Dearest Ramji,
After enjoying immensely your teaching on Narada Bhakti Sutras I found myself writing down some thoughts about love. So then I thought of sending them to you. Here they are.
As humans we experience what we call “love” as an in – dwelling and compelling feeling that resides apparently dormant in our hearts and is awaked from time to time by the appearance of an external object of beauty, desire or compassion. The heart opens, love is ignited and rises up, overwhelming the lover with its powerful force – sometimes fierce and passionate at other times gentle, tender and exquisite. It comes unbidden, gloriously and then disappears like the melting snow, no matter how hard we try to hang on to it. Love seems to retreat back into the cave of the heart and we suffer from its absence, once again seeking to re- ignite it, to experience that wonderful bliss again. A human life is spent in search of this feeling, one way or another, at the mercy of its grace. But we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Mostly we seek it in the form of another person, that elusive soul mate whose very presence opens the floodgates of bliss. Good luck with that! Perhaps when the search for the soul mate has not been successful or has resulted in painful loss, we turn to God or religion and try to experience love through religious or spiritual experience. Or through art, music, nature or any other promising object. These fleeting experiences, although joyful, do not produce lasting happiness but rather are like carrots on a stick before a hungry donkey, tempting us to keep going, keep searching, keep believing. Not to be cynical.
The lucky finder of real, true Love is brought to their knees in gratitude because they come upon the truth of their own nature – that I am the love that I sought. I am love, love is me. Love is all there is. There is no thing else. Laughing and weeping, the person we thought we were dissolves into the truth of love itself, our very being, the only reality, which in our efforts to describe it we call non duality. Why do we call it non duality? Because we realize that there is only One. Only one thing exists and for want of a better word we call it love because love is the only experience that comes close to what we now know to be the truth of existence. Other words could be goodness, wholeness, fullness, light – but these words all have an opposite, and love does not. Love is not an experience –it is the only reality, ever.
So how do I feel as a human being having made this startling discovery? Part of what unfolds with the love discovery is the understanding that love is not a feeling, although it is the giver of feelings. Once the heart has opened love does not come and go as feelings do, because I do not come and go. I am not a feeling – I am existence and existence is love, shining eternally in its own light. With this understanding, all suffering ceases. Pain may be there, or loss or the cruel dark expressions of human ignorance but none of these can re – create suffering. THey are known to be mithya. For the samsari love is blind but for the jnani, love sees all as itself.
What is the effect of that knowledge upon life as a jiva? Of course I still have love feelings for my husband, my children, my morning cup of tea – those feelings do not disappear but are experienced within the context of their apparent reality, namely mithya. Love itself is known to be satya, shining as every name and form, as every manifestation of existence. So the love I feel for my own children is the love of the universal mother for all children, at once personal and yet not separate from love itself. I am not conflicted loving this but not that. It does not make me sentimental or unfeeling but secure, peaceful, devoted, and happy in the knowledge that for all eternity and beyond, manifest or un-manifest, I am love.
