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Read more about Expansion and Widening from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

What is Love?

Love is one of the great universal forces; it exists by itself and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which and through which it manifests. What you call love and think of as a personal or individual thing is only your capacity to receive and manifest this universal force. [1]

Love is like a flame that changes what is hard into something malleable and even sublimates this malleable thing into a kind of purified vapour—it does not destroy, it transforms. [2]

What is Divine Love?

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. 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. [3]

How Does Divine Love Manifest?

To manifest the Divine love, you must be capable of receiving the Divine love. 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 the deformation. 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. [4]

On the physical plane the Divine expresses himself through beauty, on the mental plane through knowledge, on the vital plane through power and on the psychic plane through love. [5]

The Divine Love, unlike humans, is deep and vast and silent; one must become quiet and wide to be aware of it and reply to it. 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. [6]

What is Psychic Love?

Psychic love can have a warmth and a flame as intense and more intense than the vital, only it is a pure fire, not dependent on the satisfaction of ego-desire or on the eating up of the fuel it embraces. It is a white flame, not a red one; but white heat is not inferior to the red variety in its ardour. It is true that the psychic love does not usually get its full play in human relations and human nature, it finds the fullness of its fire and ecstasy more easily when it is lifted towards the Divine.

If love is psychic in its nature, it always brings a 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. [7]

The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand, but it is human and can err and suffer. [8]

What is Human Love?

Ordinary human love is vital, emotional and physical and always egoistic—a form of self-love. The psychic element is very small except in a few. [9]

Misapprehensions Related to Love

Love, the eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment; it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love divine gives itself and asks for nothing. What human beings have made of it, we do not need to say; they have turned it into an ugly and repulsive thing. And yet even in human beings the first contact of love does bring down something of its purer substance; they become capable for a moment of forgetting themselves, for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful. But afterwards there comes to the surface the human nature, full of its impure demands, asking for something in exchange, bartering what it gives, clamouring for its own inferior satisfactions, distorting and soiling what was divine. [10]

Love & Sex

All movements are in the mass movements of Nature's cosmic forces—they are movements of universal Nature. The individual receives something of them, a wave or pressure of some cosmic force, and is driven by it; he thinks it is his own, generated in himself separately, but it is not so, it is part of a general movement which works just in the same way in others. Sex, for instance, is a movement of general Nature seeking for its play and it uses this or that one—a man vitally or physically "in love" as it is called with a woman is simply repeating and satisfying the world-movement of sex, if it had not been that woman, it would have been another; he is simply an instrument in Nature's machinery, it is not an independent movement. So it is with anger and other Nature-motives. [11]

Why Doesn’t Love Manifest?

When the surroundings, circumstances, atmosphere, the way of living and above all the inner attitude are altogether of a low kind, vulgar, gross, egoistic, sordid, love is reluctant to come, that is, it always hesitates to manifest itself and generally does not stay long. A home of beauty must be given for Beauty to stay. I am not speaking of external things—a real house, real furniture and all that—I am speaking of an inner attitude, of something within which is beautiful, noble, harmonious, unselfish. People always complain that love is impermanent and passing. To tell the truth, they should be very grateful that it manifested in them in spite of the sordidness of the house they gave it. [12]

Why is Love Essential?

It is as the love of the Divine grows that the other things cease to trouble the mind. [13]

In this love lie peace and joy, the fount of all strength and all realisation. It is the infallible healer, the supreme consoler; it is the victor, the sovereign teacher. [14]

Love alone can work this miracle, for love opens all doors, penetrates every wall, clears every obstacle.[15]

If the spirit of divine love can enter, the hardness of the way diminishes, the tension is lightened, there is a sweetness and joy even in the core of difficulty and struggle. The indispensable surrender of all our will and works and activities to the Supreme is indeed only perfect and perfectly effective when it is a surrender of love. [16]

How to Love?

And what is the first gesture of love? To give oneself, to serve. What is its spontaneous, immediate, inevitable movement? To serve. To serve in a joyous, complete, total self-giving. [17]

A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. 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. [18]

Bhakti and Love

Love, bhakti, surrender, the psychic opening are the only short cut to the Divine—or can be; for if the love and bhakti are too vital, then there is likely to be a seesaw between ecstatic expectation and viraha, abhimāna, despair, which will make it not a shortcut but a long one, a zigzag, not a straight flight, a whirling round one's own ego instead of a running towards the Divine. [19]

Read more about Love from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

References