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=What Is Divine Love?=
 
The only remedy for all human suffering: divine love.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/suffering#p6</ref>
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Divine love is the great remedy.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/20-july-1932-1#p9</ref>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p26</ref>
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Love, love, love to my very dear child; all the joy, all the light, all the peace of the divine love and also my loving blessings.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/20-august-1939#p2</ref>
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With the Divine Love is the supreme power of Transformation. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/transformation#p30</ref>
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When one has found divine Love, it is the Divine that one loves in all beings. There is no longer any division.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p47</ref>
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Divine Love, true love, finds its delight and its satisfaction in itself; it has no need to be received and appreciated, nor to be shared―it loves for the sake of loving, as a flower blooms.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p65</ref>
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"O Love, Divine Love, in a fecund silence I bow to Thee"
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/28-july-1932#p1</ref>
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What is lasting, eternal, immortal and infinite, that indeed is worth having, worth conquering, worth possessing. It is divine Light, divine Love, divine Life―it is also Supreme Peace, Perfect Joy and All-Mastery upon earth with the Complete Manifestation as the crowning.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-true-aim-of-life#p65</ref>
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Let divine love be your goal.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/9-september-1939#p1</ref>
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As for the recent happenings, fear nothing. Divine Love is the essence of Truth and cannot be affected by human confusions.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/7-june-1962#p3</ref>
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Unmanifest Divine Love: the splendour of the marvellous love which the Divine keeps for the pure heart.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/general-1#p8</ref>
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Bitterness is an illusion that melts in the Sun of Divine Love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/general-1#p12</ref>
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And with Grace and divine love nothing is impossible.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/endurance#p13</ref>
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Divine Love is the essence of Truth and cannot be affected by human confusions.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p13</ref>
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While, drop by drop, the sacred blood fell, fertilising the soil, the bush covered itself with marvellous flowers, scarlet, enormous―clusters of petals, innumerable drops of blood.These are the flowers that, for us, express and hold the Divine Love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p17</ref>
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With all my will I want to save you, but you must allow me to do so. To revolt is to reject the Divine Love and only the Divine Love has the power to save.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/28-december-1932-1#p16</ref>
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Love in its origin is divine love. Love in man, that is, love grown human, is distorted, deformed; it is only divine love which is pure. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/24-march-1954#p15</ref>
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...a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Inconscience.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p23</ref>
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Love in its depths is a contact of the Divine Possibility or Reality in oneself with the Divine Possibility or Reality in the loved
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p31</ref>
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Love at its origin is a self-existent force, an absolute, a transcendent (as I have put it), which does not depend upon the objects,—it depends only on itself or only on the Divine,—for it is a self-existent power of the Divine. If it were not self-existent, it would hardly be independent of the nature or reaction of its object. It is partly what I mean when I speak of transcendent Love—though this is only one aspect of its transcendence. That self-existent transcendent Love spreading itself over all, turning everywhere to contain, embrace, unite, help, upraise towards love and bliss and oneness, becomes cosmic divine Love; intensely fixing itself on one or others to find itself, to achieve a dynamic unification or to reach here towards the union of the soul with the Divine, it becomes the individual divine Love
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p29</ref>
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Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-systems-of-yoga#p21</ref>
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Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p11</ref>
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It [the Divine Love] exists in itself and does not depend on outer contact or outer expression. Whether it shall express itself outwardly or how it will express itself outwardly depends on the spiritual truth that has to be manifested.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p7</ref>
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Divine Love is there always in all its intensity, a formidable power. But most people—ninety-nine per cent—do not feel anything at all! What they feel of it is exclusively in proportion to what they are, to their capacity of receiving. Imagine, for instance, that you are bathing in an atmosphere all vibrant with divine Love—you are not at all aware of it.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/19-may-1954#p12</ref>
 
==Symbols Associated with Divine Love==
 
===Flower===
 
‘’’Divine Love’’’ A flower reputed to bloom even in the desert.
<ref>https://toptropicals.com/cgi-bin/garden_catalog/cat.cgi</ref>
 
Punica granatum
Pomegranate
Medium-sized double orange red flower with innumerable tightly held crinkled petals; borne singly or in small clusters. A spiny shrub or small tree with many stems and glossy leaves.
"Divine Love Spreading Over the World:" Innumerable, succulent, it gives strength and life untiringly.
 
