Love: human and divine

Divine Love is a flowering of delight and self-giving. Human love is the gambol of sufferings and limitations.

Love is a bird. When we encage it, we call it human love. When we allow love to fly in the all-pervading Consciousness, we call it Divine Love.

Ordinary human love with its fears, accusations, misunderstandings, jealousies and quarrels is a fire clouding its own brightness by a pall of smoke. The same human love, arising from the meeting of two souls, is a pure and radiant flame. Instead of smoke, it emits the rays of self-surrender, sacrifice, selflessness, joy and fulfilment.

Human love is often the terrible attraction of bodies and nerves; Divine Love is the ever-blossoming affinity of souls.

Divine Love is detachment; human love is attachment. Detachment is real satisfaction. Attachment is quenchless thirst.

Ascending love, arising from the soul's joy, is the smile of God. Descending love, carrying with it the passion of the senses, is the kiss of Death.

Human love is usually self-embracing and self-persistent. Divine Love is all-embracing and self-existent.

Love can be as brittle as glass or as strong as Eternity, depending upon whether it is founded in the vital or in the Soul.

Our higher emotions, taken away from their human objects and offered to God, are turned into Divine Nectar by His magic. Our lower emotions, if not transmuted and transformed, are turned into poison by our own hand.

Disappointment skilfully dogs vital love. Satisfaction divinely consummates psychic love.

When our vital wants to see something, it has to look through self-love. When our Psychic Being wants to see something, it sees through self-giving.

Human love says to Divine Love: "I can't tolerate you."
Divine Love says to human love: "Well, that is no reason for me to leave you."

Sri Chinmoy, AUM — Vol. 1, No. 2, 27 September 1965, Boro Park Printers -- Brooklyn, N. Y, 1965