This might be the essential truth but in manifestation, we love others for the sake of some special qualities they exhibit. If we loved others for the sake of self alone, then we would have loved everyone on the planet because the self is everywhere and in everything. Isn’t it?
Sri Aurobindo quotes it in ‘The Synthesis’ stating explaining beautifully thus.
‘At length, though at first slowly and partially, we learn to make the conscious sacrifice; even, in the end, we take joy to give ourselves and what we envisage as belonging to us in a spirit of love and devotion to That which appears for the moment other than ourselves and is certainly other than our limited personalities. The sacrifice and the divine return for our sacrifice then become a gladly accepted means towards our last perfection; for it is recognised now as the road to the fulfilment in us of the eternal purpose.
But, most often, the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoistically and without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning of the great world-rite. It is so that the vast majority of earth-creatures do it; and, when it is so done, the individual derives only a mechanical minimum of natural inevitable profit, achieves by it only a slow painful progress limited and tortured by the smallness and suffering of the ego. Only when the heart, the will and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The mind’s knowledge of the law and the heart’s gladness in it culminate in the perception that it is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to the Supreme. “Not for the sake of the wife,” says Yajnavalkya in the Upanishad, “but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to us.” This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love; but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too which is not egoistic but divine. All true love and all sacrifice are in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in the darkness.’
In simple words as is the sense of the self so is the nature of love. In the lowest egoistic self we love because people are connected with us through physical circumstances and birth (physical sheath) or have common vital interests (the give and take of vital sheath) or they have similar thinking and intellectual capacities we appreciate (mental sheath). These are ignorant forms of love. Deeper still is the psychic love which loves those who manifest certain psychic qualities such as truth, beauty, simplicity, harmony, good, courage, compassion, kindness or else Godward aspiration, the followers upon the Godward Path, the Sangha. The spiritual Self, yes, with the capital S loves all creatures in a vast universal love. But it deals with each creature according to the law of their nature, without any hate or revulsion towards any but according to the truth of their being, the stage of their inner development, the turn of their nature, and what they represent in the universal movement.
2. Is it the Self with capital S, or the self with small s?
Self with a capital S. Here yajnavalkya is stating that one loves others because they represent or reflect something that one carries within oneself. It is a covert or overt recognition of that corresponding element that one loves.
3. What are the pracitcal implications of Yajnavalkya’s truth in our day to day life? How does it change our outlook and actions?
Each of our relationships helps us discover something within us. The world is truly a mirror. If we experience a strong revulsion at something we observe in someone, it means that we carry it within ourselves. What we are supressing inside forcefully we project that or notice that in others more commonly. Otherwise we would be indifferent to it or else just smile at it. Similarly we are drawn towards people through some secret affinity with some part of their nature. However the only stable ground of love is the psychic and the spiritual. Love that is mirrored or shadowed through the smokescreen of mind, vital attractions, physical needs, emotional attachments will not last except through habit and force of circumstances. It is only if it is rooted in the true Self that it will not change or diminish with the passage of time.
Finally to regard ourselves as trustees not owners or possessors of people whom we claim to love. It naturally brings freedom from jealousy, expectations, possessiveness, clinging or attachment to the body and the vital sheath or the intellectual companionship of others but to something much deeper in them and in us.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