Punica granatum
Pomegranate
Medium to large nearly round thick-skinned fruit that is yellow tinged with red when ripe and contains many seeds enclosed in a juicy reddish edible pulp; A shrub or small tree.
"Love for the Divine:" The vegetal kingdom gathers together its most beautiful possibilities to offer them to the Divine.
 
Rosa
Rose
All forms and sizes of roses, single and double, usually fragrant, in a great variety of colours; includes both shrubs and climbers.
"Integral Love for the Divine:" Pure, complete and irrevocable, it is a love that gives itself for ever.
 
Rosa
Rose
Medium to large solitary pure white flower. A large shrub.
 
===Colour===
 
Deep red is Divine Love.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/colours#p79</ref>
 
==What are the Powerful Qualities Associated with Divine Love?==
 
Divine Love has simultaneously a double play, an universal movement, deep, calm and bottomless like the nether Ocean, which broods upon the whole world and each thing that is in it as upon a level bed with an equal pressure, and a personal movement, forceful, intense and ecstatic like the dancing surface of the same Ocean, which varies the height and force of its billows and chooses the objects it shall fall upon with the kiss of its foam and spray and the clasp of its engulfing waters. [Aphorism 494]
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-493-494#p2</ref>
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But as one tends quite naturally to become like what one loves, the bhakta, if he is sincere, begins to become like the Divine whom he adores, and thus his love becomes purer and purer. To adore the Divine in the one whom one loves has often been suggested as a solution, but unless one's heart and thought are very pure, it can lead to deplorable abasements.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/10-june-1964#p2</ref>
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One is outwardly alone only if one is closed to the divine love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p27</ref>
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When the psychic loves it loves with the Divine Love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p56</ref>
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The movement of love is not limited to human beings and it is perhaps less distorted in other worlds than in the human. Look at the flowers and trees. When the sun sets and all becomes silent, sit down for a moment and put yourself into communion with Nature: you will feel rising from the earth, from below the roots of the trees and mounting upward and coursing through their fibres up to the highest outstretching branches, the aspiration of an intense love and longing,—a longing for something that brings light and gives happiness, for the light that is gone and they wish to have back again. There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p7</ref>
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But the divine intensity of self-forgetfulness, the capacity of throwing oneself out entirely, making no restriction and no reservation, as a gift, asking nothing in exchange, this is little known to human beings. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p5</ref>
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The manifestation of the love of the Divine in the world was the great holocaust, the supreme self-giving. his was the supreme love, to accept the loss of the perfect condition of supreme divinity, its absolute consciousness, its infinite knowledge, to unite with unconsciousness, to dwell in the world with ignorance and darkness...This race of all beings towards love, this irresistible push and seeking out in the world's heart and in all hearts, is the impulse given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking…
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p6</ref>
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Divine love plunges its manifestation upon earth down into the most material matter. It does not indeed find itself in the selfish distortions of the human consciousness…
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p9</ref>
One can feel it. There is a certain state of consciousness in which one perceives this divine Love wherever it is found, and one does not feel so great a difference between creatures as it appears physically. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/19-august-1953#p12</ref>
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The Divine love of which I speak is a Love that manifests here upon this physical earth, in matter, but it must be pure of its human distortions, if it is to incarnate. The vital is an indispensable agent in this as in all manifestation. But as has happened always, the adverse powers have put their hold on this most precious thing. It is the energy of the vital that enters into dull and insensitive matter and makes it responsive and alive. But the adverse forces have distorted it; they have turned it into a field of violence and selfishness and desire and every kind of ugliness and prevented it from taking part in the divine work.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p10</ref>
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For, life is a battlefield in which the Divine succeeds in detail only when the lower nature is receptive to its impulsions instead of siding with the hostile forces. And even then the test is not so much external as internal: a divine movement cannot be measured by apparent signs— it is a certain kind of vibration that indicates its presence—external tests are of no avail, since even what is in appearance a failure may be in fact a divine achievement... What you have to do is to give yourself up to the Grace of the Divine; for, it is under the form of Grace, of Love, that it has consented to uplift the universe after the first involution was established. With the Divine Love is the supreme power of Transformation. It has this power because it is for the sake of Transformation that it has given itself to the world and manifested everywhere. Not only has it infused itself into man, but also into all the atoms of the most obscure Matter in order to bring the world back to the original Truth. It is this descent that is called the supreme sacrifice in the Indian scriptures. But it is a sacrifice only from the human point of view; the human mind thinks that if it had to do such a thing it would be a tremendous sacrifice. But the Divine cannot really be diminished, its infinite essence can never become less, no matter what "sacrifices" are made. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p6</ref>
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That is why the consciousness which is at work to transform mankind, unites Force with Love, and the One who must realise this transformation will come on earth with the Power of Divine Love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-170-171#p4</ref>
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All who aspire for divine perfection know that the blows which the Lord deals us in His infinite love and grace are the surest and quickest way to make us progress. And the harder the blows the more they feel the greatness of the divine Love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-33#p3</ref>
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The true Ananda of creation is not the pleasure of the ego in having personally done well and in being somebody, that is an extraneous element which attaches itself to the true joy of work and creation. The Ananda comes by the inrush of a larger Might and Delight, ''āveśa''; there is the thrill of being possessed and used by a superpersonal Power, the exultation and exaltation of the uplifting of the consciousness, the joy of its illumination and its greatened and heightened action and the joy of the beauty, power or perfection that is being created. How far, how intensely one feels these things, depends on the condition of the consciousness at the time, the temperament, the activity of the vital, the mind's receptivity and response. The Yogi (or even certain strong and calm minds) is not carried away, as the mind and the vital often are, by the Ananda,—he holds and watches it and there is no mere excitement mixed with the divine flow of it through the conscious instrument and the body. There is a greater Ananda of samarpaṇa, of spiritual realisation or divine love, but in the spiritual consciousness and life the Ananda of creation has its place. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/the-divine-force-in-work#p15</ref>
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Love is authentic and justifies itself completely whether its cause be great or trivial.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p29</ref>
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But when it comes in the Divine Truth and Power, Divine Love descends first as something transcendent and universal and out of that transcendence and universality it applies itself to persons according to the Divine Truth and Will, creating a vaster, greater, purer personal love than any the human mind or heart can now imagine. It is when one has felt this descent that one can be really an instrument for the birth and action of the Divine Love in the world.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p2</ref>
 
