WITHDRAWING AND UNITING
WITH SOURCE,
THROUGH
FOUR FUNCTIONS OF THE MIND
EMOTION
Click here for Union through Emotion
Opening to the divine
through
love and affection.
We can liberate consciousness through love and devotion.
Intense love and affection can flow between our own
consciousness and the Lord. Christs and Krishnas,
the Prophets and Sages of every country are ongoing
responses to the same infinite love and beauty. God
responds to prayers, as Mother, Father, Friend, Beloved
or Child, according to the devotee's approach. With
time and practice, emotions mature and we free ourselves
from our existential condition.
CLICK HERE FOR SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
"What is it that makes the atoms unite with
atoms, molecules with molecules, and causes planets
to fly towards each other?
What is it that attracts man to man, man to woman,
woman to man, and animals to animals, drawing the
whole universe, as it were, towards one center? It's
what is called love. Its manifestation from the lowest
atom to the highest being: omnipotent, all pervading
is this love. What manifests as attraction in the
sentient and the insentient, in the particular and
in the universal, is the love of God. It's the one
motive power in the universe. Under the impetus of
love, Christ gives his life for humanity, Buddha for
an animal, the mother for the child, the husband for
the wife. Under the impetus of love men give their
lives for their country, and strange to say, under
the impetus of love, the thief steals, the murderer
murders. The spirit is the same, but the manifestation
is different."
"Temples or churches, books or forms, are simply
the kindergarten of religion, to make the spiritual
child strong enough to take higher steps;
and these first steps are necessary if he wants religion.
With the thirst, the longing for God, comes real devotion,
real Bhakti. Who has the longing? That's the question.
Religion isn't in doctrines, dogmas, nor intellectual
argumentation; it's being and becoming, it's realization.
We hear so many talking about God and the soul, and
all the mysteries of the universe, but if you take
them one by one, and ask them, "Have you realized
God? Have you seen your Soul?"-how many can say
they have? And yet they're all fighting with one another!"
The Way of the Saint
Union through Emotion
Three Tests of Love
The first test of love
is that it knows no bargaining.
So long as you see a man love another to get something
from him, know that isn't love; it's shop-keeping.
Wherever there's any question of buying and selling,
it's not love. So, when a man prays to God, "Give
me this, and give me that", it's not love. How
can it be? I offer you a prayer, and you give me something
in return; that's mere shop-keeping.
The second test
is that love knows no fear.
So long as man thinks of God as a Being sitting above
the clouds, with rewards in one hand and punishments
in the other, there can't be love.
Can you frighten one into love? Does the lamb love
the lion; the mouse, the cat; the slave, the master?
Slaves sometimes simulate love, but is it love? Where
do you ever see love in fear? It's always a sham.
Love, never comes with the idea of fear. Think of
a young mother in the street: if a dog barks, she
flees to the nearest house. The next day she's in
the street with her child, and suppose a lion rushes
the child, where will be her position? At the mouth
of the lion, protecting her child. Love conquered
all her fear.
So also in love of God. Who cares whether God is
a rewarder or a punisher? That's not the thought of
a lover.
Think of a judge when he comes home. What does his
wife see? Not a judge, or a rewarder or punisher,
but her husband, her love. What do his children see?
Their loving father, not the punisher or rewarder.
So the children of God never see a punisher or a rewarder.
It's only people who have never tasted of love that
fear and quake.
The third is a still higher test.
Love is always the highest ideal.
When one has passed through the first two stages,
has thrown off all shop-keeping, and all fear, one
begins to realize that love is always the highest
ideal.
How many times we've seen a beautiful woman loving
an ugly man? How many times we've seem a handsome
man loving an ugly woman! What's the attraction? Lookers-on
only see the ugly man or the ugly woman, but to the
lover, the beloved is the most beautiful being that
ever existed.
How is it? The woman who loves the ugly man takes,
as it were, the ideal of beauty which is in her own
mind, and projects it on the ugly man;
and what she worships and loves isn't the ugly man,
but her own ideal. That man is, as it were, only the
suggestion, and upon that suggestion she throws her
own ideal, and covers it; and it becomes her object
of worship. Now, this applies to every case of love.
Many of us have very ordinary looking brothers or
sisters; yet the very idea of their being brothers
or sisters makes them beautiful to us.
The philosophy in the background is that each one
projects his own ideal and worships that.
This external world is only the world of suggestion.
All that we see, we project out of our own minds.
A grain of sand gets washed into the shell of an oyster
and irritates it. The irritation produces a secretion
in the oyster, which covers the grain of sand and
the beautiful pearl is the result. Similarly, external
things furnish us with suggestions, over which we
project our own ideals and make our objects. The wicked
see this world as a hell, and the good as a heaven.
Lovers see this world as full of love, and haters
as full of hatred; fighters see nothing but strife,
and the peaceful nothing but peace. The perfect man
sees nothing but God. So we always worship our highest
ideal, and when we've reached the point, when we love
the ideal as the ideal, all arguments and doubts vanish
for ever.
Thus we come to what's called supreme devotion, in
which forms and symbols fall off.
One who's reached that can't belong to any sect, for
all sects are in him. To what shall he belong? All
churches and temples are in him. Where is the church
big enough for him? Such a man can't bind himself
down to limited forms. Where is the limit for unlimited
love, with which he's become one?
The true lovers of God want to become mad, inebriated
with the love of God, to become "God-intoxicated."
They want to drink of the cup of love which has been
prepared by the saints and sages of every religion,
who've poured their heart's blood into it, and in
which have been concentrated all the hopes of those
who have loved God without seeking reward, who wanted
love for itself only. The reward of love is love,
and what a reward it is! It's the only thing that
takes off all sorrows, the only cup, by the drinking
of which this disease of the world vanishes. Man becomes
divinely mad and forgets he is man.
Lastly, we find that all these various systems, in
the end, converge to one point, perfect union.
We always begin as dualists. God is a separate Being,
and I'm a separate being. Love comes between, and
man begins to approach God, and God, as it were, begins
to approach man. Man takes up all the various relationships
of life, as father, mother, friend, or lover; and
the last point is reached when he becomes one with
the object of worship. "I am you, and you are
I; and worshipping you, I worship myself; and in worshipping
myself, I worship you." There we find the highest
culmination of that with which man begins.
At the beginning it was love for the self, but the
claims of the little self made love selfish; at the
end came the full blaze of light, when that self had
become the Infinite.
That God who at first was a Being somewhere, became
resolved, as it were, into Infinite Love. Man himself
was also transformed. He was approaching God, he was
throwing off the vain desires, of which he was full
before. Along with desires vanished selfishness, and,
at the apex, he found that Love, Lover, and Beloved
were One.
