The Gift of Love

If there’s love, there is nothing to speak about, and if you speak, there is no love. Love loses its depth when you try to express it. The more you digest it, the more it grows. It is more to experience than to express.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III}

How does one reach the stage of realizing the love of which Maharaj Charan Singh speaks – especially as in this realm of mind and maya we are all emotion and very little love? While the soul is dominated by the mind, our experience of love is mostly emotion. However, if we manage to channelize our emotion, turning it into devotion, love will automatically develop. Real love is beyond mind and maya. It is found at the spiritual heart centre – the eye centre.

Love has no language, no proof. We can only experience love. True love is divine: it radiates from the soul, which is pure love. God is all love. And the soul, being a particle of the Lord, is thus also inherently love. Therefore we all have the potential for divine love within us. Some of us may feel or experience it more than others. This depends on the relative load of karmas that weighs upon our soul. Love raises our soul upwards towards its own home – to its father in Sach Khand. But, again and again, the passions associated with the senses pull it down. The senses dominate the mind, which wraps our soul within it, covering it with layer upon layer of karmas, from eons of lives.

Our Masters tell us that we cannot cultivate love on our own. They shower us with their love as a reward for our meditation: The more effort we put into meditation, the more love they shower on us. Love itself is grace, for as the Great Master asserts: “Love is a gift of the Master!”

Meditation is the work we do for the Master, and we should do it out of love for him. Meditation on the Shabd takes our soul back to its original home, and is the only method by which we cut the connection between our mind and soul for ever. By listening to the Shabd during bhajan the mind is controlled and subdued.

As Soami Ji puts it in Sar Bachan Poetry:

A million other methods will fail to tame it,
it will submit only by listening to that melody.

Shabd is the only sword that cuts at the root of all our passions, eliminates ages of karmas, and liberates our soul from the grip of our mind. The more we are attached to the divine melody of the Shabd, the more the mind’s karmic load fades away and the more our soul shines. That divine sound is so effective that a single spark of it can burn all our karmas – just as we may pile up a huge collection of wood, and it requires only a single spark to turn it into ashes. However, mystics tell us that it is not our puny effort at meditation that will burn our stock of karmas; rather, it’s ultimately the grace of the Master that will do this. Our daily and regular act of sitting for our spiritual practice is a sine qua non for evoking that divine grace. Actually, the Master gives us considerably more than we deserve or ‘earn’ from our meditation.

In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Maharaj Charan Singh Ji explains this saying:

The real lover never bothers whether he receives or not. He believes only in giving, because the more you give the more it grows. It’s not that the more you get the more it grows. Love is in giving, not in taking.

The more we do the Shabd practice, the more love develops within us until finally we become one with that love. Such love is a powerful solvent that dissolves all the material and subtle attachments that come our way, until only love remains. Love cultivates love: the more we have of it, the more we will love our Master. He is the embodiment of love, being constantly connected to the Shabd, the creative Word.

The pity is that we are not supposed to love what we see – in other words, the creation; and we are supposed to love what we don’t see – the Creator himself. So we spend our lives wasting our love on that which we should not have loved, and that is the whole tragedy of our love.

But when the seed of divine love sprouts within us, we have no choice but to love our Master who embodies that divine love. Only then can we surrender unconditionally – which is to lose our insignificant identity and merge into the Lord. It is only by losing ourselves in divine love for the Lord that we can find eternal peace and happiness.

In divine love, the more we share, the more it expands, until we love all without any discrimination whatsoever. The beauty of spirituality is that we become one with the object of our love – the Lord. We become permanently dyed with the hue of his love.

The basis of spirituality is love, and we are like rivulets that merge into the river which ultimately merges into the ocean of love – the Lord. It is important to keep in mind that it’s the intensity and depth of our love that will take us to our eternal home in Sach Khand.