Is spirituality about loving everybody equally?

The following excerpt is from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question (Q): Acharya Ji, I just heard you talk about ‘love’. I have withdrawn dependence from others, have set them free, but I have no sameness of feeling of love towards everyone. Am I loving, or partial, or selfish?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Parmeshwari (the questioner), ‘love’ is not about loving everybody samely or equally. You are a person, you are a body. You are a woman who was typing this question a while ago with her fingers. Right? Do you know that you will be able to love everybody? How can you love everybody? It will be very difficult.

Eight hundred crores of just human beings are there, and then you can add the fish and the birds, and the insects, and the other planets and galaxies. It is a little too big a number to love everybody. Isn’t it Parmeshwari (the questioner)?

But that’s the kind of image that has been promoted, circulated that — ‘The one who loves, loves everybody equally’. No, that’s not true. When I talked of Love, I said, “Ram prem pradhanu (the Love towards Ram, towards God, is the first priority),” And spiritually, truly that is the only Love you can have.

The mind has to have a deep Love, a constant attraction towards Peace, towards Realization, towards Rest and Understanding.

That’s what Love is.

The love that you commonly talk of as something between two people, or four people, or two hundred people is just a pale shadow of the Real thing.

When one is in Love, when one Loves the Truth deeply, then his conduct has a certain Mystical fragrance about it. The eyes can have only limited vision, the hands can reach out only to a few people, but still, very mysteriously the very presence of the loving one can help the entire universe very mysteriously.

But that help cannot be deliberate or a conscious help. You cannot say that you have to have a sameness of behaviour towards everybody.

First of all, you cannot reach out to everybody. Secondly, when people are different, how can you have a sameness of behaviour towards them?

Love does not mean that you have to display the same kind of…