Continued from Previous Part

Volumes have been and will continue to be written about the magical qualities of love; but we often forget that love does not merely provide power to procreate, it links families, communities and cultures together. Intimacy is an integral aspect of love. Love gives us dreams, hope, courage and a feeling of acceptance. It makes our life meaningful. Love enables us to hope. Love endows joy with pain, spreads rays of hope under adverse and trying circumstances. And there cannot be any opportunity for misery as long as there is hope. Hope is fount of faith. Paradox is that we are not comfortable with love; often we keep on struggling with the frustration of possessiveness for our beloved; more often we do not love, we hate, we murder and even conspire.

Only those can have access to love who have respect for earth, sky and stars; who keep in touch with nature and observe and feel and experience it with unadulterated passion and concentration. They learn from nature and remain grateful to her. They are prudent with the natural resources and keep it safe for others. They are equipped with empathy. They are aware that one can learn to love only by loving, one can live only by living. They know that one commits a large number of mistakes in the process of learning, They dream of making them beautiful and they make unstinting efforts to make their dreams real.

Love and faculty, proclivity and process of learning with hope are components of happiness. If the process of learning continues, joy would never desert us.

According to Tagore, happiness does not lead to salvation. Joy does. We pick up various kinds of stimuli through our senses; all of them do not give us comfort. Feelings that cause comfort to body as well as mind are collectively called happiness such as feeling of eating a tasty food. There are certain feelings which provide, besides instant comfort, assurance for happiness in future too, such as news of getting a respectable employment.

There is a separate class of feeling beyond the above mentioned ones; we have rendezvous with them in our day to day life, but these have divergent idioms. ---- A blooming flower in your courtyard; evocation of the sensation of the sparkle of petals struggling to bloom. It feels good, one wishes to go on looking at them, even though it does not provide any assurance or allurement for fulfilling any material want.  This feeling is joy, this feeling gives joy, because consciousness tends towards infinity, wishes to explore the universe within self. Unadulterated joy is manifest in this give and take. This is the difference between ego and spirituality.