Changes

Love, the eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment; it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love divine gives itself and asks for nothing. What human beings have made of it, we do not need to say; they have turned it into an ugly and repulsive thing. And yet even in human beings the first contact of love does bring down something of its purer substance; they become capable for a moment of forgetting themselves, for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful. But afterwards there comes to the surface the human nature, full of its impure demands, asking for something in exchange, bartering what it gives, clamouring for its own inferior satisfactions, distorting and soiling what was divine." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/19-august-1953#p22</ref>

It has become human nature something low, brutal, selfish, violent, ugly, or else it is something weak and sentimental, made up of the pettiest feeling, brittle, superficial, exacting. And this baseness and brutality or this self-regarding weakness they call love!

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p7</ref>

Because you cannot obtain what you want from the object of your love, you want to destroy it in order to become free; in the other case, you shrivel up almost in an inner rage, because you cannot obtain, you cannot absorb what you love.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-113-114#p5</ref>

Certainly, one has the right to love and true love carries in itself its joy, but unfortunately human beings are egoistic and immediately mix with their love the desire to be loved in return, and this desire is contrary to spiritual truth and the cause of passions and sufferings. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p6</ref>

===Difference between Aspiration and Desire in Love===

=== The Role of Vital ===

Vital emotions are of an altogether different nature—they are very clear, very precise, you can express them very distinctly; they are violent, they usually fill you with an intensity, a restlessness, sometimes a great satisfaction. some people imagine they experience love only when it is like that, when love is in the vital, when it comes with all the movements of the vital, all this intensity, this violence, this precision, this glamour, this brightness. And when that is absent, they say, "Oh, this is not love."

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/30-january-1951#p31</ref>

The vital must have decided that my love would express itself in a particular way, and as it did not happen that way, the vital says, "There is no love!" <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/20-october-1934-1#p4</ref>

I have never said that the vital is to have no part in the love for the Divine, only that it must purify and ennoble itself in the light of the psychic being. The results of self-loving love between human beings are so poor and contrary in the end—that is what I mean by the ordinary vital love—that I want something purer and nobler and higher in the vital also for the movement towards the Divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p50</ref>

Yes, that is the nature of vital love. It is based on desire and the sense of claim or sense of possession; psychic love is based on self-giving.

As for love, the love must be turned singly towards the Divine. What men call by that name is a vital interchange for mutual satisfaction of desire, vital impulse or physical pleasure. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p52</ref>

When the vital joins in the love for the Divine, it brings into it heroism, enthusiasm, intensity, absoluteness, exclusiveness, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the total and passionate self-giving of all the nature. It is the vital passion for the Divine that creates the spiritual heroes, conquerors or martyrs. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p49</ref>

The love in the vital or other parts is the true thing, good for the spiritual life, only when in the vital love is changed into a form of the psychic love and becomes an instrument for the transformation of the soul's love, no longer for the desires of the ego which men call love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p54</ref>

I should perhaps add one or two things to avoid misapprehensions. First, the love for the Divine of which I speak is not a psychic love only; it is the love of all the being, the vital and vital-physical included,—all are capable of the same self-giving. It is a mistake to believe that if the vital loves, it must be a love that demands and imposes the satisfaction of its desire; it is a mistake to think that it must be either that or else the vital, in order to escape from its "attachment", must draw away altogether from the object of its love. The vital can be as absolute in its unquestioning self-giving as any other part of nature; nothing can be more generous than its movement when it forgets self for the Beloved. The vital and physical should both give themselves in the true way—the way of true love, not of ego-desire. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p27</ref>

There are in the vital itself two kinds of love,—one full of joy and confidence and abandon, generous, non bargaining, ungrudging and very absolute in its dedication and this is akin to the psychic and well-fitted to be its complement and a means of expression of the divine love. And neither does the psychic love or the divine love despise a physical means of expression wherever that is pure and right and possible: it does not depend upon that, it does not diminish, revolt or go out like a snuffed candle when it is deprived of any such means; but when it can use it, it does so with joy and gratitude. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p32</ref>

But there is another way of vital love which is more usually the way of human nature and that is a way of ego and desire. It is full of vital craving, desire and demand; its continuance depends upon the satisfaction of its demands; if it does not get what it craves, or even imagines that it is not being treated as it deserves—for it is full of imaginations, misunderstandings, jealousies, misinterpretations—it at once turns to sorrow, wounded feelings, revolt, pride, anger, all kinds of disorder, finally cessation and departure. A love of this kind is in its very nature ephemeral and unreliable and it cannot be made a foundation for divine love… Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,—but this lower vital way is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and Nirananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p33</ref>

Psychic love never bargains—but the vital always tries to derive some benefit for itself in all circumstances. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/26-june-1935#p4</ref>

Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous; it is the vital which dramatizes and makes itself unhappy without any reason. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/letters-to-a-young-sadhak-iv#p16</ref>