==What Is the Importance of Manifestation of Divine Love in Various Parts of the Being?==
 
…it is not possible for the tongue of human speech to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amṛta. Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p10</ref>
 
===Manifestation in Physical===
 
The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p62</ref>
 
===Manifestation in Vital===
 
The vital is in its very nature that in us which can give itself away. Just because it is that which has always the impulse and the strength to take, it is also that which is capable of giving itself to the utmost; because it knows how to possess, it knows also how to abandon itself without reserve. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p10</ref>
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In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p12</ref>
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Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union. Love too as well as knowledge brings us to the highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment…
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p8</ref>
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For love is the one emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent; love need have no other motive than love. For all our emotions arise either from the seeking after delight and the possession of it, or from the baffling of the search, or from the failure of the delight we have possessed or had thought to grasp; but love is that by which we can enter directly into possession of the self-existent delight of the divine Being. Divine love is indeed itself that possession and, as it were, the body of the Ananda.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-motives-of-devotion#p11</ref>
 
===Manifestation in Vital===
 
But when this power begins to awake and act, when the mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to it superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and experience of superior planes of existence. The experience is in accord with that which is brought to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into a higher plane of pure self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into regions of light or of felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite Power or a divine Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or Beauty or the atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowledge. In the return the spiritual impression abides; but the mental record is often blurred and remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-triple-transformation#p24</ref>
 
