Universal Love
Human love is selfish. It can turn
into hatred and enmity. We hear occasionally of life long friendship turning
sour and bitter. Love is incapable of becoming anything other than love. It is
incorruptible as it is Ananda received by the Soul behind the
heart.
People who fall in love used to think that their love is divine
love. Divine love is defined as love of the divine. It has nothing to do with
the love of one human being for another. The Bhagavat Gita calls for surrender
of the ego. It calls the dissolution of ego as Brahma nirvananam. When the ego
dissolves, the Psychic Being emerges.
The Psychic Being is the evolving
soul, a deputy of Jivatma in evolution. Its widest reach is the whole universe.
Surrender is its native attitude and its one emotion is Love. It is universal
love capable of spreading all over the universe. The love of the psychic is a
vibration of the universe. In bhakti yoga the psychic being comes forward. It
can lead to moksha or to Supermind, depending how we choose.
Once Sri
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was walking towards the riverbank. Suddenly he felt a
whip lash on his back. Turning around, he saw someone whipping his bull. Love is
a universal vibration. In theory, all acts are universal. An act, here the act
of beating the animal, is universal. We do not feel it, as we are closed to the
universal plane. Love, the truly divine Love, when it is born in the human
vessel, opens his entire being down to his physical body to the plane of the
universe. So, he is able to receive the vibrations he is open to. The subtle
knowledge, the subtle power of infinite variety in the different worlds – planes
– is known to our ancestors. One of them is what is called in the massive,
pregnant Sanskrit phrase prakriti laya, a trance of the body from which the JIVA
can go out for centuries and return safely, provided the body is kept intact
during the period when the soul is journeying
outside.