WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Different Types of Love

Indeed, nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love.

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The true divine love is above all quarrels. It is the experience of perfect union in an invariable joy and peace.

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Radha is the symbol of loving consecration to the Divine.

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Keep always your balance and a calm serenity; it is only thus that one can attain the true Union.

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It is in your soul that the calmness can be found and it is by contagion that it spreads through your being. It is not steady because the sovereignty of your soul is not yet definitively established over all the being.

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I don't see anything wrong in not being sentimental; nothing is further from true love, the divine love, than sentimentality.

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All will be done, Mother, but why is my heart becoming more and more dry and hard?

Are you quite sure it is so dry and hard? Don't you call "dry and hard" an absence of sentimentality, that is, of a weak and superficial emotionalism?

True love is something very deep and very calm in its intensity; it may very well not manifest itself through outer effusiveness.

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To love is not to possess, but to give oneself.

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I don't experience a violent and uncontrollable love for anyone; nobody attracts me. And it is because of this that I told You I was losing all human feelings.

This can hardly be called a loss; I consider it an inestimable gain.

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A love which is sufficiently strong can make a person the slave of the beloved.

You speak here of vital love, but certainly not of psychic love and still less of the Divine Love.

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The person I love belongs to me.

This is a very ugly love, quite egoistic.

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The Ashram is not a place for being in love with anyone. If you want to lapse into such a stupidity, you may do so elsewhere, not here.

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It is not this person or that who attracts you... it is the eternal feminine in the lower nature which attracts the eternal masculine in the lower nature and creates an illusion in the mind; it is the great play, obscure and semi-conscious, of the forces of unillumined nature; and as soon as one succeeds in escaping from its blind and violent whirlwind, one finds very quickly that all desires and all attractions vanish; only the ardent aspiration for the Divine remains.

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My beloved Mother, the whole day I thought of nothing else except that red rose which signifies "Human passions changed into love for the Divine". I want to know precisely what the human passions are.

By "passion" we mean all the violent desires which take possession of a man and finally govern his life--the drunkard has the passion for drink, the debauchee the passion for women, the gambler the passion for dice, etc. If one human being feels a violent and uncontrollable love for another, this is called a passion, and it is of this we are speaking; it is this impassioned love which human beings feel for one another that must be changed into love for the Divine.

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Sensations belong to the vital domain and to that part of it which is expressed through the nerves of the body. It is sentiments and emotions which are characteristic of the heart. It is always preferable not to live in the sensations but to consider them as something outside ourselves, like the clothes we wear.