CHAPTER 3 SRI DA AVABHASA: Love is feeling-Contemplation of Me, and
that is the summary of the Way of the Heart. Live it under
all conditions. Simply to give Me your regard, simply to feelingly
Contemplate Me, should be the moment of ecstasy that draws
you naturally into feeling-response to Me, the mood of love,
devotion, freedom from mental bondage, physical bondage,
relational bondage. Thus ecstatic, you are naturally capable
of incarnating this love, through all the forms of practice
I Give you, including your love-relations and
friendships. * * * What Is Necessary (and Also Possible) Is To Enter Fully
Into The Spiritual Life-Sphere Of Love. In The Way Of The
Heart, This Is Done By First Entering (By Heart) Into My
Company (and, Thus and Thereby, Into The Company Of The
Divine Person), and (Therein) To Submit To The Divine
Embrace Of Love, Wherein Not Only Are You Loved, but You Are
Love Itself. Then You Must Magnify That Love-Radiance In the
world of human relationships. * * * When the contraction does not take place, when it is not
meditated upon, when it is no longer a matter of concern,
when there is simply this unobstructed relationship, there
is no dilemma. Then there is no one superior to the other,
no problem, no jealousy, no distinction. There is only
enjoyment. And where life is constant as that enjoyment,
there is the Infinity of Liberation, the Perfect
Consciousness of Truth, the Siddhi of the Real. But it is
always simply that basic enjoyment, that unobstructed,
spontaneous, moment to moment existence as relationship. It
is what is called “love”. It is simply the Force of the
Heart, the Real, which is unobstructed, unqualified
existence. When there is no resistance, no contraction, no
separation, there is just this ease of pleasure in one
another. And where there is that ease of pleasure, there is
no problem. Give it a name, if you like. It is simply your
natural state. * * * “Love” is perhaps the most abused word in at least the
Westernized world. The ego wants to call lust “love”. Lust
is not love. Attachment is not love. Liking what somebody
does to you is not love. Do you not know this? True love is
an expression of going beyond your separate and separative
self, going beyond what consoles you. Ultimately such love
is magnified universally. It goes beyond your house, your
castle, your egoic “self-possession”, your underwear. Do you
know this? You do not love someone because you are attached to the
person and like what the person does for you. That is not
love! Do you not know this? All such consolation must be
understood and gone beyond. Then there is love. Then you
serve another’s sacrifice, anther’s Realization-and that is
“true intimacy” in the Way of the Heart. Positive socializing is what you call “love”. But that is
not love. That is just lust and vital energy, congeniality,
satisfying the vital personality and its purposes and
desires. Love is a sacrifice of the ego in
feeling-Contemplation of Me in all relations and under all
conditions. Therefore, the primary manifestation of love is
Ishta Guru-Bhakti Yoga. Love is not mere attachment, or any kind of fascination
with objects or others that represent the possibility of
self-fulfillment. Love itself is renunciation of separate
and separative self, in relationship to another. * * * Love is the disposition of uncaused Happiness in the
moment. You always are natively certain of what it would be
to look, and feel, and be, and act completely Happy in this
very moment. Love is to do just that, and to do it
effectively toward all relations, whether apparently within
or apparently without, so there is no recoil, no separation,
no self-definition, but only the Divine Self Condition Which
precedes these. * * * To love requires a great transformation. It requires your
absolute Realization of the fundamental Nature of your True
Condition, Which is not this separate one. * * * Love is relational action rather than the action of one
who is egoically “self-possessed”-but love is action, or
real availability, not a merely subjective attitude of mind
and emotion. * * * What you call loving people very much does not amount to
much. Real loving changes your life. It changes your action.
It eliminates your patterning, your egoic tendencies, your
game. And you cannot avoid pain. The avoidance of pain is a
primary part of the motive to be superficial and mediocre.
