What is Love?
There are two forms of love: Non-dual Divine Love and dual human love.
Non-dual Divine Love is the love of our inherent Consciousness for our personality.
Consciousness allows the personality to fully be what it wants to be and accepts it for what it is. When the personality itself demonstrates similar disposition with other living beings, the personality graduates to Divine Love.
Divine Love is a force that allows one to nip hatred in the bud.
To divinely love is to see greatness in another.
To divinely love is to consciously ignore the limitations in another.
To divinely love is to stop ‘othering’ in every possible way.
One pathway to develop divine love is to meditate regularly. Meditation deepens contentment as well as love. Love grows when one grows in silence. When two people get into silence together, love grows between them.
Meditation is a useful but not sufficient condition for Divine Love. Divine Love develops when Grace purifies the aspirant to a point that the various impediments to Love are cleared away. One may say that meditation can activate grace but technically speaking, Grace is an independent impulse of the Divine and no human activity can necessarily draw it out from the Divine.
Human love is one sense lower than Divine Love and in another sense equal to it. Divine Love is a spiritual accomplishment whereas human love is spontaneous.
Human love is dependent on finding some or the other level of resonance with another’s personality. Typically human love is followed by its opposite – human hate and its many variations like resentment, bitterness, jealousy, envy, misplaced anger and the like.
Human love insists upon equality of giving and receiving whereas Divine Love is unconditional.
One shouldn’t try to bypass human love and its insistence of equality in giving and receiving in the quest for divine love. That would amount to to forcing one’s hand in vain. One should gradually grow over a period of years else the demonstrated Divine Love would in reality be fake and contrived.
While one is not stationed in Divine Love, one should at least explore human love. At the end of the day, human love is not the antithesis of divine love but its initial condition. Love is a spectrum spanning from extremely limited love of a narcissist for another on one hand to human love in the middle to Divine Love at the right of the spectrum.
Human love is rooted in attachment, whereas Divine Love is rooted in detachment. Some ascetic traditions require giving up of human love in order to be free of attachment. And yet, it may not be a good idea because it is possible to deepen human love within the human relational framework without becoming hostage to the associated attachment. In fact, the relational domain is the very training ground for such evolution, hence no point in giving up the domain altogether.
A parents love for the child is human love tending towards Divine Love. It has relatively lesser conditionality involved. However, owing to the attribute of attachment, parental love can’t take the full leap into Divine Love. An enlightened Guru’s love for his disciple (and everybody else) is a classic case of human love turning into Divine Love. It is free of the attributes of conditionality as well as attachment. A disciple’s love for Guru may not necessarily be Divine Love yet until the disciple gets enlightened.
The ongoing struggle in life is our inability to maintain love in the face of lack of resonance with another, judgement of another and unfair treatment coming to us from another. It takes ongoing discipline to come from love when love is not naturally coming from within. This discipline can yield fantastic dividends in both personal and professional life.
Being disappointed in another is a sure way to lose the person and his or her limited love for us too. To stay above judgement, resentment and anger particularly in close relationships requires one to marshall one’s pure heart again and again and again and again. Ongoing forgiveness (though extraordinarily difficult) combined with spiritual sadhana over a period of few years or decades is what it takes to master this law of love.