===Manifestation in Psychic===
 
If love is psychic in its nature, it always brings the sense of oneness or at least of an inner intimate closeness of being. The Divine Love is based upon oneness and the psychic derives from the Divine Love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p14</ref>
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Well, for you, in the state in which you are, as you are, if you had a contact with pure Divine Love, it would seem to you colder than ice, or so far-off, so high that you would not be able to breathe; it would be like the mountain-top where you would feel frozen and find it difficult to breathe, so very far would it be from what you normally feel. Divine Love, if not clothed with a psychic or vital vibration, is difficult for a human being to perceive.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p23</ref>
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But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is a divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p23</ref>
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It is the inner offering of the heart's adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intense way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p12</ref>
 
==Divine Love Through Bhakti Yoga or Devotion==
 
Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-way-of-devotion#p7</ref>
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He was speaking of human love manifesting as Bhakti, as a force of devotion for the Divine, and he says that at the beginning your love for the Divine is a very human love with all the characteristics of human love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/16-june-1954#p61</ref>
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In its essence the nature of the change of consciousness which turns existence itself into a glorified field of a Divine Love and Ananda. In its essence it begins for the seeker when he passes from the ordinary to the spiritual level and looks with a new heart of luminous vision and feeling on the world and self and others. It reaches its height when the spiritual becomes also the supramental level and then also it is possible not only to feel it in essence but realise it dynamically as a Power for the transformation of the whole inner life and the whole outer existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p6</ref>
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The Supramental is something in which the basis is absolute calm and however intense a Divine Love there is in it it does not disturb the calm but increases its depth. Chaitanya's experience was not that of Supermind, but of a Love and Ananda brought from above into the vital—the response of the vital is an extreme passion and exultation of Godward love and Ananda, the result of which is these ''vikāras''. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/bhakti-yoga-and-vaishnavism#p6</ref>
 
==Misconceptions Associated with Divine Love==
 
===How Is Human Love Different from Divine Love? What Is the Role of Ego?===
 
There is only one true love—it is the Divine Love; all other loves are diminutions, limitations and deformations of that Love. Even the love of the bhakta for his God is a diminution and often is tainted by egoism… <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/10-june-1964#p2</ref>
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It has become in 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>
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This is the most charming criticism one can make of jealousy and also the best way to cure it by overcoming the limits of the ego and by uniting with the Divine Love which is eternal and universal. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-450-451-452-453-454-455#p7</ref>
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...yet the stuff of life and its action is made up of an egoistic formation, a division, a struggle of life and consciousness to exist and survive in an apparently indifferent, inclement or even hostile world of inanimate and inconscient Matter. In the confusion and obscurity of this struggle all are thrown against each other with a will in each to assert its own existence first and foremost and only secondarily to assert itself in others and very partially for others; for even man's altruism remains essentially egoistic and must be so till the soul finds the secret of the divine Oneness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p10</ref>
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Human love fails by its own ecstasy, human strength is exhausted by its own effort, human knowledge throws a shadow that conceals half the globe of truth from its own sunlight; but divine knowledge embraces opposite truths and reconciles them, divine strength grows by the prodigality of its self-expenditure, divine love can squander itself utterly, yet never waste or diminish.[Aphorism 534] <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-534#p1</ref>
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Not truly liberative from ego-sense, they widen it at most and give it a higher and larger satisfaction; impotent in practice to change man's vital life and nature, they only modify and palliate its action and daub over its unchanged egoistic essence.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p20</ref>
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But this kind of wish to gain by what one has or does is truly one of the ugliest things in the world. And it is one of the most widespread and it has become so widespread, that it is almost spontaneous in man. Nothing can turn its back on the divine love more totally than that, that wish to calculate and profit. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/26-august-1953#p36</ref>
 
