopra, explor es how our hearts have lost their
centr e and why love so often falls short of filling a deep, aching need
within us. He also explains how we can rediscover the love we long for, one which is
rich and meanin gful, satisfying and lasting – by restoring to love its missing
element: spirituality. In presenting the long-for gotten, timeless laws of love, together with
practical sugges tions for bringing them to fruition, Deepak Chopra shows
us how to transform our lives for ever – and the lives of those whom we
love. OceanofPDF. comABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deepak Chopra, M. D. , has established a distinguished career as writer,
lecturer and physician. He is the author of twenty-one books and thirty tape
series, including  the breakthrough bestsellers Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. From 1996 he has headed the
Chopra Center for W ell Being in Carlsbad, California.
The book explores how to rediscover the love we long for, which is rich and meaningful, satisfying and lasting, by restoring the spiritual dimension to love.
What is the main focus of the book "The Path to Love"?
The author is Deepak Chopra, a physician and influential teacher.
Who is the author of this book?
The book argues that our hearts have lost their center, and we can rediscover the love we long for by restoring the spiritual dimension to love.
What is the main idea presented in the book?
The author proposes that we should not look for love outside ourselves, but rather learn to love and be loved by embracing our spiritual nature.
What is the author's proposal in this book?
The book emphasizes the importance of spirituality in finding true and lasting love, and the need to overcome our ego and negative self-image to achieve this.
What is the main message of the book?