Human love or rather to love a human being in a true and divine way is indeed the most difficult of all forms that Love may take. To love God is easier since He has no expectations and His Love is always unconditional and eternal, untainted by ego and desires, unaffected by the vagaries of Time or the distances of Space. He is the constant giver and if He seems to sometimes play the role of receiver it is by way of concession to human nature least we feel merely passive recipients and hence our joy be diminished by half. In fact, being the very Source of Love, it is purest and the most satisfying form of love. Loving an animal is also easy because animals do not bring in ego and are generally faithful. However, man is primarily the giver and his giving is richly rewarded by the simplicity of animal love that knows no crookedness or deceptions to which human love is so prone. Yet the final testing ground of love is not man’s love for God but love for man.
The paradox is that we cannot truly love man without going deep into the heart of Divine Love. That is why the Guru’s Love for the disciple or the Avatar’s Love for humanity is the highest in terms of quality. Therefore, Man must first discover the Source of Love which he can only by loving the Divine and by becoming one with Him. But once identified with this love in his own depths man must turn towards the earth and share it with all who are brought in contact with him through destiny. Else even his love for God remains incomplete if it does not universalise and spreads to his fellow humans and indeed the whole creation.
But until one can do that is one to abandon all other forms of love? Then one would abandon the very raw material that needs to be transmuted. Rather one has to love human beings in a more and more true way, without expectations, unselfishly, with a sense of giving rather than wanting, with kind generosity and wideness, with the strength that forgives easily and ignoring the real or unreal defects of others points only towards all that is beautiful and true, encouraging always the true movements, always full of care and tenderness. It is a love whose mainstay is tyaga and tapasya.
This comes rather easily to those with a developed psychic or else those with a general sattwic turn of mind and noble temperament. But those who live in the vital and with crude feelings it is a long and hard way to go before love can be truly born. In them love remains in the womb of darkness and is only indirectly reflected through egoistic feelings of possession, distortions of jealousy and hate and all the rest that make love wear such ugly masks. For this stage of humanity, the way forward is to increase the sattwic element, not to be neglectful of one’s duty towards those who depend upon us, to live reasonably and in moderation, subordinating the desire and ego to a life governed by the Shastra, the law of right living as enunciated by the wise ones.
