LOVE and HAPPINESS

There is nothing that promotes happiness more readily and more completely than love.  But this begs the question, “What is love?”  We all might answer, “Sure, I know what love is.”

The truth is very few have any idea about love.  There are instances where we might briefly experience pure, selfless love such as for our dog or cat or children while they are still young, cute and innocent.  But for the most part, few of us experience any love at all in our wanderings on this earth.  It is common to go an entire day and never feel any love.  Weeks, months and years go by and we do not feel any selfless love even a single time.

It is because of this that the world is in such a mess today.  There is no love.  Where love is absent, so too are kindness, patience, compassion, forgiveness and mercy.  If there were some way to bring love back into the hearts of the people on this planet, all of our problems would be solved. 

Love is the only thing that gives any meaning to life.  Without love, our days are filled with monochrome, dull, gray and lifeless hours.  Sleep is our only respite from this.  Without love, there can be no joy – no innocence – no lightness of being – no playfulness – no wonderment.  A world without love is a hell world. 

Healing love is selfless love.  This is the kind of love that is given without expectation of anything in return.  This can be love for others, Nature or God.  Feeling pure selfless love is the best way to remove and dissolve our emotional and mental blocks and neurosis.  Amma comments on this:

"The Path of Bhakti teaches love. First, you develop one-pointed love towards God. When that love becomes the center of your life and as the devotional practices become more and more intense, your vision changes. You come to understand that God dwells as Pure Consciousness in all beings, including you. As this experience becomes stronger and stronger, the love in you also grows until at last you become That. The love within you expands and embraces the entire universe with all its beings. You become the personification of Love. This Love removes all dryness from you. This Love is the best cure for all emotional blocks and for all negative feelings.”  Amma, Awaken Children, vol. 4

This will also be true, not only as love for the Beloved, but as love for others, Nature and the entire universe.

We are born with an innate ability to love as love is our true nature.  However, the world soon beats it out of us by teaching us to be self-centered as is the rest of the world.  A few souls see through this and are able to overcome the programming, brainwashing and domestication that all of us must endure.  The world teaches us to get ours before someone else gets it; competition not cooperation; we are all separate.  The mantra is, “It’s all about me.”

This me-ness leads to misery and suffering.  First of all, it separates us from everyone and everything.  We are not able to experience closeness with anyone, God or the universe. It is like locking ourselves in a prison with bars that are made from our likes and dislikes.

The sum of our likes and dislikes which are our desires and fears, is what we call the ego. 

To be truly happy, we will want to rekindle the dormant spark of love in our own heart and fan it with willful practice until it becomes a roaring bonfire.  Unless love roars to life in our hearts, happiness will continue to elude us and our days will be filled with a living death.   Jesus comments on this state which affects most everyone:

To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.   Luke 9:59-60