How are we going to cultivate divine love when the world as a whole has lost the actual definition of the word? Man has so abused the meaning of love that so few know what real love is. True love permeates our whole creation the same way oil is within every particle of the olive. It is not easy to define love, as it is impossible to completely describe in words the flavor of an orange. With love you have to taste its fruit to know and savor its flavor. Most of us have tasted love in one form or another in our hearts; that is how we know a little about its meaning. But most of us have not learned how to develop, purify and enlarge our human love into divine love. Man, unable to cultivate love has lost the original spark that existed in all hearts from the beginning of life.Many people recognize that the feeling or the attraction they have for their friends and relatives is love and think it unnecessary to analyze what love really is. There is so much more to love than just that. The only real way to explain what true love is to you is describe its effect. You could not contain yourself it is so overpowering....so great would be your happiness and joy if you could feel just a tiny particle of real divine love. The fulfillment of love is never in the feeling itself but the happiness and joy that feeling gives to you. Those who think love is the ultimate intoxicating happiness, do not know; the true ultimate is bliss, ever-conscious, ever-existing, ever-new bliss. Just as love is native to the soul, it is still secondary to joy for there is no love without joy. That is why the real experience of love is always together with joy. Sometimes joy arrives without any material cause as it is not subject to outer conditions. It sometimes appears absent of any material cause. You may jump out of bed one morning feeling "lighter than air" full of joy and do not know why.
However there are outer conditions that can cause joy to express itself from within; like receiving a large sum of money and shouting out "I'm so happy!" this condition of receiving all this money has simply assisted in releasing a flow of cascading joy from within the concealed pool of ever new bliss. In individual experiences there are particular events that are generally necessary to bring joy.
The universal nature of love is the divine power of attraction and has many faces. There is fatherly love which is based on reason, while motherly love is unconditional and is based on feeling, there is love between the servant and his master which is based entirely on mutual benefit; there is friendship which is the grand relationship of human love that is pure and without compulsion, then there is God's love which is the highest love and is the perfect love between the soul and spirit. There is conjugal love which is idealistic and a great expression of human love where a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. However conjugal love is very tricky, and the majority of people will leave this earth with little satisfaction in their hearts. They have sought after material love in the wrong way.
Beware the whip of a beautiful face. Those who are mostly attracted by a good-looking faces and appearances which finds their soul-mates in the graveyard of gorgeous and wonderfully decked-out forms, unaware that a demon or devil may be dwelling within. Souls of ignorance that inhabit gorgeous bodies are tombs of flesh that cover up hideous skeletons. To live and be like that is the same as being dead. Therefore the most important qualification there is for a perfect marriage is that if neither one is spiritual nor you find a spiritual man or a spiritual woman... you should not get married; you will not be loved. Every mother and every father should teach this to their children.
Fear not, there is a hidden prayer affirmation for those who pray, given by the spiritual masters and the great one's which is the promise to prevent you from making a mistake in choosing your true life companion or soul-mate. These prayers do have some prerequisites. They must be practiced for a minimum of six months with concentrated faith and have effected a heartfelt attunement with the Heavenly Father during your prayers and meditation. By continuously affirming this prayer desire, you will be blessed and marry an appropriate mate; but if you were attracted to one who is basically incompatible and mismatched the Heavenly Father will prevent you from making an incorrect choice by changing the circumstances. This prayer request should be done at the end of your meditation and with deep attention; affirm "Divine Father, according to Thy perfect law of soul union bestow on me your blessings that I attract and choose my perfect life mate."
However there is an inner loneliness a husband or a wife can never fill. You can be totally in love with your husband or wife but may be feeling up to here with human love yet that love cannot reach what God has made for himself alone. God has made his creation full proof...without Him you will never know love. The less love you have the lonelier you feel. The lack of love is the lack of God. Because your soul has forgotten its relationship with God through countless incarnations.
There was a very heated argument between two disciples, so they went to their guru preceptor (spiritual master) for council to settle the argument and to decide who was right. To their surprise his answer to them was to "love God more" and that was his advice to many others who had grievances with each other. They pondered, "how does that solve our disagreements?" Loving God more changes everything because the one thing that God is longing for and does not possess in His blissful existence in heavenly Paradise is our love and our attention.
God has imposed the identical difficulty on himself as on his children. He has given man free will to reject him or seek him. God is pursuing every heart, watching and waiting for His children to reject His creation and move towards Him and those who move towards Him will attract the One that gives all.
There have been so many reports of near death experiences where these reports were all found to be similar or identical. Those with near death experiences who died and came back said they were asked who have you loved? It is so easy to love your immediate family, isn't it? What about everyone else? Remember it is God who dwells in the bodily temple of the righteous, the error-stricken and your dear ones.
There are those who feel a dryness in their hearts and do not know how to love God while some have a lack of faith and have no idea on how to be devotional. When they talk about God they think of Him as a venerable Being in some remote Heaven sitting on a throne. They think to themselves, " I do not know God, so how can I feel love for an unknown God." Do not assume that God is enjoying himself in his heavenly existence in selfish joy. God is definitely suffering the disappointment of man's denial of Him because it is He who has caused this separation and unless we go to Him willingly He is unable to set us free from suffering or Himself in his heavenly Paradise.
A student asked the guru, Paramahansa Yogananda "what would you and the great one's tell us to do in our meditations to cultivate love for God and expand our love for all sentient beings?"
The guru replied, "here is the technique, it is called practicing the presence of God." Close your eyes and gently turn them upwards at the point between the eyebrows and lock them there without straining. Put your complete attention on the heart center, imagine and feel the strongest and greatest love that you ever felt for another human being. Saturate every cell of your body with that love. While that love is encompassing and saturating all of your bodily cells, expand the feeling of that love as a surrounding sphere embracing all your loved ones, your friends and family. Now imagine your love ever growing and magnified a thousand times and include all the people in the state you live in, the country and the earth saturated with that love. Feel the whole world, your solar system, universe and galaxies bathing in this enormous radiant globe of love. Merge yourself in that sphere of love which saturates the infinitude.
It is important to know in the beginning of this visualization that the love you feel in your heart is human love. But once that love expands encircling all things it becomes the universal love of God. Many of you ignite a little flame of yearning for God but fail to put fuel in the fire, and it dies out. The fire of love and longing must be lit over and over with every day practice of self-discipline and meditation.
The love that most people feel for their dearest friends and family is human love. It is God who gives us all those we love; no human love should be larger than love for God. The loveable natures in our relatives were wisely selected for us as brothers and sisters with loving parents, so how much greater should our love be for God? Remember it is God that is our continual Parent who through many incarnations of the present, past and future times takes care of us as the instrument of limitless family relations and parents.
People that love and adore familial relations while being neglectful of God residing within those relatives will have a sad awakening when death separates their family ties.
Contemplate, if someone dies and is reborn as a neighbor to his prior home, his previous beloved family would see and treat him as a stranger who moved in next door. These are the mysterious workings of reincarnation
