RRDS

Many years ago, I did an article for this same book analyzing love and I arrived at the conclusion that love can neither be affected by time, place nor cause, that it remains constant through all eras and all seasons, that it is not a matter of right and wrong but that, in truth and in fact, Love is God. In my innocent heart, it was as simple as that: What is Love? Love is God.

 

Now, almost ten years later, I feel a need to question this analysis. How can I claim that love is God? First of all, do I really know exactly what love is? But more importantly, can I really know who/what God is?!!

 

It comes down to an innocent teenager equating two unknowns without first understanding either.

 

Ten years later, here I am, still questioning what is love and who is God.

 

During the time since my naive analyses and conclusions, I have learnt many things. One of those things was how love feels.

 

And what is very interesting is that this very “Love” made me extremely happy and also sent me into the lowliest depths of depression. However, according to my previous conclusions, Love cannot be affected by time, place or cause and there should be no ‘seasons’ to love; yet I found myself helplessly driven on a roller-coaster of emotions because of this very “Love”. Then, the realistic response would be that what I have felt in my life cannot be called love. But, if not love, then what did I experience?

 

Is God love?

 

How can I claim to know and love God when even the great yogis cannot understand Him! I am a mere mortal human being, but yet I know that I have felt Him in my life. I know I have experienced His miracles, and I know I love Him.

 

I cannot claim to know God. I have not that right. But sometimes I feel something so inexplicably powerful throughout my entire being just by singing His praises or by praying to Him. I like to think that I feel Him. Or perhaps those are just windows in my human existence, windows to the ultimate truth, when I ‘see’ / ‘feel’ that I am really one with Him.

 

There were moments in my life that I knew the purest of happiness just by loving or by feeling that absoluteness with Him.

 

And there were moments that I went into desolate darkness because I felt that either my love or my Lord deserted me when I most needed strength.

 

I thought that Love and God can be bounded by nothing, not time, place, cause, happiness, sorrow, goodness, evil and not even the words “Love” and “God”.

 

Yet I know with complete certainty that I have felt both God and Love, even with all the dual emotions I experienced with each.

 

And you know what? Neither definition nor experience is wrong. I have felt Love and tasted the joys of experiencing Godliness.

 

And the only reason I felt the intense pains of both was not because there was duality in either, but because I had forgotten both at those moments in time.

 

Love is constant. God is constant. With or without me they exist. But my mere existence is part of both. Whether I acknowledge it or not, whether I want it or not.

 

So what is Love? Is Love God? Is God Love?

 

I still don’t know. Maybe I was right in my conclusions ten years ago, maybe I was wrong.

 

Maybe I might live my entire life without being able to answer these timeless questions. But what I do know now is that it is not as important to define love, as it is to experience.

 

Close your eyes and breathe, and know that you exist, that you’ve always existed and that you will always exist. And when you feel that wonderful feeling in your heart, when you prayer or when you’re with the one you love more than all others, just know that that is Love and it is all within that something we call “God”.

 

By Rakhee A Ramdeen

 

The whole universe, material and spiritual, is the creation of Shri Radha - Krishna. Shri Radha is the presiding Goddess of Shri Krishna. The Paramatma (supreme Lord) is subservient to her. In her absence Shri Krishna does not exist.

 

The relationship of Radha and Krishna is the embodiment of love, passion and devotion. Radha’s passion for Krishna symbolizes the soul’s intense longing and willingness for the ultimate union with God.

 

The ‘leela’ of Radha and Krishna depicts a beautiful romance that existed even in their childhood. Even though they were not married in the material world, the stories of their love, games, the magical moonlit dancing with the Gopis and Radha’s succumbing to the call of Krishna’s Basuri (flute) are most prominent and revered.

 

Krishna’s purpose to protect Dharma and to lead the righteous to victory eventually resulted in the physical separation of Him and Radha, but she waited for Him nonetheless. As the story goes, He eventually married Rukmini and Satyabhama.

 

Radha’s love for Krishna can be interpreted as the quest of the spirit for union with the divine. This kind of love is the highest form of devotion, and is symbolically represented as the bond between the wife and the husband.

