those who are gamblers, who can risk their
very life and be possessed by some unknown
energy, are able to know what love is.
Love is the first step towards God — hence it
appears mad to those who are hung up in
their heads. And because people don’t
understand the whole mystery of love,
because they try to understand it through the
mind… It can be understood only through the
heart. Remember: all that is great is
available to the heart.
The heart is the door
to all great values of life, to all ultimate
values, and the head is only a useful
mechanism, a gadget — good in the
marketplace but utterly useless in a temple.
And love is a temple, it is not a marketplace.
If you drive love into the marketplace it is
reduced into ugly sexuality.
That’s what people have done: rather than
raising love to God, they have reduced love
into ugly, animalistic sexuality. And the
strange thing is, the same people — the
priests, the politicians, the puritans — the
same people who have reduced love into an
ugly phenomenon, are against sex, are
enemies of sex. And they are the people who
have destroyed a tremendously potential
power!
Love is a lotus hidden in the mud. The lotus
is born out of mud, but you don’t condemn
the lotus because it is born out of mud; you
don’t call the lotus muddy, you don’t call the
lotus dirty.
Love is born out of sex, and then
prayer is born out of love, and then God is
born out of prayer. Higher and higher and
higher one goes on soaring.
But the priests and the puritans have reduced
the whole phenomenon into sexuality. And
once love becomes sex it becomes ugly, one
starts feeling guilty about it. And it is
because of that guilt that this saying, this
proverb: First sight of love, last sight of
wisdom.
If you ask me, I will change it a
little bit. I will say: First sight of love, first
sight of wisdom.
But it depends how you look at it. If you look
at the potential of it, at the highest
possibility that it can reach, then love
becomes a ladder.
If you look only at the
mud and you are utterly blind to the future of
the mud, then certainly love becomes
something ugly and great antagonism arises
in you. But to be antagonistic to love is to be
antagonistic to God.
Once love is reduced to sexuality only, of
course then the first sight of love is the last
sight of wisdom. But it depends on you: why
reduce it to sexuality? Why not change the
baser metal into gold? Why not learn the
alchemy of love?
Love is the greatest gift of God. Learn the art
of it. Learn the song of it, the celebration of
it. It is an absolute need: just as the body
cannot survive without food, the soul cannot
survive without love. Love is the nourishment
of the soul, it is the beginning of all that is
great, it is the door of the divine.
One of the great problems of life is that one
believes that what he desires is good for the
mere reason that he desires it. Such thinking is a
fallacy and it is a broken rung on the ladder of
life that will not sustain or support anyone who
places his weight on it. Life is complex, and it is
often very hard to know the good from the evil,
because evil has a way of disguising itself as
good. We discover the deception and the truth of
the situation after we have undergone a bad
experience.
Hopefully, due to our lack of
discrimination we learned a valuable lesson. Yet,
it is amazing how so many can experience so
much and yet learn so little.
Everyone in life desires to be happy.
An exception
may be those who, deluded, believe they are
happy in their misery. True happiness is an
outgoing expression of love; a selfless giving
without expecting a given return. While love is
the true expression of one's self, it is not
something that is sloppy or mushy; it is a quality
of great strength and of great endurance.
The love of God for His human children is a love of
the highest quality and of inconceivable
endurance. Love is also all-encompassing: it is
gentleness, yet it is firmness; it is giving, yet
doing so wisely; it is helping, yet not meddling;
it is devotion, yet not fanaticism; it is adoration,
yet not being possessive.
Love is many things,
and in its highest expression it is all things.
As we evolve in consciousness we also grow in
love. Love becomes an outpouring of divine
qualities. Anyone wishing to use a barometer to
measure his degree of development has only to
gauge his own quality and quantity of love as his
barometer and he will know exactly where he is
on the scale of life. Many claiming to be highly
developed and highly spiritual still do many
unloving things to others and this shows exactly
where they really are in spirituality.
The infusion of the Being through our practice of
Transcendental Meditation is really the infusion
of love and the infusion into ourselves of our
divine qualities.
This is love. Love as an
expression of divinity does not have to be
declared by anyone, because it automatically
radiates from one. Now, each spoken word is an
expression of love and each act is an act of love.
So love is the true goal of life because love is
eternal. When all else has vanished, love alone
will remain in its resplendent glory. Before one
can ever hope to stand erect in the light or
become eternal or godlike, one must become a
living expression of his own highest quality, and
this is love and this is also God. Indeed love is the greatest gift.
©Copyright
#Sunsampaul d Philosopher
09-02-16
01:09am
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