===Misconceptions Related to Divine Love===
 
Sometimes, very rarely, for a few seconds there is suddenly the feeling of "something". Then you say, "Oh, divine Love came to me!" What a joke! It is just that you were simply, for some reason or other, a wee bit open, so you felt it. But it is there, always, like the divine Consciousness. It is the same thing, it is there, all the time, in its full intensity; but one is not even aware of it; or else in this way, spasmodically: suddenly one is in a good state, so one feels something and says, "Oh, the divine Consciousness, divine Love have turned to me, have come to me!" It is not at all like that. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/19-may-1954#p12</ref>
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...you are not told anything about the love of riches or the love of power or the love of knowledge. You are told about the divine Love; it is not altogether the same thing. Nothing is said about enjoying ambition or desire or even aspiration; what is spoken of is the enjoying of the divine Presence. That's completely different; there is no similarity.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/16-november-1955#p47</ref>
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It is only when it is diluted, deformed, attenuated and obscured, so to say, that it becomes acceptable to human nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/31-october-1956#p10</ref>
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...love between human beings, in all its forms, the love of parents for children, of children for parents, of brothers and sisters, of friends and lovers, is all tainted with ignorance, selfishness and all the other defects which are man's ordinary drawbacks.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p23</ref>
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In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tend―when not consciously, then by automatic habit―to bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>
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And I must say that this rapturous state of consciousness would be dangerous in the present condition of the world. Because it produces reactions that are almost absolute—I see that this state of rapture has a formidable power. But I insist on the word formidable, in the sense that it is intolerant or intolerable—intolerable rather—to everything that is unlike it. It is the same thing or almost—not quite the same, but almost—as the supreme divine Love; the vibration of this ecstasy or rapture is a small beginning of the vibration of divine Love, and that is absolutely—yes, there is no other word for it—intolerant, in the sense that it will not permit the presence of anything that is contrary to it.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-94#p11</ref>
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...if divine love were to manifest in its essence upon earth, it would be like a bombshell; because the earth is neither supple nor receptive enough to be able to widen itself to the dimensions of this love. It not only needs to open, but to widen itself and to become more supple—Matter is still too rigid. And even the substance of the physical consciousness—not only the most material Matter, but the substance of the physical consciousness—is too rigid.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-49#p16</ref>
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If the movement does not last, it is because it is not conscious of its own aim and seeking; it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after but the union of all beings with the Divine.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p10</ref>
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If you look at yourself very sincerely, very straight, you will see that as soon as you begin to think of Love it is always your little inner tumult which starts whirling. All that aspires in you wants certain vibrations. It is almost impossible, without being far advanced on the yogic path, to separate the vital essence, the vital vibration from your conception of Love.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p23</ref>
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The division, the distinction between the two that you make in the beginning are a creation of the mind: once you rise to a higher level, they disappear.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p4</ref>
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It is for this reason that the Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>
<center>~</center>
Among those who have come into this world seeking to reveal the Divine here and transform earthly life, there are some who have manifested the Divine love in a greater fullness. In some the purity of the manifestation is so great that they are misunderstood by the whole of humanity and are even accused of being hard and unloving, although the Divine love is there. But it is in them divine and not human in its form as in its substance. For when man speaks of love, he associates it with an emotional and sentimental weakness.And yet none perhaps would call it love; for it does not clothe itself in a superficial sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it has done, no show of its sacrifice.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p6</ref>
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The maximum it has reached is what seems to human beings love in its highest form, its purest and most disinterested kind, like the love of the mother for the child. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p11</ref>
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The Divine has an equal love for all human beings, but the obscurity of consciousness of most men prevents them from perceiving this divine love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p30</ref>
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...it is only the Divine Love which never disappoints.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p3</ref>
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Kali's force is necessary only for those who are not yet open to Divine Love. For one who is open to Divine Love, nothing more is needed.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/11-november-1967#p2</ref>
<center>~</center>
The real soul emerges and takes the place left vacant by the desire-mind. The cleansed and emptied cup is filled with the wine of divine love and delight and no longer with the sweet and bitter poison of passion. The passions, even the passion for good, misrepresent the divine nature. The passion of pity with its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by the higher divine compassion which sees, understands, accepts the burden of others and is strong to help and heal, not with self-will and revolt against the suffering in the world and with ignorant accusation of the law of things and their source, but with light and knowledge and as an instrument of the Divine in its emergence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-release-from-the-heart-and-the-mind#p7</ref>
