Basho Refurbished

We know a love that is momentary. One day it is there, another day it is gone. Its very momentariness shows that it is not real love, it is something else masquerading as love – maybe lust, some biological urge, some psychological need, the fear of being alone, an effort to remain occupied with the other, an endeavour to fill one’s emptiness in some way or other. It can be a thousand and one other things but it is not love. If it is love… the most essential quality of love is its everlastingness.
Once you have tasted the eternity of love, the timelessness of love, you are transformed. Then you are no more part of the mundane world; you enter into the world of the holy, the sacred. Of course you go on living in the same ordinary way, in fact you become more ordinary than you ever were before. You lose all pretensions, all egoistic trips. You forget all about your being somebody, you become utterly ordinary. But in that ordinariness there is a glow, a grace, a beauty, a great splendour. You are full of light because you are full of love, you are full of joy because you are full of love. You are always ready to share because you have stumbled upon an inexhaustible source. You cannot be miserly any more.
The Golden Wind, Ch 29 (unpublished excerpt)