Human Love

Even the higher or deeper experiences do not seem to be of much value if one cannot love the Mother with the true heart.

It is a mistake to think like that. The experiences prepare the different parts of the being for loving in the right way, so that it is not the soul alone that loves. So long as they are open to ignorance and ego they cannot receive and hold the love rightly.

The action from the higher consciousness increases its intensity. However, what is the use of all that if it has no connection below with my heart that longs for love?

You might just as well say what is the use of any sadhana. For the separation of the higher consciousness from the lower, the refusal to mix their movements, e.g. love of the Divine and sex, is essential to the sadhana.

Please excuse me if I linger a little more on the topic of love, because much depends on that for the progress of my sadhana. Some parts of my being refuse to come out of their neutrality because they firmly believe that we have no love for you and you for us. The tough question is not of your love for me but of my love for you. If I have love for you why do I not feel it as before? What is responsible for this state?

It is the parts that had the vital mixture. They regard that mixed movement alone as love and when it is not active they think there is no love. The love is quiescent; that is all.

How stupid is our vital even in its ‘prudence’? It loves sensitiveness though that depresses it!

The vital loves any number of things that do it harm. It prefers the Pleasant always to the Good.

We depend very much on finding in the Mother’s ways a manifestation of her love for us. We feel we can progress only when we get it.

This demand for a physical manifestation of love must go. It is a dangerous stumbling-block in the way of sadhana. A progress made by indulgence of this demand is an insecure progress which may any moment be thrown down by the same force that produced it.

The struggle in the outer being has gone out of control. The mind is under the vital’s influence. During such circumstances, as a strategy, is it not good to satisfy the desire for the time being?

How is it you do not see that all that is ego only, the old ego. The solution is not to satisfy it but to get rid of it. If anything in your mind supports the claim, it is no wonder that the suggestions come and stop the progress. You yourself had written the clear knowledge that the divine love must be free from all these lower demands, absolute and unconditioned.

Can the suggestion of revolt come to one who loves the Divine?

If the love is absolute and complete and there have never been any vital demands connected with it the suggestion of revolt cannot come.

I have heard that many sadhikas love the Mother so much that they are ready to die for her. But if there is no physical expression of the Mother’s love for them, they can’t love her and some go so far as to revolt, weep or fast.

It is self-love that makes them do it. It is just the same kind of vital love that people have outside (loving someone for one’s own sake, not for the sake of the beloved). What is the use of that in sadhana here? It can only be an obstacle.

Often the human vital falls on an ignorant idea: if the Mother does not do this or that for me it means that she has no love for me. It has another obsession also which comes from jealousy: why so much more for others and so little or nothing for me? These seem to be stumbling-blocks for many sadhaks.

All that of course is not love, but self-love. Jealousy is only an ugly form of self-love. That is what people do not understand — they even think that demands and jealousy and wounded vanity are signs of love or at least natural attendants of it.

In the Ashram the Mother works with us first through the ordinary human love and then through the psychic love, satisfying some of our desires and demands in the beginning. For it is only so that our weak human bullock cart can proceed. But farther on when the bullocks perceive, on the way, that too great a thing called Divine Love they are frightened and fall down by the sudden shock. Then the Divine Mother showers on them the psychic love which lifts them up. And the journey is resumed. By and by, the bullocks become strong and powerful, get accustomed to the Divine Love after many a fall. Then nothing is felt as too great a thing for the rest of the journey. For the Divine Love contains everything and can stand on anything.

All that is quite correct. Even the ordinary human or the psychic love many are unable to feel or understand because it is not quite in the ordinary human way.