Question: Could you please talk about attachment and detachment in love?

Sri Chinmoy: Human love is attachment; divine love is detachment. Why is human love attachment? Because human love constantly demands. Human love wants to possess and be possessed; otherwise it is not satisfied. But even when we are possessed or when we possess, there is no satisfaction, because we see the limitations inside the other person and the limitations in our own being. When we see limitations in ourselves or in others we are not satisfied, for the soul in us can never be satisfied with imperfection. It wants constant illumination and perfection.

When we love divinely, we are not attached to anybody. We care only for the expansion of our own consciousness and of the consciousness of others. We feel that it is not right to bind them. By binding an individual we do not accomplish anything. When we really love we feel that we should expand our consciousness into Infinity and should allow and help those with whom we are closely connected to expand their consciousness as well. Divine love is the song of expansion. Constantly we try to expand our reality and help others to expand their reality. And while we are expanding, one day, at God's choice Hour, we will become one with His universal Consciousness, His transcendental Consciousness.

Attachment is in the body; detachment is in the soul. If we live in the body-consciousness, we will always be attached to people and objects around us. But if we live in the soul-consciousness, we will try to illumine the things in us that have to be illumined, we will try to perfect the things in us that have to be perfected and to manifest the things that have to be manifested fully here on earth for God's purpose.