 

It is love expressed through music - Lord Krishna is the cosmic musician. Although Radha was married (to Ayana) she still could not resist the Lord Krishna’s musical call. It is this enticing musical passion that overrides the social and female responsibilities Radha was tied to.

 

This divine love, this real love is transcendental and spiritual. We also have to become attracted to spiritual love and give up false love bounded in physical and material attributes.

 

Srila Prabhupada said, “the sum and substance of spiritual life is attraction for Radha-Krishna.”

 

Mere Shyaam Mere Nandalala

Sagare Jagata Kaa Hai Tuhi Rakhawala

 

Blessed be my Lord Krishna,

Who is the saviour of the entire Universe.

 

Compiled by: Radha Ramsaran

 

Mirabai was a princess of the Rathod clan and belonged to Medath of Rajasthan. Even from childhood she exhibited spiritual traits and was passionately attached to the murti (idol) of Giridhar Gopal, a form of Lord Krishna. She was eventually married to the crown prince of Chittore. But shortly after, her husband Bhojraj and father-in-law Rana Sangh died. Mira refused to commit sati (be cremated along with her husband), as was the practice among Rajputs, because in her heart she was wedded to Giridhar Gopal, and death of the “earthly” husband had no meaning to her She spent all her time in praying, meditation, singing and dancing before her beloved murti of Lord Krishna.

 

But this type of behavior was considered unacceptable by the royal household and the ruling king (her brother-in-law).

 

There were several incidents in which the Rana (King) tried to have her killed. A basketful of flowers with a snake inside was sent to her, but through her innocence and purity of heart, the snake was transformed to a Saligrama (symbol of Lord Vishnu)! When this failed, the Rana tried sending a cup of poison but again, by the powers of devotion, even poison became amrit (nectar). When they tried putting her atop a bed of sharp nails, the nails magically became flowers. Always, through the grace of the Lord she loved so passionately, she was saved.

 

Eventually Mirabai left the palace and undertook pilgrimage to Brindavan and Dwaraka singing and praying.

 

It is said that Mira got merged into the idol of Krishna in the temple of Ranchod at Dwaraka.

 

More than 400 songs ascribed to Mira known as Padas (lyrics) have been collected. She herself set tune to her songs and sang in a soul-stirring divinely sweet voice. “Rag Govind” and “Rag Mira Malhar” are her creations.

 

Some of Mirabal’s Padas are:

 

“I discovered the great secret in uttering the name and learnt it was quintessence of sastras. I reached my Giridhar through prayers and tears.”

 

“Oh my mind! You must do spiritual practice and worship. To love and live for Him”

 

“Without pure love, the darling son of Nanda cannot be attained”

 

Compiled by: Rakhee A. Ramdeen

“Love is not a function of doing; Love is a function of being.”

Gautama Buddha

 

EXPERIENCING THE WORLD WITHOUT LOVE is very cold and meaningless — a mere acting out of some nightmare. When we experience the world in that way, it is because we have lost touch with the basic substratum of love energy. Love is not something that you can force. Love is something that you can become receptive to, because it is there, underneath the surface.

 

Each of us has to learn how to be receptive to love (i.e., how to let love do things to us). All the expressions that we have in our language suggest that love is something you do, that love is something you go and get, or that love is something you manufacture. It is seen not as something given in reality, but to be had with effort.

 

There is an alternate view that love is an integral part of existence and of our individual lives. Underneath everything, underneath what we perceive, underneath the coming together of the fragments of a molecule, of an atom, somehow love is there. We have the choice to experience love or not to experience love. We are always choosing to experience ourselves as a function of love or as loveless beings living in a meaningless universe.

 

Now the difficulty is that we are a consumer society. We have a grabbing and holding mentality; to go out and make, create, and build. We think that if we don’t run the house, business, spouse, and children, it’s all going to fall apart. We are convinced that we have to do in order to justify our being.

 

There is something basically wrong, and it has to do with the way we relate to nature. It has to do with the way we believe we have to create those things that are good in our lives. What we want in life we see in terms of activity, doing. But love is not a function of doing; love is a function of being, of simply what you are. That’s what it means to speak of it as a substratum. It is the energy from which you are made, from which you come.

