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Universal Love
Love must grow and embrace more and more within its orbit of expression.
Love for one's wife must enlarge into a deep love for the family resulting
from such love. Familial love must grow to include neighbours, for,
after all, if a neighbour is sick, notwithstanding the marvels of modern
medicine, we are likely to be the next victims; if the neighbour is
poor, his poverty affects us; if he is the victim of gangsterism and
hoodlum attacks, we are sure to feel the repercussions. So our neighbour's
well-being is a matter of immediate concern to us. Thus, slowly, as
love matures, it must widen in scope until ultimately it envelops the
entire universe within its sublime embrace. My Master has said that
the only way of approaching the Ultimate is through love.
Now how to love everybody else? So it is manifestly impossible to love
everybody in that sense in which you can love the Master. Now this seems
to, in some way, be an obnoxious concept of love that one can love exclusively
one to the exclusion of everything else. My Master put this in a beautiful
phrase in Munich, I think some years back, when he said in answer to
the question, "How to create Universal Love?" there the question
was how to create Universal Love, not just love. He said "Love
Him who loves all." So in some mysterious way, when we love Him
who loves all, there seems to be a canalisation or a channelling of
the love resources of the entire human potential, the human race, into
one vessel, into one receptacle, which being totally unselfish, being
totally concerned with the total universe as such is able to mobilise
those accumulated resources for the welfare of all. I am giving this
in the terminology of, let us say, capital formation to help social
growth where the petty savings of the individual are mobilised in banks
and then released in large streams of capital for welfare, industrial
development, social development, educational development, health development,
any resource of development. So in that sense we come from creation
of love through Constant Remembrance of the Master to loving Him exclusively.
It was Kabir who said that the path of love is so narrow that only one
can walk. Even two lovers cannot walk through it or walk on it. So what
is the meaning? Carry the beloved in yourself. So, in that sense, loving
perhaps means putting into your heart him or her whom you wish to love.
Here it is the Master. So we have to learn to love the Master in such
a wonderful way that He becomes the occupant, the tenant of my inner
self, my heart and eventually by loving Him to the exclusion of everything
else, we forget to see anything else. We see only Him. Our entire existence
becomes centered on Him. He now becomes, instead of the tenant of my
heart, the Master of my heart. He takes over my existence and then we
find this miracle that the qualities of His heart become the qualities
of my heart, and then only the miracle happens that I have created love
in my heart not by creating it in myself but by bringing love into my
heart, as embodied in the Master. So the only true way of creating a
sustained, sustaining, self-sustaining, ever pervasive love, which can
transcend the barriers of even mortal existence and go with us to the
hereafter, is to bring the source of love into our hearts.
Now if you are interested, I can add a certain codicil to this answer,
that I often wondered how it was possible for my Master to love everybody
equally, because He didn't know any of us. He didn't know most of us.
Then I found one day, looking at the Sun, it shines on everybody equally.
It has no friends, no foes, no loves, no lovers. Similarly the Master
is Love. He is no longer someone who loves, but He has become Love and
then that Love pervades through the Universe itself.
This, brothers and sisters, is the creation of love in our hearts!
This is the miracle that we are attempting in Sahaj Marg and we have
largely achieved too I should say, by the Grace of the Master. Because,
with this love He not only welded together two or three or five, He
welded together thousands of abhyasis of different nationalities, cultures,
languages, tradition, antipathies, sympathies, varying, sometimes widely
varying, tendencies. Yet we achieved that miracle of forming a brotherhood
out of a diversity of human beings, which we see today in a small way
here, which we shall see larger in the coming days. And how was that
possible? Not because we love each other, I mean, can it be possible
that we can love twenty thousand or fifty thousand or in the future
one hundred thousand abhyasis? Every one of us loving each other! Is
it possible? Where is the time? Where is the opportunity to meet one
hundred thousand people and love them? But if we really love the One,
we love Him who loves all, and therefore with that love for Him who
loves all, we are able to love them whom He loves. He said one half
of it. "Love Him who loves all". I would like to complete,
with respect to my Master, that, when we love Him who loves all, we
love them whom He loves. Now if this does not happen, if the second
part of it does not happen, our love for Him is a lie. It is not possible
to love the Master and not love those whom the Master loves. This is
my humble submission, which is a thing you should think over. How is
it possible to love the father and not his children, the other children
that he has?
Now we have love which has expectations of our beloved ones, or it is
limited love, personalised love, individual love. But a love which expects
nothing of anybody else whatsoever, it loves all and everything in the
universe, that is universal love. And according to Sahaj Marg that is
also divine love, love for God because we expect nothing from God Himself.
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