Beyond Love

Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness.  It is just like the fragrance of a flower.  Don’t search for the roots; it is not there.  Your biology is your roots; your consciousness is your flowering. – Osho

Whatever we think we mean by love is not love.  As egos we are only able to glimpse the possibility of love when we are free from attachment.  “The one you love you cannot possess,” states Tantra.  Because we are under this mass hypnosis of avidya, we operate from a basis of delusion and fear which causes us to cling to this false self-identification of ego.  Because we are not authentically ourselves we can’t truly experience love. 

Ego is the movement into separation.  The expansive I Am becomes the limited “I am this body.”  We become “skin-encapsulated.”  On a biological level we “love” another out of sexual desire.  We bond with each other because oxytocin is released in the blood.  We bond in a very limited way where the self-clinging of ego becomes pair-bonding, family-bonding, ethnic-bonding.  Spiritual love, true love however, doesn’t exclude anyone.  It is based on the recognition that there is “only one of us here.”  The Mayans have an expression for this.  Inlakesh means, “I am another you; you are another me.”  It is essentially the same as the Sanskrit Namaste. 

True love requires spiritual work, i.e. sadhana.  We can’t do this on a purely intellectual level.  We have to enter into the stream of devotion.  We have to develop a practice of meditation.  We have to love and appreciate ourselves on a soul level.  We can’t see God in another until we have accepted that God is within us as well.  Sadhana, spiritual practice is basically a means of dehypnotizing ourselves and waking up to who we truly are.  Meditation is a state of consciousness which can arise out of many diverse methods.  The method whether TM, kriya yoga, mahamudra, vipassana, contemplative prayer, ecstatic dance, etc. is just a means to help us enter into a sacred inner space. 

In the tradition of Bhakti Yoga, “The Yoga of Love,” there are different terms for different stages of love.  The first term is “bhava” which means a loving, devotional attitude.  Love begins with the intention of loving.  It begins with the cultivation of a positive attitude.  In a sense it is more conceptual than emotional; the acceptance of the inner divinity of oneself and the other, the “object” of our loving intention.  This the first stage of “conscious love.”  It has nothing to do with our notions of “falling in love” which is really a state of unconscious infatuation.  Bhakti yoga is the path of conscious love, rising rather than falling in love.  “The method and purpose of Bhakti,” said Swami Satyananda Saraswati, “is to take you away from identification with the little "I": the body-mind. The aim is to reduce personal whims, conflicts, disharmony, etc., which tend to imprison and severely limit awareness. The aim is to make the mind a perfect reflector, a perfect mirror of experience.” (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1992/djuly92/bhkyog.shtml)

“Prem” is the second term.  It means “love.”  Bhava paves the way for the more spontaneous flow of love from the heart.  Prem is the experience of bliss as one sheds the false form of ego and longs to unite with the Divine essence.  There is wonderful mantra “aham Prema” which means “I am love.”  Prem is the awakening to our essential nature as loving awareness.  The universe, the multiverse, is the evolving product of the outflow of love from its formless essence.   Love is the essence of everything that exists.  As we willingly shed our ego defenses it is revealed as our own Self.

Bhakti is the flowering of love.  It is the state of devotion wherein the “little I” is completely transcended.  As Swamiji says, “. . . in bhakti the 'I' is lost; there is only 'you'. That state of self-awareness is known as bhakti.”  Love in all of its forms helps to disintegrate the cage of ego that we have come to live in.  With the flowering of Bhakti there is no cage left, no separate self, only Love.  (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1995/bmarch95/say295.shtml)