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Read Summary of '''[[Divine Love Summary|Divine Love]]'''  
 
Read Summary of '''[[Divine Love Summary|Divine Love]]'''  
 
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=How Can Divine Love Flourish?=
 
 
To become conscious of the Divine Love, all other love must be abandoned.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p34</ref>
 
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Once one has found divine Love, all other loves, which are nothing but disguises, can lose their deformities and become pure―then it is the Divine that one loves in everyone and everything. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p49</ref>
 
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It is only when it moves away from its true nature and essential quality that man accepts it, and even (''smiling'') approves of it and glorifies it. This means that it must already be quite warped in order to be accepted by the human consciousness. And to accept it, bear it and receive it in its plenitude and purity, the human consciousness must become divine.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/31-october-1956#p10</ref>
 
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It is only when it moves away from its true nature and essential quality that man accepts it, and even (smiling) approves of it and glorifies it. This means that it must already be quite warped in order to be accepted by the human consciousness. And to accept it, bear it and receive it in its plenitude and purity, the human consciousness must become divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/31-october-1956#p10</ref>
 
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Yet if you persist and make the necessary effort, it is not impossible for this human love to be transformed into divine love through identification with what you love. He has not said that the love between two persons can change into divine love. It is not that at all! He has always said the opposite. He spoke about someone who had asked him about devotion, you know, about the sadhak's love for the Divine. At the beginning your love is altogether human—and he speaks of it even as commercial barter. If you make progress, your love will change into divine love, into true devotion. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/16-june-1954#p61</ref>
 
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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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The Divine Love, unlike the human, is deep and vast and silent; one must become quiet and wide to be aware of it and reply to it. X must make it his whole object to be surrendered so that he may become a vessel and instrument—leaving it to the Divine Wisdom and Love to fill him with what is needed. Let him also fix this in the mind not to insist that in a given time he must progress, develop, get realisation; whatever time it takes, he must be prepared to wait and persevere and make his whole life an aspiration and an opening for the one thing only, the Divine. To give oneself is the secret of sadhana, not to demand and acquire. The more one gives oneself, the more the power to receive will grow. But for that all impatience and revolt must go; all suggestions of not getting, not being helped, not being loved, going away, of abandoning life or the spiritual endeavour must be rejected.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p45</ref>
 
 
==How Can Divine Love be Manifested in Various Parts of the Being?==
 
 
===In Physical===
 
That is why no effort is too arduous, no austerity too rigorous if it can illumine, purify, perfect and transform the physical substance so that it may no longer conceal the Divine when he takes on an outer form in Matter. For then this marvellous tenderness will be able to express itself freely in the world, the divine love which has the power of changing life into a paradise of sweet joy. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p87</ref>
 
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Physical means can be and are used in the approach to divine love and worship; they have not been allowed merely as a concession to human weakness, nor is it the fact that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. On the contrary they are one means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact, and so long as it is done in the right spirit and they are used for the true purpose they have their place. It is only if they are misused or the approach is not right because tainted by indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility, or some gross desire, that they are out of place and can have a contrary effect.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p38</ref>
 
 
===In Vital===
 
 
They [sex impulsions] persist only because something still wants to reserve a place for them. So the best answer to the question about the sadhana (What is the place of sex in our sadhana?) is "No place". One must give up the sex-satisfaction and be satisfied with the Divine Love and Ananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p44</ref>
 
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It is true that the removal of the sex-impulse in all its forms and, generally, of the vital woman-complex is a great liberation which opens up to the Divine considerable regions of the being which otherwise tend to remain shut up. These things are a degradation of the source in the being from which bhakti, divine love and adoration arise...<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p94</ref>
 
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If the vital is not there to infuse its dynamism and living force, matter will remain dead; for the higher parts of the being will not come into contact with earth, will not be concretised in life, and they will depart unsatisfied and disappear.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p9</ref>
 
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As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attraction of all the myriad forms and presences that surround us, by which mentally and emotionally man escapes from the first limits of his ego, has to be taken up into a unifying divine love for the universal Divine…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p5</ref>
 
 
‘’’Bhakti’’’
 
