Monday, Apr 05, 2010 This week’s Food for Thought – April 5, 2010

The world as a whole has forgotten the real meaning of the word love.  Love has been so abused and crucified by man that very few people know what true love is.  Just as oil is present in every part of the olive, so love permeates every part of creation.  But to define love is very difficult, for the same reason that words cannot fully describe the flavor of an orange.  You have to taste the fruit to know its flavor.  So with love.  All of you have tasted love in some form in your hearts; therefore, you know a little about what it is.  But you have not understood how to develop love, how to purify and expand it into divine love.  A spark of this divine love exists in most hearts in the beginning of life, but is usually lost, because man does not know how to cultivate it.

Many people wouldn’t think it even necessary to analyze what love is.  They recognize love as the feeling they have for their relatives, friends, and others to whom they are strongly attracted.  But there is much more to it than that.  The only way I can describe real love to you is to tell you its effect.  If you could feel even a particle of divine love, so great would be your joy—so overpowering—you could not contain it.

Think deeply about what I am telling you.  The satisfaction of love is not in the feeling itself, but in the joy that feeling brings. Love gives joy.  We love love because it gives us such intoxicating happiness.  So love is not the ultimate; the ultimate is bliss.  God is Sat-Chit-Ananda, ever-lasting, ever-conscious, ever-new bliss.  We, as souls, are individualized Sat-Chit-Ananda.  “From Joy we have come, in Joy we live and have our being, and in that sacred Joy we will one day melt.” (Taittitya Upanishad 3-6-1)  All the divine emotions—love, compassion, courage, self-sacrifice, humility—would be meaningless without joy.  Joy means exhilaration, an expression of ultimate Bliss.

Man’s experience of joy originates in the brain, in the subtle center of God consciousness that the yogis call sahasrara, or thousand-petaled lotus.  Yet the actual feeling of joy is experienced not in the head, but in the heart.  From the divine seat of God-consciousness in the brain, joy descends into the heart center and manifests there.  That joy comes from God’s bliss—the essential and ultimate attribute of Spirit.

—Paramahansa Yogananda, The Divine Romance, October 10, 1943

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