Part II — Question and answers
Question: What is love?
Sri Chinmoy: There are various types of love: animal love, human love and divine love. In animal love we see, we feel and we become the instrument of destruction. Animal love is another name for unlit, obscure, dark passion. Animal love is not human love; but if human love is not transformed or purified by the divine light, there is every possibility that it will be covered by animal love. That is because the animal is still deep inside us. Each human being has inside him animal qualities and divine qualities. At every moment, he is pulled either by the divine or the undivine. The undivine here is animal love.With human love, we have to be extremely careful, because human love is very limited. In human love, there is every possibility of being captured by pleasure. In human love there is practically no opportunity to expand our divine consciousness. True human love, even if it is not spiritual, will have some psychic emotion in it. This emotion will try to show us that love should not bind or impose. However, in human love we always feel that the other person does not want us or need us. There is always some fear or hatred in human love. In the case of human love for a spiritual Master, we feel that we want or need his love but are not getting it in the manner that we deserve. Human love, as everybody knows, ends in frustration and frustration is followed by destruction. In human love, we end up losing our own sweet feeling of oneness with the other person and we end up losing our divine reality.
Divine love makes no demand. It is spontaneous and constant. It is unlimited in every way. It is like the sun. The sun is for everybody. Everybody can use the sunlight, but if we keep our doors and windows shut, what can the sun do? It is God's divine Love that has to act in and through the human love. But if we do not care for the divine love that is flowing around us or wants to flow in us, then the divine love cannot function in and through us.
Human love binds; but before it binds it is already bound. Divine love illumines, but before it illumines, we see that it is already illumined. Divine love starts with the awareness of some higher reality. It is our constant conviction of some high, very high truth. Divine love at every moment illumines us and in illumination we see total fulfilment.
God is all Love; God and God's Love can never be separated. God is highest and most powerful because of His Love. But human love has simply killed God's divine Love. Human love has been misused to such an extent that God's divine Love has been suffocated. We are using only our human love, which is binding, and we are thinking that this is our real achievement or fulfilment. But at the end of our journey, we see that it is all frustration, all destruction.
The very nature of human love is to stick only to one person and to reject everyone else: accept and reject, accept and reject. But in divine love, which is unlimited and infinite, the question of acceptance and rejection does not arise at all. In divine love there is no possession — only a feeling of oneness. This oneness can enter into an animal, into a flower, into a tree or even into a wall. It is not like human love where today we want to possess one person or thing, tomorrow two persons, the day after tomorrow three. When we have divine love for someone, at that time there is automatically inseparable oneness. No bridge is required; we just become one. The lover becomes the beloved, the knower becomes the known and the seeker becomes one with the Master.
Divine love tells us that we are greater than the greatest, larger than the largest; it tells us that our life is infinitely more important than we imagine. Divine love means constant transcendence, not only of our human boundaries, but of God's own Realisation in us and through us.
In divine love we grow. Divine love, the love of the soul, liberates and expands our consciousness. Love means oneness of divinity, oneness of reality, oneness of the individual consciousness with the unlimited consciousness. When we enter into the universal Consciousness through our meditation, we do not think of human love at that time. We think only of divine love and oneness. If we have something small like a tiny knife, then we cannot cut something very big with it. But if we have a very big knife, then we can cut something large with it. In the spiritual life also, the instrument that we are using right now is our very limited consciousness. That is why we are limited in our love. But if we use the other instrument, which is very vast, if we use the universal Consciousness, our capacity for divine love become unlimited.
Divine love will come from the spiritual Master, from God and from our own meditation, but only when we do not expect it. A child expects either a penny or a nickel or a quarter from his father. More than that is beyond his expectation. If he expects from his father all the time, the father will give, but he will give only what the child expects. But if the child feels that whatever his father has is also his, and if he wants only to please his father, then when the father retires or when the father feels that the child is capable of receiving, he will give the child all his wealth.
When we don't expect anything from God, God will give us everything. He will say, "It is I, who am giving the infinite Love. How is it that My children remain with very limited capacity, very limited achievement?" So in order to prove that He and His children are one, that we are his worthy instrument or representative, He will give us of His infinite Peace, Light and Bliss.
When one becomes unconditionally surrendered to the Master's will, which is the same as God's Will in the case of a realised Master, one gets infinite love, divine love. Everything will come in the form of love. We will get peace, but it will come in the form of love; this peace we will offer to: mankind through love. Just because we love, we are spreading our peace or power. God Himself manifests everything through love. Here on earth and there in Heaven, there is only one thing that God is proud of and that is love, divine love.
