How to Cultivate Divine Love:
by Paramhansa YOGAnanda

There is a Power that will light your way to Health, Happiness, Peace and Success, if you will but turn towards that Light.

God is Sat-Chid-Ananda, ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss.   We, as Soul, are individualized Sat-Chit-Ananda.    “From JOY we come, in JOY we live, and have our being, and in that sacred JOY, we will one day melt again.”  (From Taittririya Upnisad)

A talk given at Self-Realization Fellowship, Hollywood California, Oct 10, 1943)

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 Olive, so Love permeates in every part of creation.  But to define Love is very difficult, for the same reason that the 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 bit about what it is.   But you have not understood, how to develop Love, how to purify and expand 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 is 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 than that.  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 even 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 such an intoxicating happiness.  So Love is not the ultimate, the ultimate is Bliss!

God is Sat-Chid-Ananda, ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss.   We, as Soul, are individualized Sat-Chit-Ananda.    “From JOY we come, in JOY we live, and have our being, and in that sacred JOY, we will one day melt again.”  (From Taittririya Upnisad)

All the Divine emotions – Love, compassion, courage, self-sacrifice, humility – would be meaning less without JOY.  JOY meaning exhilaration, an expression of ultimate Bliss. 

Man’s experience of JOY originates in the brain, in the subtle center of God-consciousness that the Yogies call Sahastrara , or thousand-petaled lotus.  Yet the actual feeling of JOY, not experienced in the head, but in the heart.  From the divine seat of God-consciousness in the brain, JOY descends into the heart center, (The Anahat Chakra, the subtle dorsal center, the seat of feelings.)  and manifests there.  That JOY comes from God’s Bliss – the essential and ultimate attribute of Spirit. 

Trough JOY, may be born in the conjunction with certain outer conditions, it is not subject to conditions; it often manifests without any material cause.  Sometimes you wake up in the morning “walking on air” with JOY, and you do not know why.  And when you sit in the silence of deep Meditation, JOY bubbles from within, roused by no other stimulus.  The JOY of Meditation is overwhelming.   Those who have not gone into the silence of true Meditation do not know the real JOY is.

We feel much happiness in the satisfaction of a desire; but in the youth we often feel in the heart a sudden happiness that comes as it from nowhere. JOY expresses itself under certain conditions.  Thus, when someone receives a thousand dollars and exclaims, “How happy I am!” the condition of having received thousand dollars has merely served as pickaxe, refreshing a fountain of JOY from the hidden treasure of Bliss within.  So in human experience, certain events are usually required to bring forth JOY itself is the perennial native state of the Soul.  Love also is native state of the Soul, but is secondary to JOY; there could be no Love without JOY. Can you think of Love without JOY?   No. JOY attends Love. When we speak of the misery of unrequited Love, we are talking about unfulfilled longing. The actual experience of Love is always accompanied by JOY.   (To be continued …)

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