Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions,” said Sri Yukteswar. “Pure divine love, on the other hand, is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.”
There is a vast difference between human emotions and Divine love. Where did that love go if you had a love partner or were married and that partner left you? Paramahansa Yogananda encouraged us to pour kindness and love on the wrongdoer. It is better to remember that you loved that person unconditionally than to be remembered as one who was hateful.
Using meditation techniques allows us to know who we are and lets us dive into the calm consciousness of the soul. It will give us the sense of the perfect being that we ARE (when we break through), and the more we feel we ‘are,’ the more we can express those soul qualities.
A soul quality of pure Divine love delivers joy. Recognizing the Divine Consciousness that we ARE (most are overwhelmed by monkey mind dictates not reaching that state) is the criterion that answers all questions. An elevated state of consciousness helps to serve others since, from within, love expands to all.
Human Love vs Pure Divine Love
Finding peace and love inside oneself and sharing that vibe with those you encounter is joyful. However, only some people get to keep that state and know what true love is. Words are insufficient to describe the taste of vanilla ice cream; you have to taste the ice cream to understand its flavor. Experiencing Divine love is similar.
Divine love unobstructed by ego consciousness is a free expression of love. When a soul is filtered by confining, constricted ego consciousness, that higher identification needs work. Meditation opens that blockage to openness without a filter on the soul. When the ego steps in, guess what? God steps out.
Human Love
On the other hand, human love can be fickle and run off the rails. How many have promised in their wedding vows, “I will love you forever,” yet the divorce rate in the U.S. exceeds 50%. That kind of love is not love.
If one discovers that their mate slept with someone else, their groomed ego feels violated. It might have been just a temporary weakness in your mate’s makeup. But what did you first adore? Someone who felt sensitive to you and who holds you in their heart.
They might have been sensitive to a friend who didn’t realize the overall circumstances, and the breaks in the car didn’t work when it came to stopping. Holding a grudge instead of holding the door open for your mate will toss you into hell for a long time.
Those associating love as this guy/gal is mine belongs to me without connection to a kind of Divine love and are vulnerable to pain. There are human weaknesses that flair up and surface in their partner that rile their pre-programmed brain thoughts. Doubts, anger, tempers, resentments, and lousy behavior surface, and their immature love is on the skids.
Divine love has an inexhaustible timeline. This harmonic love unites and binds those who tune into that isness identification. Those who achieve this love force become in harmony with others, nature, and God’s omnipresence.
When you love God with pure divine love, without reserve, when you realize that He resides in all nature and people, then He fills you with awareness, impartially, and forgiveness. Then true love can begin. Love forgives; love sees God in everyone and everything.
The Free Choice Playground
We are here because the love of God gives us a playground to work out our free will and desires. Love is an energy that science doesn’t write about; it cannot be named.
With love, you feel better about yourself. Many tell us that, as one expands beyond what one was taught, new energies will emerge because of and with love-inspired choices.
Even though love is invisible, you can sense it and feel it; it is one of the BIGGEST unseen forces! We arrived on this Earth to learn about love. Here, we can enter this schoolhouse of learning. It might eventually open a door within some of us to better love, know God as pure Divine Love, and see His creation in a better light.
Sensual Physical Love and Happiness
If it’s just physical satisfaction, when taking it to extremes, that damages relationships. Seeking only lust and appeasement can ruin happiness since life is more than a craving tumble into constant sensuality.
Curiosity and emotion prevail in all humans, tempting them to disobey God’s commands. Life masters tell us that they thereby lose their sense of self-control and drift away from purity and a Divine sense of bliss.
Paramahansa Yogananda teaches that “married couples who desire children should confine their attention during the act of mating to its creative purpose. To avoid many sufferings, humanity should not see sex communion for its own sake”
Flirting with thinking that sexual intimacy is real love, as a dominant viewpoint, might be narrow thinking considering feedback given from many realized masters. “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:34–35). Channelers, as well as those with near-death experiences, communicate that same awareness.
Modifying our body’s senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch is worthwhile. The wrong use of the sex force has negative consequences.
Seeking God In Your Partner
One should, instead, strive to see God in their partner as best they can. Living in harmony with body, mind, and soul with the responsibilities daily life imposes as an experience is fulfilling. It should lead to a loving friendship with someone who has their back forever.
Finding and having someone helpful, exercising their strengths to make life better for their mate, especially when you have similar interests with your mate, is a blessed lofty soul. Right-action talks and selfish inaction take a negative toll. In my blue-collar world, we say, “action talks, bullshit walks.”
One can learn that the connection between spirit and individual life is not just physical. Practicing unselfishness and thinking of others first are genuine magnets for a loving friendship.
Traits and Efforts Talk
If any traits in your mate raise a distaste and you sense a less loving disposition, something is triggering something inside you that needs attention. Those thoughts need the elimination of that prejudice and an attitude adjustment.
Your example of loving yourself and working on your spiritual growth provides answers and will inspire the same in others. Remediation then comes to the rescue and self-purification results.
One’s spiritual efforts, respect for one’s mate, self-discipline, study, and activities to relieve another’s burdens make sailing smoother. Maintaining one’s physical attractiveness with proper diet and exercise is also essential since your body is a temple of the soul. However, the first focus needs to be on your soul. Guess what? Your mate was and is first attracted to your soul.
The Love Mate As Friend
Looking forward to interacting and sharing one’s company with your mate is satisfying. Not everyone can conquer their animal lust for sex, but for those that do, having a friend mate is desirable.
If your relationship is as sexual intimacy or as a loving celibate, look forward to sharing your interests, company, and happiness. Loving friendship is joyful. Good times flourish when each one serves the other, wishing the other the highest attainment, divine joy, and happiness.