 
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 a 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 than 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>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The principle of Yoga is to turn God-ward all or any of the powers of the human consciousness so that through that activity of the being there may be contact, relation, union. In the Yoga of Bhakti it is the emotional nature that is made the instrument. Its main principle is to adopt some human relation between man and the Divine Being by which through the ever intenser flowing of the heart's emotions towards him the human soul may at last be wedded to and grow one with him in a passion of divine Love. It is not ultimately the pure peace of oneness or the power and desireless will of oneness, but the ecstatic joy of union which the devotee seeks by his Yoga. Every feeling that can make the heart ready for this ecstasy the Yoga admits; everything that detracts from it must increasingly drop away as the strong union of love becomes closer and more perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-godward-emotions#p1</ref>
 
 
==In Mind==
 
 
This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p8</ref>
 
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The Intuitive or Overmind are more open to the truth of Divine Love and more capable of universalising love than the mind ordinarily is—love there is also more calm in its intensity, less ego-bound than in the mental parts. But the mind can also approach their quality of love, if the love in it grows psychic and spiritual.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p10</ref>
 
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It is the thoughts of the outer mind that have to be refused, the suggestions and ideas that end by disturbing the sadhana. There are also a number of thoughts of all kinds that have no interest, but which the mind is accustomed to allow to come as a habit, mechanically,—these sometimes come up when one tries to be quiet. They must be allowed to pass away without attending to them until they run down and the mind becomes still; to struggle with them and try to stop them is no use, there must be only a quiet rejection…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-mind-and-other-levels-of-being#p20</ref>
 
 
===In Psychic===
 
 
…But our aim is to go beyond mental ideas into the light of the supramental Truth, which exists not by ideative thought but by direct vision and identity. In the same way our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and there feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings of the vital emotions cannot reach or experience.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p46</ref>
 
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You must make an effort to come into touch with your psychic being, to become aware and free in the consciousness of your psychic being, and then, quite naturally, spontaneously, you will know what Divine Love is.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p28</ref>
 
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Live in the consciousness of the psychic centre; thus your will will express the Divine's Will alone and your transformed being will then be able to receive and manifest the Divine Love.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-soul-the-psychic#p33</ref>
 
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If, through a sustained effort, a deep concentration, a great forgetfulness of self, you succeed in coming into touch with your psychic being, you will never dream of thinking, "Oh! I would like to be in contact with Divine Love"—you are in a state in which everything appears to you to be this Divine Love and nothing else. And yet it is only a covering, but a covering of a beautiful texture. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p25</ref>
 
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A psychic change is demanded, a divestiture of the masks of the Ignorance, a purification of the egoistic mental, vital and physical movements that prolong the old inferior consciousness; each movement of love, spiritualised, must depend no longer on mental preference, vital passion or physical craving, but on the recognition of soul by soul,—love restored to its fundamental spiritual and psychic essence with the mind, the vital, the physical as manifesting instruments and elements of that greater oneness. In this change the individual love also is converted by a natural heightening into a divine love for the Divine Inhabitant immanent in a mind and soul and body occupied by the One in all creatures.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p2</ref>
 
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To establish the latter down to the subconscient is a thing which would mean the entire transformation of the whole being and it cannot be done except as the result of the supramental change which is as yet far away. The other may be established even now in principle, but to make it living and complete in the whole being would mean the psychic transformation completed with the spiritual also well under way already.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p9</ref>
 
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The love that belongs to the spiritual planes is of a different kind—the psychic has its own more personal love, bhakti, surrender. Love in the higher or spiritual mind is more universal and impersonal. The two must join together to make the highest divine love.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p21</ref>
 
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On the other hand if thoughts come up from within, from the psychic, thoughts of the Mother, of divine love and joy, perceptions of truth etc., these of course must be permitted, as they help to make the psychic active.  <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-mind-and-other-levels-of-being#p20</ref>
 
 
===In Spiritual===
 
 
…the integral Yoga founds itself on a conception of the spiritual being as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transference to other worlds or a cosmic self-extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into the consciousness of the omnipresent reality which we always are in the essence of our being. It substitutes for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual seeking of a divine union. It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised nature. The conversion its action will effect is an integral conversion of our ethical being into the Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual into the illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional into the divine love and unity, our dynamic and volitional into a working of the divine power, our aesthetic into a plenary reception and a creative enjoyment of divine beauty, not excluding even in the end a divine conversion of the vital and physical being...
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p12</ref>
 
