Oh, it's raining outside

Malati : The first thing he said that struck me was a few straightforward words, spoken without condemnation or opinion, but as a simple fact. If it was raining now, for example, and I said, "Oh, it's raining outside," it would be a simple fact. You may or may not like the rain, but the fact is that it's raining. In the same way he said to us, "There is no love in this material world." We were all from the hippie generation, and the thrust of the hippie movement, particularly in San Francisco, was love. Every living entity is searching for love. Even little animals can't go without love. If you have an animal in your house and you ignore it, that animal becomes despondent. Every living creature in this world needs love and innately desires to seek and find love through relationship, through creating a loving situation with others. But all of us have been disappointed. We have all been in love, or almost been in love, or thought we had been in love, only to find that the love was gone, the love was lost. The person we loved went away. That propensity to love brought sorrow, yet that wasn't what love should be or was supposed to be. We hadn't found love. So when he said, "There is no love in this material world," it was such a simple and yet profound statement. It brought great relief to my heart. I didn't have to look anymore. I didn't have to think about it anymore. It wasn't there. And it wasn't a negative statement, because he went on to explain that the reason we were not finding love was because we didn't understand what love was. He told us that real love was found in our relationship with Krishna. That was my first strong memory.