That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,
He is still the godhead by which all can change. https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/34/satyavan#p48,p49</center>
= How Does Love Manifest?=
Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-double-soul-in-man#p10</ref>
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Love will not be destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to its widest capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love of God, the love of man, the love of all things as ourselves and as beings and powers of the Divine; a large, universal love, not at all incapable of various relations, will replace the clamant, egoistic, self-regarding love of little joys and griefs and insistent demands afflicted with all the chequered pattern of angers and jealousies and satisfactions, rushings to unity and movements of fatigue, divorce and separation on which we now place so high a value. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-equality#p8</ref>
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At the beginning of this manifestation, in the purity of its origin, love is composed of two movements, two complementary poles of the urge towards complete oneness. On one hand there is the supreme power of attraction and on the other the irresistible need for absolute self-giving. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p70</ref>
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There is a spiritual emotion, a spiritual sense, there is an intermingling of oneness with oneness, of being with being, of consciousness with consciousness, of delight of being with delight of being. There is a joy of intimate separateness in identity, of the relations of love joined with love in a supreme unity, a delight of the many powers, truths, beings of the eternal oneness, of the forms of the Formless; all the play of becoming in the being finds its self-expression upon these powers of the consciousness of the Spirit. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/knowledge-by-identity-and-separative-knowledge#p26</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.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-motives-of-devotion#p11</ref>
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The oneness with all in its basis is something self-existent and self-content which does not need expression. When it does express itself as love, it is something wide and universal, untroubled and firm even when it is intense. This is in the basic cosmic oneness. There is also the surface cosmic consciousness which is an awareness of the play of cosmic forces—here anything may rise, sex also. It is this part that needs the perfect psychisation, otherwise one cannot even hold, contain and deal with it in the proper way.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p22</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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/19-august-1953#p1</ref>
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The root of the second status is desire, eager to possess but limited in capacity; the bud of the third is Love which seeks both to possess and be possessed, to receive and to give itself; the fine flower of the fourth, its sign of perfection, we conceive as the pure and full emergence of the original will, the illumined fulfilment of the intermediate desire, the high and deep satisfaction of the conscious interchange of Love by the unification of the state of the possessor and possessed in the divine unity of souls which is the foundation of the supramental existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-double-soul-in-man#p1</ref>
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The growth into the third status of life by the principle of association, the growth of love, does not abolish the law of desire, but rather transforms and fulfils it. Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange; it is a commerce between being and being. In its life-origin, the law of love is the impulse to realise and fulfil oneself in others and by others, to be enriched by enriching, to possess and be possessed because without being possessed one does not possess oneself utterly.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-ascent-of-life#p9</ref>
== How to Love? ==
''I feel there is no love in me towards the Mother. What shall I do to feel this love?''
