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Nonduality
Highlights: Issue #3149, Sunday, April 27, 2008, Editor: Mark
Love has nothing to do with another person. Love is your
individual and collective soul. Love is God. Love is Truth. Love
is Beauty. Love is Self. To know yourself, to surrender to the
truth of yourself, is to surrender to love.
- Gangaji
What we see is not the most important.
Could dust rise without the invisible
hand of the wind?
Could a fan turn without any current?
Could lungs breathe without breath?
Tell me
What is the shape of Love?
How much does Joy weigh
when held in the palm of your hand?
Can you catch the Spirit of Life in a jar?
All things seen depend
upon the Unseen.
All sounds depend upon Silence.
All things felt depend
upon what is not felt.
. - Adyashanti
Q: Swami, it is good to love God, is it not? Then why not follow
the path of love?
Maharshi: Who said you couldn't follow it?
You can do so. But when you talk of love,
there is duality, is there not?-the person who loves
and the entity called God who is loved?
The individual is not separate from God.
Hence love means one has love towards one's own Self.
Q: That is why I am asking you whether God
could be worshipped through the path of love.
Maharshi: That is exactly what I have been saying.
Love itself is the actual form of God.
Only if one attains the height of love
will liberation be attained.
Such is the heart of all religions.
The experience of Self is only love,
which is seeing only love,
hearing only love,
feeling only love,
tasting only love
and smelling only love,
which is bliss.
Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, quoted from
http://www.harshasatsangh.com/ramanaindex.htm
For the average person, love is a manifestation of the violent,
possessive doership of the ego. Whereas for the spiritual person,
it is not a sentiment at all, but a state of mind in which love
exists to the degree in which the selfish element is transcended.
According to the average person, the desire for possession is the
criterion, the touchstone of sincerity or reality by which love
is to be judged. Even the mother is accused of not loving her
child if she is not particularly possessive towards her baby.
Love - the sentiment, and love - the non-affective state of mind,
where a subject-object relationship does not exist, are infused
by the same force. Though basically not different, one is steeped
in egoistic involvement, the other unaffected and pure. The
former is exemplified by the love of a man for a woman, the
latter, sometimes called divine love or caritas, is a luminous
pool of light and not a beam focused on one object at a time.
All-embracing, bathing all alike in its radiance. It must,
however, be recognized that the discrimination between spiritual
and romantic love is illusory because both are aspects of the
same reality. Physical expression of love cannot be excluded
because the relationship is on the plane of phenomenality. In a
few rare cases, even the sense of doership and possession will
not exist.
Recently, I came across an instance where the personal element
was not excluded from true love. A nurse recounted: "While
taking care of my patient's wound, we began talking, and he told
me that he needed to visit the nursing home to eat breakfast with
his wife. She had been there for a while, a victim of Alzheimer's
disease. I asked him if his wife would be worried if he was a bit
late, whereupon he replied that due to her loss of memory she no
longer knew who he was, nor had she recognized him in five years.
I was surprised and asked him: 'And you still go every morning?'
I had to hold back tears when he smiled, patted my hand and said:
'She doesn't know me, but I still know who she is.' I realized
that true love is neither physical nor romantic. True love is an
acceptance of all that is, that has been, that will or even will
not be."
- Ramesh Balsekar
The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the
receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or
need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation.
Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only
thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the
Beloved all around me.
- Ram Dass
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; No
disease that enough love will not heal; No door that enough love
will not open; No gulf that enough love will not bridge; No wall
that enough love will not throw down; No sin that enough love
will not redeem.
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, How
hopeless the outlook, How muddled the fangle, How great the
mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.
If only you could love enough, You would be the happiest And most
powerful being in the world.
- Emmet Fox
That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you
do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to
cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved
yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the
service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love
yourself absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as
yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you
cannot love them. Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't
refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of
self- knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realization, no
virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the
same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you
will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the
depth and fullness of yourself, you know that every living being
and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when
you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for
you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens
alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realization can
break it. Go for it resolutely.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That
No power can withstand divine Love.
- Mary Baker Eddy