Mississippi Gulf Coast Junior College; Gulfport, Mississippi, USA

Jefferson Davis Campus
27 February 1974

Dear sisters and brothers, I wish to share with you my humble philosophy, which
is based on love. We know that there are two types of love: human love and Love
divine. In human love, what we actually try to do is to possess the many without
caring for the One, the Source. But if we do not possess the Source, then the many
cannot be of any help to us. If there is no root, then how will the tree grow? How
will we be able to claim the branches or the flowers and leaves as our very own?
With the divine Love, we go first to the One, the Source, and from there we go to
the many. We become one with the root, and then we grow into the tree, which
will manifest itself through the branches and leaves, the flowers and fruits.
Divine Love is the song of multiplicity in unity.
In human love there is demand or, at least, expectation. Very often we start
with demand and, when a higher wisdom dawns, we no longer demand, but still
we expect something from others. We convince ourselves that this expectation is
justified. Since we have done something for others— offered our love—we feel it
is quite legitimate to expect something in return.
But in divine Love there is no such thing as demand or expectation. In divine
Love we just give what we have and what we are. What we have and what we are
is dedicated service. In the human life, before we give our love, we try to discover
love in others—that is, their love for us. In the divine Life, before we give our
love to others, we try to discover Love in its reality and integrality within
ourselves. Only then are we in a position to offer love to others. At first our
satisfaction dawns when we feel that those to whom we offer our love accept it
wholeheartedly. But there is an even higher form of divine Love when we go
beyond this feeling, and give love just for the sake of self-giving. We give, and
even if our love is not accepted, we do not mind. We shall go on giving, for we are
all love, our Source is all Love.
In human love there is not only demand and expectation, but there is
something even worse: withdrawal. First we demand, then we expect. When our
expectation is not fulfilled, we sometimes try to withdraw from the person to
whom we have offered our love. In divine Love, it is never like that. With divine
Love we try to become one with the weakness, imperfection and bondage of
others. Although we have inner freedom, we use this inner freedom not to lord
it over others, but to become one, consciously one, with their imperfections. In
this way we can understand them and serve them at their own level, with a view
to transforming their imperfections.
The capacity of human love is so limited that we cannot expand ourselves and
totally embrace one another. There is bound to be a feeling of supremacy. I shall
love you, no doubt, but I wish to remain an inch higher than you. On that
condition I shall love you. The superior loves the inferior because he is satisfied
to some extent with his position in this relationship. The inferior very often loves
the superior because of his insecurity. So love binds them and gives them both
some sense of satisfaction. But in divine Love there is no such thing as superiority
and inferiority. Divine Love always gives itself freely and wholeheartedly. Divine
Love gets satisfaction only by offering itself totally and unconditionally. In divine
Love, we come to notice that the personal and the impersonal perfectly go
together. There is a balance between the two. The personal in us enters into the
vast, which is impersonal; and the impersonal in us enters into the personal to
manifest its unmanifested Reality, Divinity and Immortality. In human love, the
personal and the impersonal are two strangers; worse, they are at daggers drawn.
The personal and the impersonal at best try to reach a compromise, but this
compromise brings no satisfaction at all; in the very depth of human love, there
is always a rivalry and competition between the two. On rare occasions, the
personal says to the impersonal, which is inside the human being, “Let us
alternate our reality, our height, our wisdom, our capacity. This moment you
stand up and I shall remain seated; the next moment I shall stand up and you will
sit.”
In human love, very often the physical mind, the doubting mind, the suspecting
mind, comes to the fore. But in divine Love, we see only the loving heart,
the surrendering heart, the all-beckoning heart. The mind loves a reality because
it sees the reality according to its own understanding and vision. But the heart
loves a reality because it sees the reality in the reality’s own form. The heart
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becomes inseparably one with the reality, with the very existence of that reality,
both inner and outer. It sees the living breath of the reality in its own form and
shape; it sees the body and soul of the reality all together.
In human love, the lover and the beloved are two separate persons. The lover
is running towards the beloved and, when he reaches the beloved, he finds his
satisfaction. In divine Love, the Lover and the Beloved are one and inseparable.
In divine Love, the Lover is the Supreme and the Beloved is the Supreme. In
human love, we feel that satisfaction lies somewhere else—not within us, but in
somebody else. But in divine Love, satisfaction is found nowhere else but in
ourselves. The Lover and the Beloved are one and the same—the Supreme
dwelling within and the Supreme outside us. When we speak of our ‘self ’ as the
divine Lover or Beloved, we have to know that this is the ‘Self ’ which is both the
One and the many. This Self, the Supreme, finds its satisfaction only when it gets
a glimpse of God’s Reality, Infinity, Eternity and Immortality in the many. This
‘Self’ is the One, and it wants to see and feel its Reality in the many.
Love is duty. In our human life we see duty as something mechanical, lifeless,
forced—something thrust upon us. But in the divine life, duty is something full
of opportunity. At every second an opportunity is dawning for us to expand our
life’s consciousness, our life’s reality, our life’s delight. So in the divine life we
welcome duty, for it increases our capacity and potentiality and expands the
dream of our divine, unhorizoned Reality.
Life is the lesson of love. Love is the lesson of life. When we study life’s lesson
in our human life, the lesson is composed of fear, doubt, anxiety, worry and
frustration. But in the divine life, we see that love is the lesson not only of life,
but also for life—for the life that is everlasting, ever-illumining and ever-fulfilling.
A divine Lover is he who believes in the divine miracle. A human miracle is
something that feeds our curiosity, something that lasts for a fleeting second. But
the divine miracle is the elevation of consciousness. To raise somebody else’s
consciousness, to raise humanity’s consciousness even an iota is the true divine
miracle. The conscious help the divine Lover gives to the seeker performs this
divine miracle.
We are of God the eternal Love and we are for God the eternal Love. We are
of God the infinite Love and we are for God the infinite Love. Eternity is the
Source of the Silence-life; and Infinity is the message of the sound-life. From the
One we came and for the many we exist. This is the real message of divine Love.
We are of the One and we are for the many—the many in the One. This is the
quintessence of Love divine.