Excerpts Chapter 17
THE MEDITATION BOOK:
DIVINE LOVE
How to feel love for everyone?
Question: How can I have love for everyone in my heart all the time?
Sri Chinmoy: One first has to love oneself. Those who say, “First love humanity, then think of yourself,” are mistaken. This philanthropic idea is absolutely wrong. Love, spontaneous love, must first grow inside. We cannot grow love in the supermarket or somewhere in the subway station. Love has to be grown here, deep within us. When we see and feel and become love, only then can we offer our love to the rest of humanity.
If you want to have love for all humanity, then you should know how everybody came into existence. Humanity came into existence from the Source and that Source is God. If you can have love for God at every second of your life, then you will have love for all. You have to know that only God can satisfy you most convincingly. From within you will get the message that only the Source from which you came into existence can satisfy you.
Every day when you meditate, please say the word “love” before you start your meditation. When you utter the word “love”, try to feel that your arms, your legs, your eyes and every part of you has increased its capacity. Take the arm, for example. The arm means strength. When you say the word “love”, you have to feel that your arms have become stronger – not for striking anybody, but for working more for humanity. Then concentrate on your eyes and try to feel that you are using your eyes to see only good things in everybody. When you concentrate on your ears, feel that you want to hear only good things, encouraging and inspiring things. If somebody says bad things, you will just keep your ears closed. Each time you say the word “love”, concentrate on one of your organs. Then afterwards, try to concentrate on your inner consciousness, which is now aspiring but which is also limited. Try to expand it. First you repeat the word “love” in a human way with your body, and then you repeat it in a divine way, with your inner consciousness. Automatically you will have love for God, and when you have love for God, you will feel love for humanity. When you love God, that means that you are watering the root. So naturally all the branches and leaves will get water also.
So if you want to love your neighbour, or your wife, husband or child then you have to love God first. God is the Source. If you don’t go to the Source, who is all Love, then it will just be words when you say, “I love you, I love you.” There is no way for any human being to establish real love except by becoming one with God’s Love. Through God, you can have a free access to any individual on earth and, at that time, your love will be most pure and most effective.
Meditation exercise – developing love for oneself
Question: I do not really know how to love myself, and yet I feel I need to love the Supreme.
Sri Chinmoy: For the time being, forget about the Supreme. Only feel that you have entered into a garden with many, many flowers. Choose one flower that you like and go near it. Appreciate its beauty and smell its fragrance. Then just say a few times, “How I wish I could be as pure and as beautiful as this flower.” After five minutes, try to imagine that an infinitesimal amount of beauty from that flower has entered into you. Then gradually try to feel that all the good qualities you are seeing in the flower – its beauty, its purity, its fragrance and so on – have entered into you and are inside you.
Now remember how much you loved that flower and how much joy it gave you. At first it had a separate existence. But little by little you brought its beauty and reality inside your own body and inside your own heart. Then try to feel that you do not have a body, you do not have a mind, you do not have anything. Think of yourself only as that most beautiful flower. Because you have become that beautiful flower, you are bound to appreciate yourself and love yourself the way that you loved the flower.
Once you start loving yourself, you have to feel that God loves you infinitely more. If you are suffering from a physical ailment or something else, you may feel that nobody is there to love you or sympathise with you. But there is Someone and that Person is inside you. If you are suffering, then you have to know that He is suffering infinitely more. If you are happy, then He is infinitely happier. Try to cultivate the feeling that the Supreme, who is your highest part, is always feeling what you are feeling, only infinitely more. If you love somebody, He loves that person infinitely more. And if you love yourself, then He loves you infinitely more.
Feeling God’s love for us
Question: How can we feel that God loves us infinitely more than we love ourselves?
Sri Chinmoy: The proof of the pudding is in the eating itself. The human in us feels that we are either the lowest or the highest. When it identifies with the lowest, it says, “I am useless, I am nothing.” In this way the vital comes forward and tries to gain sympathy. But each time a doubt comes and we feel that we are not God’s instrument, we fall short of our capacity. How many times we doubt ourselves, belittle ourselves, kill ourselves! The moment we doubt that God is inside us, a dark spot appears on the golden tablet of our heart. When we don’t love ourselves, the face of the sun is covered with clouds. The moment we belittle our capacity and doubt ourselves, the moment we forget what we eternally are, at that time we are millions of miles from the truth. We love ourselves only when we feel that we have achieved something or feel that tomorrow or the day after we are going to do something. This is the human in us.
Who is God? God is our highest part, our most illumined part. When we as individuals enter into our highest consciousness and know that we are in all, of all and for all, at that time we do not doubt ourselves. At that time, we are everything, so who can doubt whom? We embody God and want to reveal and manifest God, so we do not even dream of minimising our capacity. Here we are spontaneously embodying and revealing the divine.
When the real, the highest, the most illumined part in us comes to the fore, at that time we really love ourselves. We love ourselves because we know who we are. Love is not a kind of outer movement or action. Love is life, and life itself is spontaneous nectar and delight. So the Supreme in us, who is infinite Delight, loves us infinitely more than we love ourselves.