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)
