A man once approached Sri Ramanujacharya with a sincere request: "Show me the way towards the divine. How can I attain God?"
Sri Ramanuja responded by asking, "Have you ever loved anybody?"
The man, taken aback, retorted, "What are you talking about? Love? I am a celibate. I avoid women just as I would avoid a disease. I don't look at them; I close my eyes."
Undeterred, Sri Ramanuja gently asked, "Can you recall even a small flicker of love that you might have experienced at any point in your life?"
The man, now visibly angry, said, "I have come to you to learn about prayer, not about love. I am not interested in worldly things."
Sri Ramanuja then said, "I cannot help you. If you have no experience of love, then there is no possibility for any experience of prayer. First, go into the world and love. When you have loved and been enriched through it, then come to me. Only a lover can understand what prayer truly is.
"Love is a natural form of prayer, given easily by nature. Prayer, however, is a higher form of love, not given so easily. It is achieved only when you reach the higher peaks of totality. Much effort is needed to achieve it. For love, no effort is needed; it is available and flowing. You are resisting it."
This teaching underscores that the foundation of spirituality is built upon the experience of love. Only through love can one understand and attain the higher realms of prayer and divine connection.
This story was told by Osho
The Ramanuja Teaching on Love & Prayer — Modern Relevance
The Core Paradox
The man came seeking the shortcut to God while simultaneously closing himself off from the very experience that leads there. This is one of the most common spiritual traps people fall into — mistaking avoidance for discipline, and numbness for purity.
What the Story Really Says
Ramanuja's response wasn't a rejection. It was a diagnosis.
He saw that the man had confused suppression with transcendence. True
renunciation isn't the absence of feeling — it's the transformation of feeling
into something higher.
The man thought:
Celibacy - → Avoidance of love → Purity → God
Ramanuja corrected this to:
Love → Deepened capacity to feel → Expanded heart → Prayer → God
Modern Day Relevance
1. Productivity Culture vs. Presence Many people today are
relentlessly "optimising" their lives — cutting out relationships,
emotions, and vulnerability in pursuit of goals. Like the man in the story,
they think detachment from feeling makes them stronger. But it only makes them
hollow. You cannot build meaningful work, art, or leadership on an empty
interior life.
2. The Rise of Spiritual Bypassing This is a well-documented
modern phenomenon — using meditation apps, yoga, or religious ritual as a way
to avoid dealing with relationships, grief, and emotional wounds. Ramanuja's
teaching cuts right through this. No mantra covers for an unlived heart.
Authentic spirituality must pass through human experience, not around it.
3. The Vulnerability Crisis We live in an age of extreme
guardedness. Social media creates performance, not connection. Many people go
years without genuine intimacy — and then wonder why life feels meaningless.
The man in the story had simply formalised this guardedness into a religious
identity. The modern version is more subtle but equally real.
4. Empathy as a Leadership and Social Skill Research consistently shows that the most effective leaders, therapists, teachers, and parents are those with high emotional attunement — people who have loved and lost and learned. Ramanuja was essentially saying: lived emotional experience is not a distraction from depth, it IS the depth.
Life Lessons
You cannot give what you have not felt. Whether it is
compassion, forgiveness, or devotion — all of it must first be experienced
personally before it can be expressed genuinely. A doctor who has never
suffered has a harder time holding a patient's fear. A leader who has never
failed struggles to inspire those who have.
Resistance is not the same as transcendence. Closing your
eyes to something is not freedom from it. The man who says "I don't think
about women" is often thinking about them more than anyone else. True
freedom comes from moving through an experience fully, not from building walls
around it.
Love is the training ground of the soul. Every act of love —
for a parent, a child, a friend, a cause — teaches surrender, patience,
sacrifice, and joy. These are precisely the qualities that prayer and spiritual
life demand. Love is not opposed to God; it is the curriculum that prepares you
for God.
Nature has already given you the beginning. Ramanuja says
love is naturally flowing — it requires no effort, it is already available. The
tragedy is that we actively resist it out of fear, pride, or ideology. Life's
invitation is already extended. The only question is whether you will accept
it.
Effort belongs to the higher stages, not the first step. Many people wait to feel "ready" for love, connection, or spiritual life. But readiness doesn't precede experience — it emerges from it. Start where nature meets you. The refinement comes later.
The Deepest Insight
Ramanuja did not say "Prayer is better than love."
He said prayer is love at its highest intensity. The same current runs through
both — one is a river you can step into easily, the other is the ocean you
reach after a long journey. But you cannot reach the ocean by refusing to touch
water.
In a world that increasingly treats emotion as weakness and detachment as wisdom, this ancient teaching is perhaps more urgent than ever: open the heart first. Everything else follows.