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If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss,—a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, although something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened to this experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights above: the nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite ascension and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is because it has been superconscient to mind and therefore mind, when it rises into it, is unable at first to retain there its power of conscious discernment and defining experience…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-triple-transformation#p24</ref>
 
 
==What are the Prerequisites for Manifestation of Divine Love?==
 
 
Truth alone can give to the world the power of receiving and manifesting the Divine Love.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/messages-for-the-supramental-manifestation-upon-earth#p11</ref>
 
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"It may be said that a complete act of divine love and worship has in it three parts that are the expressions of a single whole,―a practical worship of the Divine in the act, a symbol of worship in the form of the act expressing some vision and seeking or some relation with the Divine, an inner adoration and longing for oneness or feeling of oneness in the heart and soul and spirit." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/25-july-1956#p1</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
To manifest the Divine love you must be capable of receiving the Divine love. For only those can manifest it who are by their nature open to its native movement. The wider and clearer the opening in them, the more they manifest love divine in its original purity; the more it is mixed with the lower human feelings, the greater is the deformation. One who is not open to love in its essence and in its truth cannot approach the Divine.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p4</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of Love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. …The moment man's consciousness awakens to the Divine love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human forms, he knows for what his heart has all the time been truly longing. That is the beginning of the Soul's aspiration, that brings the awakening of the consciousness and its yearning for union with the Divine. All the forms that are of the ignorance, all the deformations it has imposed must from that moment fade and disappear and give place to one single movement of the creation answering to the Divine love by its love for the Divine. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p11</ref>
 
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I have said that if one wants to know what love is, one must love the Divine. Then there is a chance of knowing what love is. I have said that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. So if one loves the Divine, gradually, through this effort of love, one grows more and more like the Divine, and then one can be identified with the divine love and know what it is, otherwise one can't. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/14-april-1954#p7</ref>
 
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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 enthusiasm 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/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The first step is to stop being selfish. For everyone it is the same thing, not only for those who want to do yoga but also in ordinary life: if one wants to know how to love, one must not love oneself first and above all selfishly; one must give oneself to the object of love without exacting anything in return. This discipline is elementary in order to surmount oneself and lead a life which is not altogether gross.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p23</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
To will it is a constant, sustained, concentrated aspiration, an almost exclusive occupation of the consciousness. This is the first step. There are many others: a very attentive observation, a very persistent analysis, a very keen discernment of what is pure in the movement and what is not... You must take up your search with a purity of aspiration and surrender which in themselves are already difficult to acquire. You must have worked much on yourself only to be ready to aspire to this Love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p23</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
My love is always with you; if then you do not feel it, it is because you are not capable of receiving it. It is your receptivity that is lacking and should be increased; for this you must open yourself, and one opens oneself only if one gives oneself. Surely you are trying more or less consciously to draw the forces and the divine love towards you. The method is bad. Give yourself without calculating and without expecting anything in return, and then you will become capable of receiving. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/receptivity#p21</ref>
 
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I was stating that a human being, unless he raises himself to the divine heights, is incapable of receiving, appreciating and knowing what divine Love is. Love must cease to be divine to be accepted by man. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/31-october-1956#p11</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
…the will to pierce through this limited and human form of love and discover the principle of divine Love which is behind it. Then one is sure to get a result. This is better than drying up one's heart. It is perhaps a little more difficult but it is better in every way, for like this, instead of egoistically making others suffer, well, one may leave them quiet in their own movement and only make an effort to transform oneself without imposing one's will on others, which even in ordinary life is a step towards something higher and a little more harmonious.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p30</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
To go through, to see what is behind it, not to stop at the appearance, not to be satisfied with the outer form, to look for the principle which is behind this love, and not be content until one has found the origin of the feeling in oneself. Then the outer form will crumble of itself and you will be in contact with the divine Love which is behind all things.
 
