Cultivating Real Love

The world as a whole has forgotten the real meaning of the word love. Love has been so abused and crucified that very few people know what true love is. To define love is very difficult, for the same reason that words cannot fully describe the flavor of an orange. We have to taste the fruit to know its flavor. So is it with love.

All of us have experienced love in some form in our hearts, yet we know very little about what it is. We have not understood how to develop love, how to purify and expand it into divine love. A spark of this divine love exists in most hearts in the beginning of life, but it is usually lost, because we don’t know how to cultivate it.

Love is not just in the feeling, but the joy that feeling brings. Love gives joy. We love because it brings us happiness. Love is not the ultimate; the ultimate is bliss. God is Sat-Chit-Ananda, ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss. We, as soul, are individualized Sat-Chit-Ananda. From Joy we have come, in Joy we live and have our being, and in that sacred Joy we will one day melt again.

All the divine emotions, love, compassion, courage, self-sacrifice, humility would be meaningless without joy. Joy means exhilaration, an expression of the ultimate Bliss.

Our experience of joy originates in the brain, in the subtle center of God-consciousness in yoga terms the Sahasrara, or thousand-Petaled lotus. Yet the actual feeling of joy is experienced not in the head but in the heart.

From the divine seat of God-consciousness in the brain, joy descends into the heart center, and manifests there in the Anahata chakra.

Paramahansa Yogananda stated that our life and consciousness are maintained by the power and activity within the "tree of life." The trunk of the tree represents the Sushumna, in which the seven subtle centers or chakras are located. From these centers comes the power for all our physiological and psychological functions and abilities.

Yogananda stated that there is a definite connection between the physiological function of the heart and the subtle spiritual center of feeling in the heart. Working together, they express the great emotion of love, both human and divine.

That joy comes from God's bliss, being the essential and ultimate attribute of Spirit.

Though joy may be born in relation with certain outer conditions, it is not subject to conditions; it often manifests without any material cause. Sometimes we wake up in the morning almost as walking on air with joy, and we don't know why. When we sit in the silence of deep meditation, joy bubbles up from within, we are not roused by no outer stimuli. The joy of meditation is overwhelming. Those who have not gone into the silence of true meditation do not know what real joy is.

We feel happiness in the fulfillment of a desire; but when we were young, we often felt a sudden happiness that came as if from nowhere. Joy expresses itself under certain conditions, but it is not created by those conditions. In our human experience, certain events are often required to bring out joy, but the joy itself is the perennial state of the soul.

Love also is native to the soul, but love is secondary to joy; there could be no love without joy.

Universal nature of love

In the universal sense, love is the divine power of attraction in creation that harmonizes, unites, and binds together. It is opposed by the force of repulsion, which is the outgoing cosmic energy that materializes creation from the cosmic consciousness of God.

Repulsion keeps all forms in the manifested state through maya, the power of delusion that divides, differentiates, and disharmonizes.

The attractive force of love counteracts cosmic repulsion to harmonize all creation and ultimately draw it back to God. When we live in tune with the attractive force of love, we achieve harmony with nature and our fellow human beings, and are attracted to blissful reunion with God.