Darshan 28 September 1979
Prem means love, but love with a difference - not the love that we know but a love that is almost unknown to people.
People misunderstand their lust as love. The biological urge is not equivalent to love. Love is not biological, but spiritual. The biological urge can become a foundation for it, and it is a very solid foundation, but it is not all. One has to go through it only to go beyond it. If one moves in a circle and never goes beyond it, life is wasted.
Life is not only biological; that is the first plane. The second plane is psychological and the third plane is spiritual. Hence love also has three dimensions: the biological, the psychological, the spiritual.
The biological is well-known; everybody is born with it. It is inborn; one need not learn about it. The psychological is a little more difficult. One is in love with music, that is psychological. Or one is in love with poetry, that is psychological - it has nothing to do with sexuality. But when one is in love, not with anything in particular but simply in love, when one becomes love, then it is spiritual. The biological has an object - the other, more particularly, the body of the other.
The psychological has also an object - refined, more subtle - poetry, music, painting, sculpture, but still there is an object. It is not visible, not graspable, but the object is there and can easily be comprehended. It is comprehensible although invisible. But with the spiritual the object simply disappears. It is there no more. Love is there like a fragrance arising out of your being, unaddressed, not in any particular direction, not towards something or somebody: you are simply love energy.
That's what I mean by prem: the ultimate height and depth of love.
And Paritosha means contentment. One comes to contentment only when one has come to this kind of love, to this plenitude of love, to this height and depth. Then there is immense contentment.
All discontent that we have known before disappears. One is soaked with contentment, each fiber of one's being dances with contentment. There is great harmony felt within and without. Love brings contentment, and contentment helps you to drown yourself in existence; then you are no more separate.
The ego arises out of discontent, the ego exists as a discontent. The ego is a complaint against existence. When there is nothing to complain about the ego cannot exist, there is no nourishment for it. The ego exists with "No: I don't want this, I don't want that. This is not for me. I want more; it is not enough." These are the ways of the ego to nourish itself. When you say 'I am absolutely happy with things as they are,' the no has disappeared; yes has arisen in you.
To say yes to existence is to be a sannyasin. To say amen to existence is to be a sannyasin. But that is only possible if one knows the highest form of love.
Love brings contentment, contentment brings God in!