Love kills

Love essentially means somebody else has become far more important than yourself. That may be distressing – your existence is threatened.

The moment you say 'I love you' to somebody, you will lose all your freedom; you will lose everything that you have, you can no longer do what you want in your life.

There are innumerable problems, but at the same time it drags you in. It is a sweet poison. A very sugary poison; it is self-annihilating.

If you do not annihilate yourself, you will never know love. Some part of you must die. That something else or somebody else has to occupy that space within you which was you all this time. If you do not let this happen, there is no love, only calculation.

We have formed a variety of relationships in our lives: family relationships, spouse relationships, business relationships, social relationships, a variety of relationships to serve different needs of our life.

I am not saying there is no expression of love in these relationships. There is. It should be there in everything that you do. Every action can be conducted lovingly.

But when we are talking about love as a spiritual process, we are talking about love as a process of self-annihilation. When we use the word 'annihilation,' it looks like a negative word.

When you really love somebody you are willing to surrender everything – your personality, your likes, your dislikes. When there is no love, people are rigid.

Suddenly when they fall in love with someone, they are willing to twist themselves any way they need to, which is a fantastic spiritual process because you are becoming flexible. So love is definitely self-annihilating; that is the most beautiful part of it.

Whether you call it annihilation or liberation, whether you call it destruction or Nirvan, when we say, 'Shiva is a destroyer,' we are saying he is a compulsive lover.

Love is not necessarily self-annihilation, it could be just annihilation. It all depends whom you have fallen in love with. So He destroys you; because if it does not destroy you, it is not a genuine love affair.

When I say 'destroy you,' it does not mean destroying your home, your business or this or that. When what you call as 'myself,' your rigid personality is destroyed in the process of loving, that is self-annihilation.

Your ways of thinking, your ways of feeling, your likes, your dislikes, your philosophies, your ideologies melt down when you fall in love.

That must happen to you; do not wait for another human being to come and do it. Just make it happen for yourself because you do not need anybody to love.

You can just love anything. If you simply, deeply create an unreasonable sense of love towards something – you can even do it without any external object – you will see self-annihilation will naturally happen.

(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author)