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A supreme divine Love is a creative Power and, even though it can exist in itself silent and unchangeable, yet rejoices in external form and expression and is not condemned to be a speechless and bodiless godhead. It has even been said that creation itself was an act of love or at least the building up of a field in which Divine Love could devise its symbols and fulfil itself in act of mutuality and self-giving, and, if not the initial nature of creation, this may well be its ultimate object and motive. It does not so appear now because, even if a Divine Love is there in the world upholding all this evolution of creatures…

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p10</ref>

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… The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace.

<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p11</ref>

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p44</ref>

...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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p30</ref>

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>

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>

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>

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>

<ref>https://toptropicals.com/cgi-bin/garden_catalog/cat.cgi</ref>

An Old Chaldean Legend

Long ago, very long ago, in the desert land that is now Arabia, a divine being incarnated on earth to awaken it to the Supreme Love. As one would expect, he was persecuted by men, misunderstood, suspected, hunted after. Mortally wounded by his assailants, he wished to die alone, quietly, so that his work might be accomplished; and, pursued by them, he fled. Suddenly in the broad barren plain, a tiny bush of pomegranate appeared. The Saviour stole under its low branches in order to give up his body in peace; and at once the bush expanded miraculously, increased itself, widened, became deep and luxuriant in such a way that when the pursuers passed by they did not even suspect that the One whom they were chasing was hidden there, and they continued on their way.

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p14,p15,p16,p17</ref>

Punica granatum

Pomegranate

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p66</ref>

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p6</ref>

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>

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p1</ref>

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>

==What Is the Importance of Manifestation of Divine Love in Various Parts of the Being?==

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>

===Manifestation in Mental===

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>

===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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p59</ref>

===Manifestation in Psychic===

When the psychic loves it loves with the Divine Love.

<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p57</ref>

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p12</ref>

...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>

===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>

When one has found divine Love, it is the Divine that one loves in all beings. There is no longer any division.

<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p48</ref>

It [human consciousness] does not want to fulfil the sadhana unless it can get by it the things it wanted. It wants the satisfaction of the ego, "self-fulfilment", appreciation, the granting of its desires. It measures the Divine Love by the outward favours showered upon it and looks jealously to see who gets more of these favours than itself, then says that the Divine has no love for it and assigns reasons which are either derogatory to the Divine or, as in your letter, self-depreciatory and a cause for despair. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/difficulties-of-the-physical-nature#p97</ref>

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>

The attachment to parents belongs to the ordinary physical nature—it has nothing to do with Divine Love. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p34</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 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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p33</ref>

Altruism, philanthropy, humanitarianism, service are flowers of the mental consciousness and are at best the mind’s cold and pale imitation of the spiritual flame of universal Divine Love.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. Or if they are intensely followed with an entire sincerity of the will, it is by an exaggerated amplification of one side of our nature; in that exaggeration there can be no clue for the full and perfect divine evolution of the many sides of our individualised being towards the universal and transcendent Eternal.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p20</ref>

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>

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>

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>

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>

All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>

And let me say also that, as regards human love and divine love, I admitted the first as that from which we have to proceed and to arrive at the other, intensifying and transforming into it, not eliminating, human love. Divine Love, in my view of it, is again not something ethereal, cold and far, but a love absolutely intense, intimate and full of unity, closeness and rapture using all the nature for its expression. Certainly, it is without the confusions and disorders of the present lower vital nature which it will change into something entirely warm, deep and intense; but that is no reason for supposing that it will lose anything that is true and happy in the elements of love.

<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p36</ref>

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>

...Divine Love is not an emotion…

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p46</ref>

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>

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>

...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. [Based on Aphorism 49—To feel and love the God of beauty and good in the ugly and the evil, and still yearn in utter love to heal it of its ugliness and its evil, this is real virtue and morality.]

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-49#p16</ref>

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>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p5</ref>

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>

==What Is True Love for the Divine?==

Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda… <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p33</ref>

=Why Is Divine Love Important? What Are the Unique Positive Effects and Qualities of this Manifestation?=