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Love cannot be cold—for there is no such thing as cold love, but the love of which the Mother speaks in that passage is something very pure, fixed and constant; it does not leap like fire and sink for want of fuel, but is steady and all-embracing and self-existent like the light of the sun. There is also a divine love that is personal, but it is not like the ordinary personal human love dependent on any return from the person—it is personal but not egoistic,—it goes from the real being in the one to the real being in the other. But to find that, liberation from the ordinary human way of approach is necessary.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p44</ref>
<center>~</center>
In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul-movement. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their true abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness, the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p23</ref>
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The love which is turned towards the Divine ought not to be the usual vital feeling which men call by that name; for that is not love, but only a vital desire, an instinct of appropriation, the impulse to possess and monopolise. Not only is this not divine Love, but it ought not to be allowed to mix in the least degree in Yoga.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p29</ref>
<center>~</center>
Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p13</ref>
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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 feeling, 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. There has been too much of this kind in the relations of the sadhaks with the Mother—approaching her, I suppose, as a human mother with all the reactions of the lower vital nature. For a long time it was perforce tolerated—and this was the concession made to human weakness—even accepted in the beginning as a thing too prominent in the human being not to be there to some extent but to be transformed by degrees; but too often, it has refused to transform itself and has made itself a source of confusion, disorder, asiddhi, sometimes complete disaster. It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature…
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p39</ref>
<center>~</center>
The action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p62</ref>
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without expecting any return for itself-expenditure, any mutual unification.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p29</ref>
<center>~</center>
The attachment to parents belongs to the ordinary physical nature—it has nothing to do with Divine Love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p35</ref>
<center>~</center>
Although it is a divine love for the supreme and universal Divine that must be the rule of our spiritual existence, this does not exclude altogether all forms of individual love or the ties that draw soul to soul in manifested existence.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p2</ref>
<center>~</center>
It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p13</ref>
<center>~</center>
Even, he may come to us at first as an enemy, with the wrath of love, and our earliest relations with him may be those of battle and struggle. Where first there is love and attraction, the relations between the Divine and the soul may still for long be chequered with misunderstanding and offence, jealousy and wrath, strife and the quarrels of love, hope and despair and the pain of absence and separation. We throw up all the passions of the heart against him, till they are purified into a sole ecstasy of bliss and oneness. But that too is no monotony.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p10</ref>
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That is not often true in human practice; for there the destiny of love and its justification depend very much as a rule (though not always) on the nature of the cause or object. For if the object of love is trivial in the sense of his being an inadequate instrument for the dynamic realisation of the sense of oneness which McTaggart says is the essence of love, then love is likely to be baulked of its fulfilment, But there are unhappily its diminutions in the human mind, human vital, human physical; there the divine essence of Love may easily become mixed with counterfeits, dimmed, concealed or lost in the twisted movements born of division and ignorance.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p29</ref>
<center>~</center>
Till then the touches of the Divine Love and Ananda are usually momentary or brief, they cannot remain. In an impure consciousness the Divine Love if it came in would create a perturbation and possibly be attacked by a mixture which would make it impossible for it to stay. It is therefore that touch only can come. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p5</ref>
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The Mother did not tell you that love is not an emotion, but that Divine Love is not an emotion,—a very different thing to say. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p46</ref>
 
==What Is True Love for the Divine?==
 
Divine love is of two kinds—the Divine love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p51</ref>
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The true love for the Divine is self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender; it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger—for these things are not in its composition. In return the Divine Mother also gives herself, but freely—and this represents itself in an inner giving—her presence in your mind, your vital, your physical consciousness, her power re-creating you in the divine nature, taking up all the movements of your being and directing them towards perfection and fulfilment, her love enveloping you and carrying you in its arms Godwards. It is this that you must aspire to feel and possess in all your parts down to the very material, and here there is no limitation either of time or of completeness. If one truly aspires and gets it, there ought to be no room for any other claim or for any disappointed desire. And if one truly aspires, one does unfailingly get it, more and more as the purification proceeds and nature undergoes its needed change. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p29</ref>
=Why Is Divine Love Important? What Are the Unique Positive Effects and Qualities of this Manifestation?=