Everybody wants to be loved; that is a wrong beginning. It starts because the small child cannot love, cannot say anything, cannot do anything, cannot give anything; he can only get. A small child’s experience of love is of getting: getting from the mother, getting from the father, brothers, sisters, guests, strangers…. So the first experience that settles deep in his unconscious is that he has to get love.
But the trouble arises because everybody has been a child, and everybody has the same urge to get love; nobody is born in any other way. So all are asking, ‘Give us love,’ and there is nobody to give because the other person was also brought up in the same way.
So, one has to be alert and aware that just an incident of birth should not remain a constant prevailing state of your mind. Rather than asking, for love, start giving love...it is a beautiful experience, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is a small experience, and it is the experience of a beggar. Don’t be a beggar. At least as far as love is concerned, be an emperor, because it is an inexhaustible quality in you. If you are miserly about it, it dies. So be really spending thrift.
Don’t bother to whom — that is really the idea of a miserly mind: I will give love to certain persons with certain qualities.
So the first secret is: don’t ask for it, and don’t wait, thinking that you will give if somebody asks you. Give it! Just give your love to anybody — a stranger. It is not a question that you have to give something very valuable, just a helping hand and that will be enough. In twenty-four hours, whatever you do should be done with love, and the pain in your heart will disappear. And because you will so love, people will love you. It is a natural law. You get what you give. In fact, you get more than you give.
Learn giving, and you will find so many people being loving toward you who had never looked at you, who had never bothered about you.
Your problem is that you have a heart full of love but you have been a miser. Rather than making the heart blossom you have been hoarding it, so once in a while when you are in a moment of love you feel it disappearing. But why one moment ? Why not every moment? You can touch this chair with a loving hand. The thing depends on you, not on the object. Then you will find a great relaxation and a great disappearance of your self — which is a burden — and a melting into the whole.
This is certainly a disease, in the literal meaning of the word. It is simply a tense state of your heart which simply wants to give more and more.
Perhaps you have more love than other people, perhaps you are more fortunate, and you are making out of your fortune a great misery for yourself. Share it, without bothering to whom you are giving. Just give it, and you will find tremendous peace and silence. This will become your meditation.