Question: Do you think that there can't be true love between a man and a woman?

Sri Chinmoy: From the human point of view, love is just compromise or frustration. Emotional love, the love which is based on emotional feelings, will never be fulfilling. For twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years a couple can be living together in compromise or frustration. In India I knew a respectable couple. The day the husband died, one of the wife's most intimate friends said to her, "Oh, what a wonderful life you led, so full of love. You will miss your husband terribly." She immediately said, "Sure, I shall miss him, but there was no love. It was all compromise." With our outer eyes, when we used to see them walking together, we used to say that they were the happiest couple but when her husband died, the woman said that it was just a compromise for fifty years.

This lack of true love is not limited to Indian couples. The West has not experienced love, real love. Romantic love it has experienced to the fullest measure, but not real love — the love that energises, inspires and feeds the hungry world.

Again, I wish to say that true love does exist. Love is a divine quality that comes from God. Whenever one of God's qualities is there, God also has to be there. You cannot have a quality while the possessor of that quality is somewhere else. No! Inside the quality is the life and breath of our possessor. Pure love, divine love, the love that gives us new life constantly at every moment is the very Breath of God. Men can offer this love to women and women can offer it to men, but the question is, how this love is used.

If a man loves a woman, knowing that the Divine is there, the Supreme is there, then that is divine love. If he does not see the Divine in the individual, in the woman, if he sees only the body, vital and mind, or if he sees the animal in that woman, then it is human love. If he sees the divine in himself and the divine in the woman, then that is divine love.

This divine love can be used to reveal our own true existence and to expand our own consciousness and the consciousness of our beloved. If we use love for the expansion of the other person, then that is the love divine. This love will all the time fulfil and be fulfilled. This love does exist and has to be utilised by both men and women.

If we practise the inner life, the spiritual life, then we will realise what true love is. We will realise true love, embody true love, reveal true love and manifest true love, and in this way transform the face of the world.