Changes

By becoming divine in nature [''one can love divinely'']; there is no other way. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p10</ref>

To love truly the Divine, we must rise above attachments.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/love-for-the-divine#p24</ref>

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-right-way-of-loving-the-mother#p10</ref>

And it is very easy to explain how a person who has this [ love is like a flame, a white flame which overcomes all resistances] experience can spread it, can act on others; because to have the experience you must touch the one, supreme Essence of the whole manifestation, the Origin and the Essence, the Source and the Reality of all that is; and at once you enter the realm of Unity—there is no longer any separation of individuals, there is only one single vibration that can be repeated indefinitely in external form.

If you rise high enough, you find yourself at the heart of all things. And what is manifest in this heart can manifest in all things. That is the great secret, the secret of the divine incarnation in an individual form, because in the normal course of things what manifests at the centre is realised in the external form only with the awakening and the response of the will in the individual form. Whereas if the central Will is represented constantly and permanently in an individual being, this individual being can serve as an intermediary between this Will and all beings, and will for them. Everything this individual being perceives and offers in his consciousness to the supreme Will is answered as if it came from each individual being. And if for any reason the individual elements have a more or less conscious and voluntary relation with that representative being, their relation increases the efficacy, the effectiveness of the representative individual; and thus the supreme Action can act in Matter in a much more concrete and permanent manner. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-49#p14</ref>

==By Aspiration==

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. If you have an imaginative faculty, you may try to imagine and see if your imagination tallies with reality. There are people who believe that it is enough to wake up one day in a particular mood and say, "Ah! How I wish to be conscious of Divine Love, how I wish to manifest Divine Love...." Note, I don't know how many millions of times one feels within a little quivering of human instinct and imagines that if one had at one's disposal Divine Love, great things could be accomplished, and one says, "I am going to try and find Divine Love and we shall see the result." This is the worst possible way. Because, before having even touched the very beginning of realisation you have spoilt the result. 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. 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>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-march-1951#p21,p22,p23</ref>

When the love goes towards the Divine, there is still this ordinary human element in it. There is the call for a return and if the return does not seem to come, the love may sink; there is the self-interest, the demand for the Divine as a giver of all that the human being wants and, if the demands are not acceded to, abhimana against the Divine, loss of faith, loss of fervour. Etc. etc. But the true love for the Divine is in its fundamental nature not of this kind, but psychic and spiritual. The psychic element is the need of the inmost being for self-giving, love, adoration, union which can only be fully satisfied by the Divine. The spiritual element is the need of the being for contact, merging, union with its own highest and whole self and source of being and consciousness and bliss, the Divine. These two are two sides of the same thing. The mind, vital, physical can be the supports and recipients of this love, but they can be fully that only when they become remoulded into harmony with the psychic and spiritual elements of the being and no longer bring in the lower insistences of the ego.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p29</ref>

Each one of you should be able to get into touch with your own psychic being, it is not an inaccessible thing. Your psychic being is there precisely to put you in contact with the divine forces. And if you are in contact with your psychic being, you begin to feel, to have a kind of perception of what Divine Love can be. As I have just said, it is not enough that one morning you wake up saying, "Oh! I would like to be in contact with Divine Love", it is not like that. 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.

''So, Divine Love need not be sought and known apart from the psychic being?''

No, find your psychic being and you will understand what divine Love is. Do not try to come into direct contact with divine Love because this will yet again be a vital desire pushing you; you will perhaps not be aware of it, but it will be a vital desire.

The soul's turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as an instrument of expression at first is 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. But in human love itself there are several kinds of motive-forces. There is a psychic human love which rises from deep within and is the result of the meeting of the inner being with that which calls it towards a divine joy and union; it is, once it becomes aware of itself, something lasting, self-existent, not dependent upon external satisfactions, not capable of diminution by external causes, not self-regarding, not prone to demand or bargain but giving itself simply and spontaneously, not moved to or broken by misunderstandings, disappointments, strife and anger, but pressing always straight towards the inner union. It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p32</ref>

==By Peace==

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. 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 touches only can come. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p4</ref>

==By Getting Rid of Lower Movements==

...one can certainly become conscious of the Divine's Love before one has oneself the universal love—one can become conscious of it by contact with the Divine in oneself. Naturally the consciousness of it should lead to the development of a universal love for all. But if he means a love that is divine, not tainted by the lower movements, then 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>

The higher Consciousness is a state of pure love but it is also a state of pure openness to divine knowledge. There is no opposition there between these two kindred things; it is the mind that makes them separate.

The best way to get to it is to refuse all mental agitation when it comes, also all vital desires and turmoils, and to keep the mind and heart turned as constantly as possible towards the Divine. The love for the Divine is the strongest force for doing this. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/19-october-1939#p3,p4</ref>

You say of your God: "I have loved Him so much and yet He did not remain with me!" But what kind of love have you given Him? In its essence, love is one, just as consciousness is one; but in the manifestation, it is coloured and differentiated by each individual nature. If you are impure and egoistic, love in you will become impure and egoistic, narrow, sectarian, limited, ambitious and possessive, violent, jealous, vulgar, brutal and cruel. Is this the kind of love that can be offered to God? 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>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/love-for-the-divine#p15</ref>

It is possible by bringing the real soul to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, an all-embracing personal-impersonal delight.The lover of Nature does this when he takes joy in all the things of Nature universally without admitting repulsion or fear or mere liking and disliking, perceiving beauty in that which seems to others mean and insignificant, bare and savage, terrible and repellent. The artist and the poet do it when they seek the ''rasa'' of the universal from the aesthetic emotion or from the physical line or from the mental form of beauty or from the inner sense and power alike of that from which the ordinary man turns away and of that to which he is attached by a sense of pleasure. The seeker of knowledge, the God-lover who finds the object of his love everywhere, the spiritual man, the intellectual, the sensuous, the aesthetic all do this in their own fashion and must do it if they would find embracingly the Knowledge, the Beauty, the Joy or the Divinity which they seek. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-double-soul-in-man#p9</ref>

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.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/10-june-1964#p2</ref>

=Bhakti and Love=