When your love relationship has changed from intimacy to a loving friendship, it can be best to have separate rooms. If your partner is not as meditative as you are, you’ll have more time for that activity. Also, why share a bed where you smell their farts?
Arrange your bedroom living space to your liking. Don’t complicate things. Loving your partner as an intimate friend is a harmonious, high-plane way to live experience and can bring joyful results. Your true love is your Polestar Creator, Mother, Friend, and Beloved God. When you get to the other side, you may not want your desires pulling you back to another Earth rodeo go around. Seek renunciation: https://everhols.com/renunciation/
Polestar Of My Life: I have made Thee Polestar of my life. Though my sea is dark and my stars are gone, I still see the path through Thy mercy (a short cosmic chant written by Paramahansa Yogananda).
Animals’ main priorities are food, shelter, and procreation. Humans share the same desires for well-being; however, we have free will. The free will to enter a higher state of consciousness can be achieved by a scientific-focused concentration technique called meditation (in my opinion, Yogananda’s Kria Yoga as taught in SRF https://yogananda.org fills that request far better than other practices I’ve tried).
A pure diving love affirmation that Paramahansa Yogananda gives is, “As I radiate love and goodwill to others, I will open the channel for God’s love to come to me. Divine love is the magnet that draws to me all good.”
The Basic Truth About Love
The Divine light of love will serve as a beacon, illuminating the path ahead. Obstacles in relationships arise when we neglect to recognize the Divine presence within ourselves, others, and the situational scenario of the moment. By embracing an innate purity, possibility, and power in all things, we can better align our senses with the ultimate positive potential of almost any circumstance.
This alignment allows us to see the Divine in everyone, regardless of their appearance or actions, and to embrace our fullness. Maintaining an open and receptive attitude enables us to navigate life’s challenges with fluidity, grace, and harmony in all our relationships and situations.
Where is the Love? In answer to that question, I found this cosmic chant:
“Spirit is I, and I am Spirit. Wake up and know that you and God are one. God is the indwelling Self of man and the sole Life of the whole universe.”
Why The Way You Focus On Sex Might Be A Big Problem
The Creator of the universe, in Genesis, downloaded his suggestions. Genesis is deeply symbolic, especially the part about Adam and Eve and the tree that appeared in the Garden of Eden. They were instructed they could eat the fruit that was all around in the garden, but not the fruit of the tree that was in the middle of the Garden of Eden. “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die” Genesis 3:2-3.
The tree in the middle of the garden symbolizes a human being. Viewed upside down, that tree represents the human spinal cord. The roots of the tree symbolize man’s hair, and the branches of the tree are auditory and divergent nervous systems.
So, here, the Creator of the Universe is saying there are a lot of enjoyable fruits that man can look at, eat, use, taste, smell, touch, and use to their delight for enjoyment, except sex. Sex was that apple in the middle of the garden. In the Garden of Eden, we could take vacations, travel wherever we want, enjoy the world’s creations, the arts, music, pastime hikes, or anything we want as long as we don’t eat the apple. The Creator wanted us to enjoy all human sensibilities except one.
Eat the apple? A coiled snake in the spinal cord stimulates the sex nerves. Affected by the sex impulse, Adam and Eve were bowled over and could no longer enjoy the bliss of that perfect garden.
Pure Love OR That Talking Snake Promising Duality
That talking snake promised Eve the knowledge of “good and evil,” or dualistic oppositional experiences. Adam and Eve ate the apple. They fell, and almost all their children fell into the same trap.
There is a personal responsibility to restore oneself to the purity that the Creator envisioned for all of his children. Few follow that path, yet that door is open to all. The road is heading upward as long as one is not tricked into serpentine animal impulses. Using sex to bring one of the Creator’s humans into this world is one thing; anything else is bowing down to the serpents.
Paramahansa Yogananda said that his father slept with his mother only once a year to bring a new soul into this world. He had 8 children, 4 sons and 4 daughters.
The Creator first made the divine man. There may be others whose divine presence is constant in the omnipresent single eye on the forehead. “When the eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light,” said Mary’s son Jesus.
Third Eye Focus and Kria
Focusing one’s will on that third eye was lost when man began eating those apples. Those who walk the road to the Creator’s wish will eventually meet a lifetime of epic bliss.
A scientific approach to reaching this awareness is breathing up the spine into the third eye. It is the most advanced training method I have found and taught at yogananda.org. This scientific-based practice is called Kria Yoga, and it is more fully explained at https://everhols.com. Kriya Yoga practice is a scientific way to grow full self-control and realize one’s relationship with the Creator. It calms a floating dualistic turmoil, eventually replacing it with a divine inner certainty.
To paraphrase my mentor, we need to manifest God’s presence within us because we are a Divine part of Him. Because of that, we can’t find lasting satisfaction in anything material. Without contentment in God, as we have observed in others and ourselves, we will not win contentment from anything else.
“He loves God best who acts rightly. According to the laws of true love (stated succinctly, if crudely, in the adage, ‘if you love me, love my dog’), the yogi, where one renounces worldly desires and pursues spiritual goals, in his love for God also loves the action which God has imposed on him. He performs his dutiful and meditative activities joyously, desirelessly, solely to please Him whom he loves. He, indeed, is the true – ideal – yogi, where one renounces worldly desires and pursues spiritual goals.” **
** God Talks With Arjuna, The Bhagavad Gita commentary by Paramahansa Yogananda, chapter 6
Note: Most “quotes” are statements published by SRF from Paramahansa Yogananda (unless otherwise noted).
