Cultivating Divine Love

Love is one of the most misused words in our vocabulary. We only need to ask ourselves how often we use this word inappropriately in our daily lives.

Human love often comes with expectations, we want to experience something. When expectations are no longer fulfilled, we often tend to withdraw from the person. It seems that in human love we seek to fulfill a void that exists in us and we are never completely satisfied until we find what that void is.

In divine love, we try to become one with the weakness, imperfection and bondage of others, in order to understand and serve them at their own level, with the purpose of helping them in transforming their imperfections.

What is the source of love and how can it be maintained?

A spark of divine love exists in all of us from the beginning of our life, but often it is lost because it is not nurtured. Perhaps we can recover this divine spark of love, when we analyze what love is.

Most of us recognize love as a felling we have, for family, friends, relatives with whom we are in close contact. But on closer examination, the satisfaction of  love is not in the feeling itself, but in the joy that the feeling arouses in us. True love gives joy, it gives happiness. So love is not the ultimate, the ultimate is joy, bliss.

God is Sat, Chit, Ananda or ever existing conscious bliss. We as souls are individualized Sat, Chit, Ananda. From joy we have come, in joy we live and have our being and in joy we will one day return again.

All the emotions of love, compassion, courage, self sacrifice, humility would be meaningless without joy. Joy means exhilaration and expansion of the ultimate bliss.

The expansion of joy originates in the brain, in the subtle centres of God consciousness that yoga calls Sahasrara, or the thousand pedaled lotus. Yet the actual feeling of joy is not experienced in the head, but in the heart.

From the divine seat of God consciousness in the brain, joy descends into the heart centre, the Anahata chakra and manifests there. That joy comes from God’s bliss, the attribute of spirit.

We may experience joy under certain outer conditions, but it is mostly manifest without any material cause. Joy is being. We can experience this joy in meditation. It arises from within like a giant wave.

In the universal sense, love is the divine power of attraction that harmonizes, unites, and binds together. It is in contrast to repulsion which is the outgoing cosmic consciousness of God. The attractive force of love counteracts repulsion in order to harmonize creation and ultimately draw it back to God.

Love expresses itself in various ways; it is a universal feeling, its expressions are distinguished by the nature of consciousness through which it moves. This is very important for us to remember in order to discern whether love comes from ego consciousness and thus is selfish or from soul consciousness and thus is selfless and harmonizing.

How do many people experience love?

The capacity of human love is often expressed in a very limited way in that we cannot expand it to totally embrace another. The weaker, very often loves the stronger because of insecurity. So love binds them and gives them both some sense of satisfaction.

But in divine Love there is no such thing as superiority and inferiority. Divine Love always gives itself freely and wholeheartedly. Divine Love gets satisfaction only by offering itself totally and unconditionally. In divine Love, we come to notice that the personal and the impersonal perfectly go together. There is a balance between the two. The personal in us enters into the vast expanse which is impersonal; and the impersonal in us enters into the personal to manifest its unmanifest Reality, Divinity and Immortality.

In human love, the personal and the impersonal are like two strangers. In the very depth of human love, there is always a rivalry and competition between the two.

In human love, very often the doubting mind, the suspecting mind, comes to the foreground. But in divine Love, we see only the loving heart, the surrendering heart, the all beckoning heart.

In human love, the lover and the beloved are two separate persons. The lover is running toward the beloved, and when he reaches the beloved he finds his satisfaction. In divine Love, the lover and the beloved are one and inseparable.

In human love, we feel that satisfaction lies somewhere else, not within us, but in somebody else. But in divine Love, satisfaction is found nowhere else but in ourselves. The Lover and the Beloved are one and the same-the Supreme dwelling within and the Supreme outside us.

When we speak of our self as the divine Lover or Beloved, we have to know that this is the 'Self' which is both the One and the many. This Self, the Supreme, finds its satisfaction only when it gets a glimpse of God's Reality, Infinity, Eternity and Immortality in the many. This 'Self' is the One, and it wants to see and feel its Reality in the many.

Love is duty. In our human life we see duty as something mechanical, lifeless, forced, something thrust upon us. But in the divine Life, duty is something full of opportunity. At every second an opportunity dawning for us to expand our consciousness, our life's reality, our life's delight. So in the divine Life we welcome duty, for it increases our capacity and potentiality and expands the dream of our divine Reality.

Life is the lesson of Love. Love is the lesson of Life. When we study Life's lesson in our human life, the lesson is composed of fear, doubt, anxiety, worry and frustration. But in the divine Life, we see that Love is the lesson not only of Life, but also for Life, for the Life that is everlasting, ever illuminating and ever fulfilling. Divine is the elevation of consciousness.

We are of God the eternal Love and we are for God the eternal Love. We are of God the infinite Love and we are for God the infinite Love. Eternity is the Source of the Silence. From the One we came and for the many we exist. This is the real message of divine Love. We are of the One and we are for the many, the many in the One.