Master Is Love Personified

My Master too frequently refers to the need for love in one's life. One of his most revealing ideas is that love is a godly or divine thing, and therefore not to be spurned. Love is to be diverted to its proper and natural object, God! What the human individual is required to do is to divert his mind so that the love in the heart can be diverted to its real goal. My Master's personal life is the expression of his inner love for all mankind. His is a pure and divine love, universal in its scope and yet individual in its manifestation. Master's impersonal love for his devotees is not shown in grand deeds, but the love is hidden behind every small, insignificant and often unnoticed act in the humble routine of day-to-day existence.

Master had to assume a human form which represented for us a centre for our attention, something on which we could focus, first our attention, then our aspiration, finally our love. We cannot love an abstract thing. We need a concrete thing to love. But once you have perfected your love for the concrete, the concrete disappears, the love exists. So, the idea especially from the west, that love needs a lover to love - it is true initially, not later. It is a failure if you continue to need the person to love. The person can disappear. But the love must continue to exist. It is almost as mysterious as needing a pot to hold water in it, and then being able to break the pot, but the water remains in it, without the pot to hold it.

So, the whole mystery of spirituality according to me is, that a person is needed to first of all make us capable of love; second, to attract that love towards himself; third, disappear from the scene, so that the love can exist even when he does not exist. This is the final test. And this is what Babuji has written, that: "Any moth can immolate itself in a living flame, but rare is the moth that can die in a cold flame."

Like you have a rose, a flower, it has thorns, it has petals, it has perfume. This thorn is painful, the petals are soft and nice, you can also eat them, but it's the fragrance which is the most important thing. It has no substance, it goes anywhere. Isn't it? So similarly the person is like the thorns, the heart is like the petals, what comes out is love. And it must come out without individuals, you see. A saint should not say, "I love so and so, or her or him." He loves, he is love. Like the sun shines. If you are there, the sun shines on you.

To say that the Master loves me is the wrong thing. He doesn't love anybody. He loves only His Master. But by becoming perfect, He has become love. Like it has become honey, it is sweet to everybody. You cannot say, "Oh, the honey is sweet for me and not for her". Love has become His nature, His existence, His self. So we feel as if He loved us. But it's a mistake to think the Master loves. The Master can love only one, and that is His Master. But He has become like, you know, I used once somewhere this astronomy example, dust clouds, they become condensed and the gravity becomes so much that the more they condense, the heat is developing and it becomes a sun - it is now a sun, therefore it illuminates everything.

We are to receive - He has not to give. In the human life, if I am to receive your love, you must love me. Isn't it? I cannot receive your love unless you love me. But in spirituality it is not like that. In spirituality He is always loving, but I don't receive. When I become receptive - I feel His love. And then I say, "Master loves me." But He also loved me before I received it. That is the difference. Here, one day you hate, one day you love. There it is always love, because His existence is like that.

So you see, the lover need not have a body or a heart. The beloved need not have a body or a heart, provided that when they were both present physically, this love had become established. I think it is for this reason that the Master comes physically. If he had never appeared, we could never have loved him. I mean, can you imagine a Master and love such an imaginary Master? It's not possible. So, I think it is for that reason that all this happens, the Great Personality comes before us, shows himself to us, talks to us, laughs with us, jokes with us, eats with us, so that we can learn to love him and of course, His love is always eternal. So the important thing is not that he has to learn to love us, because He can love us from wherever he is. By appearing before us as a human being with the enormous lovable qualities, also many foibles, quirks, you know, or funny characteristics like spitting or things like the hookah, he gives us, or presents himself to us, to evoke our love, very much in the fashion that a child can only ask for a toy which it sees, or a man can only love a woman he sees. There is no man born who can love an abstract woman, nor can women, with all their capacity for love, love a man who has never been present before them.

So the presence is necessary to start this process of lover/beloved happening. Like a matchstick is necessary to light the candle, and having lit it, the matchstick is unimportant. It is now the candle which becomes important. Perhaps like that the Master is a matchstick, a Divine illuminant, always alight in His own realm, in His own sphere coming down to set us alight, set us aflame. So that, that love which is in our hearts, cold, icy, selfish, he sets it alight and sort of makes it melt, and then his job is finished. He says, "Au revoir. Now you do the job which I have done for you." We too have now to remember one very important thing: He comes with His Divine love, the Divine flame of love, sets our hearts afire, makes us also burn like Him, and then we have to transfer this to the following succeeding generations. If we think it is for enjoyment, for intimacy with the Master, it is betrayal of his love for us. So you see, he comes to love us, not because he needs our love, he comes to teach us how to love so that, in our turn, we may teach others how to love. And then some day it is possible that the whole world is full of love, which is what we are looking for. So this is the problem, or this is the purpose, for which a Master appears before us.