 

The thing about love is that you can’t bring it about through any of the ways that you usually go about getting the things you want. You may have tried it — looking for love. You may have lost your lover and decided you would go out and find another one. You went to all the parties, “Maybe this one will be it.” You may have noticed that it didn’t work, and the way love came was that it slipped up on you when you were not looking, when you were not expecting. Why it is that love comes like that? Why is it that this energy, which is the basic substratum of our being, has to sneak up upon us in order for us to experience it?

 

This essence of love has been forgotten. In fact, the tragedy of our time is that we have forgotten how to be. We have only learned how to do, and that is why love comes hard to us.

Deep in our cultural metaphor there lies the error that the human being is a machine. The metaphor of a plant would be more appropriate. Your being grows like a plant. The love being in you is also like a plant in its growth. It doesn’t have any mental content. It doesn’t have a perceivable direction. It just does its thing as a function of your being. Just like a plant does.

 

Look at the life of a plant. It begins with a seed. From that comes a small shoot, and from that small shoot comes a stem and leaves, from the stem and leaves come the flowers. It grows; it doesn’t do.

 

Plants do not make choices. They are not active in any way. Their growth is a pure receptivity to nature moving through them. That is the way our being is. It grows on its own. It grows as a pure response to nature.

 

For the most part, our doing is our vain trying to shape our being in a certain way. It is like a hibiscus trying to be a carnation and a carnation striving to be a hibiscus. If you are a hibiscus, you cannot be a carnation. Only the human mind can conceive of such madness. It does so by making so much noise with thought, chatter, and doing that it can no longer hear the growing inside it.

 

Our active, striving doing has created our “civilization.” We can choose, do, create, and dominate nature. But then we come to see ourselves in a way that is not real. We lose our touch, our rootedness, our sense of who we are and what nature is. The most important aspect of creativity that we so often forget is receptivity. Those of you who are artists know that the creation comes through you. The painting that you design in your head way before you execute it does not have the beauty of the one that comes through you, where you become a pure channel for the creation. This is the way art is, and this also is the way love is.

 

Love Energy

We cannot be creators of love. We can make a valentine, we can send it, we can tell someone we love them. We can go out and look for a lover. We can find someone and convince ourselves that we love. But this beingness, this being that is like a plant, that is a pure receptivity to nature, is not responsive to love on that level. There are many who try to use the ways of love to their own advantage. They marry for money, power, or security. They place themselves in prison. They place themselves in situations where nature’s wonderful unfolding of meaning cannot take place.

 

So love, in a sense, has false faces that reflect the flawed state of our consciousness. Love becomes an antagonist. It comes into our life and disrupts it. It takes us to places that we believe we shouldn’t go. We fight it. We try to shape it. “No, I won’t love this one; I will love that one because it is more advantageous to me.”

 

And so we move, and every time we make a choice for expediency we sacrifice something. And the happening is so silent in us that we may not hear what that sacrifice is.

What I am saying to you is that love is nature reaching into you and taking hold of you. You know what it feels like when you have been in love. Or when you have been in a situation when you could not allow love and suddenly love comes. Yet this is nature’s way of reaching into you and saying “Come back.”

 

Now the manifestation of love energy in a human being is a very magical thing. Like all things that are intangible and really valuable in life, love is a process, a constantly transforming, transmuting way of being within us. It passes through phases like the plant; the seed, the seedling, the leaves, the branches, and the ultimate flowering. All of those phases in a plant’s life also exist in us as the possibility of love.

 

There is a law by which the flower grows from the seed to the blossoming. What is that law? Love in your being is a seed which wants to sprout, to become a plant and a flower. What is this growth? What is this way that love has with us? How does it function?

 

Each human being is a threesome entity; a body, a mind, and a soul. All three of these levels are manifest in the world that we experience: the physical, the mental, and the emotional/spiritual. All three are always present, no matter how they may be suppressed. And love, this calling from nature, accordingly becomes manifest in different ways, and it grows by its own mysterious laws.

 

Being in Love

The seed bursts and roots begin to go down into the ground. A seedling comes — the first green shoots. And this is love moving into the second level, which is the level of the mind. Not the volitional mind, but the creative mind. When the energy of love reaches the mind, becomes transformed in that way, you may have noticed that sexuality suddenly becomes another matter. It’s not available just here and there and anywhere any more. It goes some place. In love two minds become one. There is a merging of the minds. Some transformation has taken place.