Become truthful, pure, sincere, straightforward. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-right-way-of-loving-the-mother#p10</ref>
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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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/6-march-1957#p5</ref>
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Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestations of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the sadhaka. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/concentration#p8</ref>
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All love, indeed, that is adoration has a spiritual force behind it, and even when it is offered ignorantly and to a limited object, something of that splendour appears through the poverty of the rite and the smallness of its issues.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p3</ref>
..it is true that until there comes the peace, purity, freedom from ego, wideness, light of the universal consciousness which is the basis of the universal love, it is difficult to have a love that is free from all the defects, limitations, taints of ordinary human love. The more one has of the universality the more one tends to be freed from these things.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p23</ref>
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Keep your love pure of all selfish claim and desire; you will find that you are getting all the love that you can bear and absorb in answer. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-right-way-of-loving-the-mother#p4</ref>
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Let us grant that at first love may only be an extended selfishness and that this aspect of extended selfishness may persist and dominate, as it does still persist and dominate, in higher stages of the evolution: still as mind evolves and more and more finds itself, it comes by the experience of life and love and mutual help to perceive that the natural individual is a minor term of being and exists by the universal. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-ascent-of-life#p2</ref>
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The conscious preservation of individuality along with the consciously accepted necessity and desire of interchange, self-giving and fusion with other individuals, is necessary for the working of the principle of love; for if either is abolished, the working of love ceases, whatever may take its place. Fulfilment of love by entire self-immolation, even with an illusion of self-annihilation, is indeed an idea and an impulse in the mental being, but it points to a development beyond this third status of Life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-ascent-of-life#p7</ref>
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Only he who loves can recognise love. Those who are incapable of giving themselves in a sincere love, will never recognise love anywhere, and the more the love is divine, that is to say, unselfish, the less they can recognise it.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love#p33</ref>
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Keep your love pure of all selfish claim and desire; you will find that you are getting all the love that you can bear and absorb in answer. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p25</ref>
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One does not say to God, "Show your love for me first, shower on me the experience of yourself, satisfy my demand, then I will see whether I can love you so long as you deserve it." It is surely the seeker who must seek and love first, follow the quest, become impassioned for the Sought—then only does the veil move aside and the Light be seen and the Face manifest that alone can satisfy the soul after its long sojourn in the desert. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/bhakti-yoga-and-vaishnavism#p11</ref>
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If you want your love to be worthy of the one you love, if you want to enjoy love in its eternal perfection, become perfect, break out of the limitations of your ego, partake of eternity. And then you will always be close to the object of your love, for you will grow into his likeness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/love-for-the-divine#p15</ref>
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Love alone can love, love alone can conquer the ego. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p24</ref>
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You feel lonely because you feel the need to be loved. Learn to love without demand, to love just for the joy of loving (the most wonderful joy in the world!) and you will never again feel lonely. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p29</ref>
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The thirst for affection and love is a human need, but it can be quenched only if it turns towards the Divine. As long as it seeks satisfaction in human beings, it will always be disappointed or wounded. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p17</ref>
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It is not the love that someone feels for you that can make you happy, it is the love you feel for others that makes you happy: for you receive the love that you give from the Divine, who loves eternally and unfailingly. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/divine-love-and-human-love#p38</ref>
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...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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Only love can rule over love by enlightening, transforming and exalting it. For here too, more than anywhere else, control does not consist of suppression and abolition but of transmutation—a sublime alchemy. This is because, of all the forces at work in the universe, love is the most powerful, the most irresistible. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p67</ref>
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So the part of the consciousness which has been struck by this opposition makes a direct appeal to the origin of Love, with an intensity which it would not have without the experience of this refusal. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-88-89-90-91-92#p7</ref>
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As for yoga we may add something else: it is as I said in the beginning, 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 egotistically 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>
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So, even if your love remained as pure as it can be in the manifested world, it could not keep you in constant contact with the Divine unless all the rest was transformed. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/14-april-1954#p19</ref>
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This was what I meant, not anything else. 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>
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Radha is the personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material Nature the supreme Ananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/bhakti-yoga-and-vaishnavism#p61</ref>
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One has just a tiny little opening, very tiny, at times like a pinhead, and naturally that force rushes in. For it is like an active atmosphere; as soon as there is a possibility of being received, it is received. But this is so for all divine things. They are there, only one does not receive them, for one is closed up, blocked; one is busy with other things most of the time. So, as one is full of oneself, there is no place for anything else. One is filled with things; there is no place for the Divine.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/19-may-1954#p12</ref>
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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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p23</ref>
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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.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-september-1956#p26</ref>
==Role of Psychic in Channelising Love==
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 the spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p12</ref>
===How to Purify the Mental, Physical to Receive and Give Love?===
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.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-ii#p2</ref>
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I should perhaps add one or two things to avoid misapprehensions. First, the love for the Divine of which I speak is not a psychic love only; it is the love of all the being, the vital and vital-physical included,—all are capable of the same self-giving.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-right-way-of-loving-the-mother#p6</ref>
= Bhakti and Love =