How Do You Define Love

Everyone in your life is your teacher, and you are a teacher to everyone in your life. Let your life be a study of love; let your life be a teaching of love.

Love is a way of living: it is your being. And even though it’s important to be thoughtful, living a life of love isn’t as much an expression of the mind as it is a living out from the deepest, most pure consciousness of our being – the Soul. Even though our hearts are expressed naturally to a degree, in order to live out from our Soul, we first have to come to know ourselves as Soul. We have to discover and experience the consciousness of pure and eternal love, joy, truth and goodness that is our real being and Self. It’s not something we have to create or become. We already are that love and truth.

Rose In essence love is beyond description because it resides in and as a part of us that is deeper than the mind. The mind is a vehicle for the expression of our Soul and the medium through which we connect and interact with the world and those around us. But in order to know our pure being we have to become liberated from that part of us that categorizes, names, explains and describes things and become immersed in pure awareness its self. The way to know love is to experience or express it. Gangaji says: "When you’re expressing love, you’re expressing God. When you’re experiencing love, you’re experiencing God."

You are Love. Your pure being is already and always infinite and eternal love, joy, truth and goodness. The reason we don’t always know or fully express these qualities of our Soul is because the sediment has been stirred up by the turbulence of the ego, thus clouding the waters of our conscious awareness and obscuring to some degree our knowing, and therefore the expression of our pure and eternal nature, the Soul.

Kindness, compassion, understanding, patience and service are all products of unconditional love. Bhakti is a Sanskrit word that means love or devotion. Sri Yukteswar Giri, the great guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, said "the deeper meaning of Bhakti is the experience of divine love through the union or merging of the wave of our pure consciousness, the Soul, with the ocean of infinite and eternal love that is God’s consciousness." I interpret that deeper divine love like a three faceted diamond. When you experience union of the love, that is your being, with the love that is God’s being, you experience three dimensions of love simultaneously. One: you experience yourself as love itself. Two: you experience God’s indescribably infinite and eternal love for you. And three: through the experience and knowing that God, through His grace, has created you out of Himself, out of His love, truth and goodness, and that He loves you totally, eternally and unconditionally, you are filled to overflowing with selfless love, devotion and gratitude to God: you experience in fact that your very being is love for God. This is Bhakti.

When it comes down to it, your beingness is the most precious, good, pure and loving thing that exists because it is the very presence of God. We are not separate from one another; we are one. Because the wave of pure love that is your being, and the wave of pure love that is my being, are arising out of the same one ocean of infinite and eternal love that is God’s omnipresence. Dedicate your life to knowing and expressing that blessedness in and as every moment of your life.

In closing I’d like to share this prayer: Dear God, Thank you for blessing me with the joy of experiencing my Self as Your love and for the conscious awareness of Your blessed loving presence. Guide me to express the tenderness, compassion, truth, love and goodness that is Your presence within me, as me, in and as every moment of my life, and to always remember that Your grace is my sufficiency in all things and all ways.