 

When the substratum of love energy reaches the mind, flowering there in its own way and becoming love, you have a whole new series of trials before you, for love is the destroyer of ego. For love to move beyond that “in love” space, there are many hurdles to overcome. So when love, that hand of nature, reaches up and creates that state of being “in love,” then suddenly we have been given a school. To work out that love, that being “in love” space with another human being, is the greatest workshop. When the drive to experience that love in a pure form is so great, what has to be accomplished is the bringing together of two minds. That is very difficult. Minds are separate. They are not prone to becoming one. Our will is to be separate. Our ego, our mind is set to see itself as separate, not merged. So there is a tremendous fear, too, of falling into love, because to experience that new love space, we have to let go so much of our isolation, of our sense of aloneness. And even though we all say we want to do that, we are scared to death of it. There is nothing more frightening than intimacy.

 

Now notice that two things are frightening, and they both have to do with love. Sex is frightening because we lose control. Love is frightening because we lose the independence and autonomy of mind. We lose the capacity to control in love. When you are in love you are crazy.

 

To sacrifice to sex, to sacrifice to love, really represents the annihilation of the ego. The ego has to be annihilated, and love is a way that ego annihilates itself. This is why great minds and sacred traditions speak always of surrender. The surrender to that love energy is the most difficult task. It is the task of a courageous man and a courageous woman to give up their securities.

 

God and Love

One of my teachers said to me, “Sacrifice everything for love.” I was willing to sacrifice a lot, but everything?

 

But the “everything” is all that separates us from nature, and now that we are talking at this level, we can bring God out of the closet and call nature “God,” because at this level we are beginning to reach a higher perception of the whole matter.

 

To surrender to God you have to surrender everything. You lose that autonomy. You lose that capacity to control yourself. And it is the most frightening thing to give up that autonomous doing and controlling that you identify yourself with. It is the most frightening thing to surrender to that being that you are. The mind is so tricky in this way. Rather than surrender, it criticizes the love object, “This one is not quite right.” “This other one is wrong in some way.” “This one’s eyes are not brown — I want brown eyes.” We become very choosey.

 

But see what is behind all that. It is that fear of loss of self, that fear of loss of autonomy. It is fear of the loss of that part of ourselves, our ego, that we have separated out from nature.

 

So you see, love is a great gift, in this way. And in order for you to give, really to give yourself in loving, you have to drop your ego. And this is why my teacher says that love is the highest way. And it also is the most difficult. Many things get in the way, many illusions.

 

So, love is a great opportunity. It is the greatest thing going in the human potential movement. We’ve forgotten about it. We have techniques, facilitators, and workshops. Love, I am telling you is the greatest of these. It is what is called in India a Sadhana, a personal spiritual discipline. Love is a way to come to God. But it requires a constant purification.

 

Love as Teacher

Our institutions and our society feed the process whereby the other becomes a possession. It’s a great spiritual lesson in life to learn how to drop that possession, to learn how to let go. So this becomes the great spiritual challenge of love; the state of being in love presents the opportunity to deal with attachment at a fundamental level. We must love and let go of the other, allow them their freedom to themselves, otherwise we kill the love. It’s a paradox, a disastrous paradox. You need the discernment to see beyond it. So love is the greatest teacher. It is a process of letting go of the other, letting go of your expectations.

 

You see, these are all things of the mind, all mechanisms of the ego, and they are the same mechanisms that separate you from your sense of God and your own being. Those same forms of holding that create attachment in your love relationships are the same obstructions between you and the experience of divinity within yourself.

 

So this second stage, this second manifestation of love energy is a great growth opportunity. Learn to let go. Learn to discover how you are holding in love. Go deep in yourself and find those fears within yourself that make you possess. Find in yourself, and deal in yourself, with the real existential issues.

 

Love is a manifestation of God, and it has all these forms. We can stop it and our lives lose this meaning, but we can also learn to surrender to it. If we can let it be, we can come to rest in it. It is the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.

by Pundit Neil Prashad