As you become more and more an open lotus of consciousness, you will be surprised, taken aback, with a tremendous experience that can only be called love. You are so full of joy, so full of bliss; each fiber of your being is dancing with ecstasy. You are just like a rain cloud that wants to rain and shower. The moment you are overflowing with bliss, a tremendous longing arises in you to share it. That sharing is love.

Love is not something that you can have from someone who has not attained to blissfulness. And this is the misery of the whole world: everybody is asking to be loved and pretending to love. You cannot love because you don’t know what consciousness is. You don’t know the satyam, the shivam, the sundaram.

You don’t know truth, you don’t know the experience of the divine, and you don’t know the fragrance of beauty. What have you got to give? You are so empty, you are so hollow; nothing grows in your being, nothing is green. There are no flowers within you, your spring has not yet come.

Love is a by-product. When the spring comes and you suddenly start flowering, blossoming, and you release your potential fragrance…sharing that fragrance, sharing that grace, sharing that beautitude is love. And there is no question of making it better. It is already perfect; it is always perfect. If it is, it is perfect. If it is not perfect, it is not there. Perfection and love cannot be separated.

If you had asked me, “What is love?” it would have been more truthful, honest, sincere, authentic. But you are asking me, “How can I love better?” You have already accepted as a fact that you know what love is – not only that, your question implies that you already love. Now the question is how to better it.

I don’t want to hurt you, but I am helpless. I have to say the truth to you: you don’t know what love is. You can’t know because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. You have not experienced yourself. You know nothing of who you are. In this blindness, in this ignorance, in this unconsciousness, love does not grow. This is a desert in which you are living. In this darkness, in this desert, there is no possibility of love blossoming.

First you have to be full of light and full of delight – so full that you start overflowing. That overflowing energy is love. Then love is known as the greatest perfection in the world. It is never less and never more. But our very upbringing is so neurotic, so psychologically sick, that it destroys all possibilities of inner growth. You are being taught from the very beginning to be a perfectionist, and then naturally you go on applying your perfectionist ideas to everything – even to love.

Just the other day I came across a statement: A perfectionist is a person who takes great pains, and gives even greater pains to others. And the outcome is just a miserable world.