Love

An Explanation by Maharaj Charan Singh

Love? Well, 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. What do you want to know about love?

You see, love has two aspects. It raises our soul upwards; then passion pulls us down. So we are more concerned with the devotional part of love. Love means to lose your own identity, to become another being, to merge into another one, to do which pleases the other person and not to do anything which displeases the other person. That is love. The soul by instinct is in love with the Father. The tendency of the soul is always towards its own origin. It is full of love and devotion for the Father, but it is just helpless due to the mind. The mind has a weakness for the senses, so it has become a slave of the senses. There is such a great load on the soul that its love is just crushed under that weight.

The soul cannot help but love its own origin. So we have to lift the weight of the senses, of the mind, of karmas or sins, before we can experience that love. And we feel real love when we go beyond the realm of mind and maya, when there are no coverings on the soul, when the soul shines, when it knows itself. Then it experiences the real love for its own Father, for its own origin. Love has the quality of merging into another being, becoming another being. Ultimately, we lose our own identity and individuality and become one with the Father. And that is why we say that love is God and God is love.

The more love you give, the more it grows. It is something which does not decrease by sharing. All other things decrease if you share them, but this is something within us which always grows and grows, the more and more we give. And the only way to experience that love is to withdraw it from the senses by simran and dhyan and attach it to the divine melody within. Because the mind is fond of pleasures, when it gets a better pleasure than the sensual pleasures, it automatically leaves the sensual pleasures. So the more the mind is attached to Shabd and Nam within, the more the soul starts shining within – what we call a higher consciousness. That is our concept of love.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III}