The Love of Rama and Sita is Extraordinary

                     The Love of Rama and Sita is Extraordinary.

 

    The Love of Rama and Sita is extraordinary. It’s not marriage, it’s love. If you have not read Valmiki’s Ramayana — the story of Rama — you must read it. Tulsi and many others have written versions of the Ramayana after Valmiki, but all those Ramayanas have lost the purity of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Valmiki’s version is pure because he is not concerned about morality or religion. Valmiki narrates the Ramayana in the spirit of Rama himself.

    To love someone is to accept that person totally, the way they are. It can be anything but wrong whatever that person does to me then. It is in the very nature of love that though the whole world may find fault, the lover sees no trace of it. The lover has already taken leave of the ego. Rama can send Sita into the jungle because it is not a sending — it is his own going. Even this much discrimination is not left between them. If one is causing some trouble to the other, one thinks, one considers; but if one is putting oneself into trouble, there arises no question of thinking. To Rama, Sita is so much part of himself that even the thought that there is something improper in sending her away did not occur to him. Sita leaves for the jungle just as Rama did one day when he was told to do so by his father. There is no questioning where there is love, there is only deep acceptance.

    What has happened between Rama and Sita is nothing but a supreme incident of love. That they are husband and wife is secondary — a social formality, a social conformity — it is not irrelevant. In Sita’s mind will never arise the thought of other men, in Rama’s mind will never arise the thought of other women. The idea of other men or women arises only when there is no love.