Spirituality, I think, is a big word, too many letters in it, ten letters I think or eleven letters. Love has only four, and what are these four to symbolise? Him, me, his love for me, my love for him. Now, generally, we want his love for us. How are we to love him? So this receiving aspect of love alone seems to be still very human, you see. We are still very human. And we would rather be loved than love. This is the common, what shall we say, the cry of the human heart, you see: "Nobody loves me." This is a very common thing. Now why on earth should anybody love you? I mean, there is no logical reason why somebody should be loved, you see. The occasion when you can say nobody loves me is when you deserve to be loved and you are not loved. Now the Master does the opposite. No one here deserves his love, but he loves us. But when it comes to our loving others, as he wants us to do, we say, "Oh, he is not deserving, she is not deserving, I only love those who are deserving.' Then how can we become like him?

So becoming like Him means being like Him, loving like Him, no distinctions. He loves anybody who is there, not only before Him but not yet born perhaps too, because a love like that cannot have limitations of space and time. So he loves us before we come into existence, he loves us when we exist in his presence, and he loves us when we are out of this existence again. Not only is His love eternal, we are in some way eternal in His presence because for His love there is no death, there is no life, there is no afterlife. Therefore his love for us really proves that we too are eternal like Him. And all this living, dying business is a play of the senses, a play of the consciousness.

And all that we have to realise is, "If he can love me before I am born, I must have been there in some form for him to love me." When I am alive, of course, I am present before him for him to love me; when I am dead I must again be there for him to love me in some form or the other. So what is the continuity of me which survives the past, the present and the future? It must be that which he loves. And if I have it, what more do I need? Because He is eternal, our love for each other is eternal and all this dance/drama of meeting and parting, it is a play to awaken us to this reality. That, "Human being that you are, don't allow yourself to be clouded by your senses and your desires. Your life is not from what you consider your birth to what you consider your death. Therefore don't try futilely to compress all the pleasures of existence into this 60 to 70 years. In any case what you can do with your body is a very very gross thing compared to what love can do at its subtlest. Learn this from me," he says, and comes to teach us.

When a child is born - when you have a baby, does the baby feel it is new in its mother's hands? And does it feel that it has to get used to the mother? Or does the mother feel, "This is a new baby, I must get accustomed to the baby?" I never felt like that. You know, I felt as if I was going home to my Master. And therefore, you know, I could just go and sit with him, talk with him, no difference, right from the beginning. Other people usually take a few years to come nearer and nearer and nearer the Master. Same thing with the Master, because essentially the relationship between a master and a disciple is a love affair, at the highest level. So there should be no shyness holding back, you know, all this nonsense. So… you don't mind if I say what the conclusion is, that where there is hesitation, and all this reserve about coming to the Master, there is no love.

So when we talk of the Master and our love for the Master, at the real stage of love you should not even be conscious that you love him. That is the final stage. So we should work towards that. So you see, love really means going beyond the human figure, the human form, the human qualities.

I remember once Babuji wrote to me a letter in reply to a letter of mine where I had said, "I do not know how love can grow and grow and grow. It seems to grow without limit." I meant the love of the disciple for his Master. And he wrote back and said, "It is true that there is this enormous love and I love you too but I should not repeat this." Because love, when it is exposed, is like cutting a seed to show the life inside it. If it is cut, it is dead. So all the young people here should remember this. Why? So that at least the next generation, you know, can reestablish love as a citadel of hope, as a citadel of eternity, as a citadel of completion, of perfection, of creation. That is the first lesson. The second lesson is, love cannot change. Once we love, we love forever. It should apply to human relationships. It should apply even more to the divine relationship. Otherwise, again it is, excuse me for saying it, all over the world they say it is like French love, love bought and sold, love bartered, love bargained for. I do not agree with that term. But it is how the world looks on France.

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