That is the best way…Therefore, the best way when love comes, in whatever form it may be, is to try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence. Naturally, it is full of snares and difficulties, but it is more effective. That is to say, instead of ceasing to love because one loves wrongly, one must cease to love wrongly and want to love well…one must learn how to love better: to love with devotion, with self-giving, self-abnegation, and to struggle, not against love itself, but against its distorted forms: against all forms of monopolising, of attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, and all the feelings which accompany these main movements. Not to want to possess, to dominate; and not to want to impose one's will, one's whims, one's desires; not to want to take, to receive, but to give; not to insist on the other's response, but be content with one's own love; not to seek one's personal interest and joy and the fulfilment of one's personal desire, but to be satisfied with the giving of one's love and affection; and not to ask for any response. Simply to be happy to love, nothing more… <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p23</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol...
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
So too the love that desires and grasps and is troubled with joy and shaken with grief must be rejected for the equal, all-embracing love that is free from these things and has no dependence upon circumstances and is not modified by response or absence of response. So we shall deal with all the movements of the soul; but of these things we shall speak farther when we consider the Yoga of self-perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-release-from-the-heart-and-the-mind#p7</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
In itself the adoration in the act is a great and complete and powerful sacrifice that tends by its self-multiplication to reach the discovery of the One and make the radiation of the Divine possible… <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p11</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our Yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truth—what I call the Supramental—and its Divine Power...
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p2</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The integral Yoga, refusing to rely upon the fragile stuff of mental and moral ideals, puts its whole emphasis in this field on three central dynamic processes—the development of the true soul or psychic being to take the place of the false soul of desire, the sublimation of human into divine love, the elevation of consciousness from its mental to its spiritual and Supramental plane by whose power alone both the soul and the life-force can be utterly delivered from the veils and prevarications of the Ignorance.
 
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p20</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The human form is naturally unable to bear the Divine Love or contain it, because it is itself a creation of the ignorance, weak and impure. It must be transformed in order to be capable of that; it must become strong and pure. First of all, it must have the strength to love the Divine alone and turn away from all other ties. But besides that a new consciousness must be created in it—first a consciousness of pure and purifying Divine Peace from above which must take hold of all down to the most physical—then in that peace an increasing inner strength pure and unegoistic—then the Divine Light and Knowledge transforming all the consciousness and movements. When this has been done, then the human form can contain the Divine Love and Ananda. …
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p5</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The Divine Love may not be able yet to manifest on the physical plane, humanity being what it is, as fully and freely as it would otherwise do, but that does not make it less close or intense than the human… <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p6</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
There is the one divine Love secret in all things, but the manifestation [of it in matter and in forms of life] depends upon the state of consciousness and its organisation.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p8</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
You ask how you can repair the wrong you seem to have done. Admitting that it is as you say, it seems to me that the reparation lies precisely in this, in making yourself a vessel for the Divine Truth and the Divine Love. And the first steps towards that are a complete self-consecration and self-purification, a complete opening of oneself to the Divine, rejecting all in oneself that can stand in the way of the fulfilment. In the spiritual life there is no other reparation for any mistake, none that is wholly effective. At the beginning one should not ask for any other fruit or results than this internal growth and change—for otherwise one lays oneself open to severe disappointments. Only when one is free, can one free others and in Yoga it is out of the inner victory that there comes the outer conquest.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/time-and-change-of-the-nature#p22</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
There is the selfishness which is always a part if not the whole of human love—and it is the reaction of the demand and desire it brings that creates the opposite feeling. It is when this selfish element is rejected that one can feel the true psychic or divine love.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p57</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
Thus the motives of devotion have first to direct themselves engrossingly and predominantly towards the Divine, then to transform themselves so that they are rid of their more earthy elements and finally to take their stand in pure and perfect love. All those that cannot coexist with the perfect union of love, must eventually fall away, while only those that can form themselves into expressions of divine love and into means of enjoying divine love, can remain. For love is the one emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent; love need have no other motive than love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-motives-of-devotion#p11</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The higher consciousness in its descent takes several fundamental forms—peace, power and strength, light, knowledge, Ananda. Usually it is the peace that descends first. This is not a mental, vital or physical peace of the ordinary kind, but something from above (spiritual), very firm, solid and concrete. It is its concreteness that makes you feel like a still massive block—a mass of the higher consciousness in place of the more tenuous substance of the ordinary nature. As for its being worth having, you can see that it is—it is indeed the beginning of the real transformation—all the rest hitherto has been mainly preparation and clearing of difficulties and impediments through all these years. This serene peace and massive stillness has to stabilise itself, fill the whole nature, widen itself until all existence internal and external seems full of it. This may take time, but the beginning once there it is sure to take place, if one is steady and constant. It becomes besides the sure base on which all the rest,—power and strength, light and knowledge, Ananda and divine love, can come in and securely fill the consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/the-descent-of-the-higher-consciousness-and-force#p19</ref>
 
