Love; The Greatest Gift

LOVE; THE GREATEST GIFT

Only those who are courageous enough, only those who are gamblers, who can risk their very life and be possessed by some unknown energy, are able to know what love is. Love is the first step towards God — hence it appears mad to those who are hung up in their heads. And because people don’t understand the whole mystery of love, because they try to understand it through the mind.

It can be understood only through the heart. Remember: all that is great is available to the heart. The heart is the door to all great values of life, to all ultimate values, and the head is only a useful mechanism, a gadget — good in the marketplace but utterly useless in a temple. And love is a temple, it is not a marketplace. If you drive love into the marketplace it is reduced into ugly sexuality. That’s what people have done; rather than raising love to God, they have reduced love into ugly, animalistic sexuality. And the strange thing is, the same people who have reduced love into an ugly phenomenon, are against sex, and are enemies of sex. And they are the people who have destroyed a tremendously potential power! Love is God and God is love. Love is a lotus hidden in the mud. The lotus is born out of mud, but you don’t condemn the lotus because it is born out of mud; you don’t call the lotus muddy, you don’t call the lotus dirty.

Love is born out of sex, and then prayer is born out of love. Higher and higher and higher one goes on soaring. There is this proverb: First sight of love, last sight of wisdom. If you ask me, I will change it a little bit. I will say: First sight of love, first sight of wisdom. But it depends how you look at it If you look at the potential of it, at the highest possibility that it can reach, then love becomes a ladder. If you look only at the mud and you are utterly blind to the future of the mud, then certainly love becomes something ugly and great antagonism arises in you. But to be antagonistic to love is to be antagonistic to God.

Once love is reduced to sexuality only, of course then the first sight of love is the last sight of wisdom. But it depends on you: why reduce it to sexuality? Why not change the base metal into gold? Why not learn the alchemy of love? Love is the greatest gift of God. Learn the art of it. Learn the song of it, the celebration of it. It is an absolute need: just as the body cannot survive without food, the soul cannot survive without love. Love is the nourishment of the soul, it is the beginning of all that is great, it is the door of the divine.

One of the great problems of life is that one believes that what he desires is good for the mere reason that he desires it. Such thinking is a fallacy and it is a broken rung on the ladder of life that will not sustain or support anyone who places his weight on it. Life is complex, and it is often very hard to know the good from the evil, because evil has a way of disguising itself as good.  We discover the deception and the truth of the situation after we have undergone a bad experience.  Hopefully, due to our lack of discrimination we learned a valuable lesson. Yet, it is amazing how so many can experience so much and yet learn so little.

Everyone in life desires to be happy.  An exception may be those who, deluded, believe they are happy in their misery. True happiness is an outgoing expression of love; a selfless giving without expecting a given return. While love is the true expression of one's self, it is not something that is sloppy or mushy; it is a quality of great strength and of great endurance.  The love of God for His human children is a love of the highest quality and of inconceivable endurance. Love is also all encompassing: it is gentleness, yet it is firmness; it is giving, yet doing so wisely; it is helping, yet not meddling; it is devotion, yet not fanaticism; it is adoration, yet not being possessive.

 Love is many things, and in its highest expression it is all things. As we evolve in consciousness we also grow in love. Love becomes an outpouring of divine qualities. Anyone wishing to use a barometer to measure his degree of development has only to gauge his own quality and quantity of love as his barometer and he will know exactly where he is on the scale of life. Many claiming to be highly developed and highly spiritual still do many unloving things to others and this shows exactly where they really are in spirituality.

The infusion of the Being through our practice of Transcendental Meditation is really the infusion of love and the infusion into us of our divine qualities.  This is love. Love as an expression of divinity does not have to be declared by anyone, because it automatically radiates from one. Now, each spoken word is an expression of love and each act is an act of love. So love is the true goal of life because love is eternal. When all else has vanished, love alone will remain in its resplendent glory. Before one can ever hope to stand erect in the light or become eternal or godlike, one must become a living expression of his own highest quality, and this is love and this is also God. Indeed love is the greatest gift, that was why Christ decided to die for us out of the love he has for us to wash away our sins

©Sunsampaul Egwu Philosopher