You do not want to feel the difficulty, so you will never
address it. Therefore, you just smile and say [Sri Da
Avabhasa speaks in a very squeaky, superficial voice and
forces a superficial smile] “I love you.” Devotion must
be suffered. Intimacy must be suffered. A unique kind of
suffering Awakens you. It is joyous if you suffer it most
profoundly. If your life is to be transformed by it, then
you must go beyond pain. Love has a wall of pain in it. If you do not endure that
pain, then you make love into a social convention and your
so-called loving does not amount to anything. Everybody is
smiling at one another and shaking hands and speaking
pleasantries. That is not love. Love is very serious, even
when it laughs. Divine Self-Realization is not the avoidance of the pain
of life but it is to suffer it to the nth degree, to the
point of Awakening, to the point of Freedom, to the point of
being utterly transformed, in effect, by love, to murder the
murderer, to be Free of limitations but not by evading
them. The ego-transcending point of view actively acknowledges
the principle of love. My devotee who is functioning in an
ego-transcending fashion-even to the degree of Divine
Enlightenment presumes himself or herself to live in a world
of love. In the world of relations, that one is alive in the
Domain of Love. Love is the principle of human functioning. It is the
principle of relationship. Love is what is to be Realized
and expressed. You must overcome all limits upon it.
Spiritual life is many things, but at the level of human
relations, its essence is love. * * * Love is what you are all struggling with, you see. You
would sit in meditation in a cave for twelve hours a day
long before you would begin to get serious about the matter
of love. You do all you can to see that you are pleasurably
situated in your sexual relationship, in your work, in your
household, or in your automobile. You work very hard to
study and read about and think about and imagine and even
perform meditative exercises. Yet love is the most profound,
and the most difficult, activity to do. And love is the one
single act that you are most reluctant to perform-whether in
public or in private. * * * All My devotees should be able to bring the principle of
love into active manifestation in daily life and eliminate
all the rituals of un-love, all the mediocre versions of
love, all the ceremonial affirmations of love. Actually live
love in feeling-Contemplation of Me. Express love all day. Do not allow the conventions of
egoic worldliness to suppress love’s expression. Contemplate
Me with your feeling-devotion, and make your love of Me the
principle of all your acts, and change everything. Take a
look at all the ceremonies of un-love you have built into
your life and eliminate them. Change them however you must,
so that you manifest actual love, its real, verbal,
physical, human expression, and its practice altogether,
Spiritually, ultimately. You can never truly be anyone’s friend, or lover, or
husband, or wife, or father, or mother, and you can never be
My devotee, until you decide to surrender to Me. Until that
time, you are wandering in your attention, and you cannot
really be trusted. You cannot be faithful, you cannot make
agreements, you cannot love, you cannot persist as love. * * * If, as My devotee, you would transcend the ego, you must
deal with the emotional gesture of the feeling-being from
moment to moment. Transcendence of the ego is entirely an
emotional matter. Thus, there is no transcendence of the ego
until love appears, until there is self-transcendence via
emotional sacrifice of the body-mind in
feeling-Contemplation of Me, the Incarnate Divine Person,
the Adept of the Living One, Who is Expressed as everything
and Who absolutely Transcends everything. As My devotee, you must choose this sacrifice, this
loving gesture. If you will choose it, if you will make this
emotional commitment, then all experience becomes Divine
Revelation to the point of Ecstasy and the Transcendence of
everything in Self-Existing Divine Being and Self-Radiant
Love-Bliss. * * * You cannot idealize this great Love-feeling and say that
from now on this is how you are going to live. You will
discover, as you have discovered on countless occasions
previously, that you do not do that. You cannot merely make
love an ideal, in other words. You must first become
involved in love by finding That Which Is Love, Which Comes
to you as Love, and Which Is Supremely Attractive. Acknowledge That One, know That One, and allow yourself
to respond to That One in love. The Way of Truth, then, is not merely to love. The Way of
Truth is to be the devotee of the One Who Is Love.