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The soul's turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine... It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. But that does not mean that the other parts of the being, the vital and physical included, are not to be used as means of expression or that they are not to share in the full play and the whole meaning of love, even of divine love. On the contrary, they are a means and can be a great part of the complete expression of divine love,—provided they have the right and not the wrong movement… 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#p38</ref>
 
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It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration which ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all one's inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love which possesses the spirit and its members.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-way-of-devotion#p5</ref>
 
 
==Common Misconceptions Related to Development of Divine Love==
 
 
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…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/15-august-1956#p1</ref>
 
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The one thing to be done is to change it, not to suppress its movement or destroy it. For without it no intensity is possible anywhere.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/2-june-1929#p10</ref>
 
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To want to get rid of the one in order to find the other is very difficult. It is almost impossible. For human nature is so limited, so full of contradictions and so exclusive in its movements that if one wants to reject love in its lower form, that is to say, human love as human beings experience it, if one makes an inner effort to reject it, one usually rejects the entire capacity of feeling love and becomes like a stone. And then sometimes one has to wait for years or centuries before there is a reawakening in oneself of the capacity to receive and manifest love…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p23</ref>
 
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It is not that love for all is not part of the sadhana, but it has not to translate itself at once into a mixing with all―it can only express itself in a general and when need be dynamic universal good-will, but for the rest it must find vent in this labour of bringing down the higher consciousness with all its effect for the earth. As for accepting the working of the Divine in all things that is necessary here too in the sense of seeing it even behind our struggles and difficulties, but not accepting the nature of man and the world as it is―our aim is to move towards a by a greater and happier manifestation. That too is a labour of divine Love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/relations-with-persons-outside-the-ashram#p33</ref>
 
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It is this consciousness that has expressed itself in your letter—or the obscure part of it which clings to its old attitude. It 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. It is not in you alone that this part feels and acts like that, it is in almost everybody. If that were the only thing in you or the others, then indeed there would be no possibility of Yoga...
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/difficulties-of-the-physical-nature#p105</ref>
 
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It is the inability to affirm or keep this character that makes human love either transient or baulked of its full significance or condemned to sink into a less exalted movement diminished to the capacity of the human receptacle…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/philosophical-thought-and-yoga#p31</ref>
 
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Love itself blinded by the confusions of this present consciousness may stumble in its human receptacles and, even otherwise, may find itself unrecognised, rejected or rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of man's inferior nature…
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p2</ref>
 
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Its other signs are doubt; tamasic depression; an exaggerated sense of impurity and unfitness; the idea that the Mother is remote, does not care for one, is not giving what she ought to give, is not divine, with other similar suggestions accompanied by an inability to feel her presence or her help; a feeling that the Yoga is not possible or is not going to be done in this life; the desire to go away and do something in the ordinary world—the thing itself suggested varying according to the personal mind. If it were not this one invariable hostile force acting, there would not be this exact similarity in all the cases. In each case it is the same obscurities thrown on the intelligence, the same subconscious movements of the vital brought to the surface, the same irrational impulses pushing to the same action,—departure, renunciation of the soul's truth, refusal of the Divine Love and the Divine Call.
 
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/dealing-with-hostile-attacks#p16</ref>
 
 
<center>"One single drop of Thy divine love can transform this suffering into an ocean of delight!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/20-july-1932-1#p1</ref></center>
 
 
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==References==
 

Revision as of 09:47, 13 May 2021

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