In the Mother's Light

Love

THERE is nothing in the art and literature of the world so moving, so inspiring and so exalting as the expression of man's love for the Divine. The soul's beauty and sweetness are, as it were, distilled into the love-lyrics of the mystics, and no human relation has ever reached the depth, the amplitude, the consuming intensity of passion which characterise the relation between the human soul and its eternal Beloved. Life becomes a Paradise, and even its crosses are transmuted into crowns by the magic of this love. Poverty, starvation, suffering slander, persecution, all tend but to feed the soul's sacred fire of love which burns brighter and brighter as it leaps up towards its sempiternal source. The incredible sacrifices that love makes with a beaming smile of unstinted joy, the unfailing and clearsighted faith and trust that it exhibits in the midst of defeat and desolation, should be evidence enough, even to a sceptic and a materialist, of the reality of its passion and the truth of its spiritual vision. Even a half-awakening of this love elicits the divine qualities of tenderness, compassion, forgiveness and forbearance, patience and endurance, equality and selflessness which nothing else in life can inspire and induce to an equal extent No materialist creed can ever hope to make out of common clay a St. Paul or a St. Francis, a Tulsidas, a Mirabai, or a Suso. The power that produces this miracle is no illusion or fiction; rather it is a pitiable self-delusion in modern man, enclosed in the dim cell of his reason, to deny the eternal Fount above and swear by the temporal waters on which he is so helplessly tossed.

Psychic Love

The most sincere and poignant expression of love for the Divine is essentially psychic. It is the soul in man that alone can pierce through the veil of appearances and deliver itself to the Divine with the unreserved self-abandon of an absolute

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love. Neither the mind nor the surface heart of fugitive emotions can have that passionate seeking and aspiration, that self-effacing surrender, which we find in a Chaitanya or a St. Catherine of Genoa. The hungering physical, the craving vital, the straining and clinging emotional, and the groping mental parts of man are constitutionally incapable of concentrating on the Divine and making Him the sole object of their pursuit, unless the soul has awakened and infused its fire-passion into them. The soul is made of love and joy, and it is not by any effort or outer influence, but by an innate, spontaneous urge that it turns to the Divine and offers itself to Him. It is the central being in man, embodying the central truth and purpose of his existence : the union with and the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. But this truth and purpose are realised by love and by nothing else—love which is, in Dante's words,

The increate perpetual thirst that draws

Towards the realms of God's own form...¹

In some of the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother this psychic love finds an exquisitely sweet and melting expression :

"Like a flame that burns in silence, like a perfume that rises straight upward without wavering, my love goes to Thee, and like the child who does not reason and has no care, I trust myself to Thee that Thy Will may be done, that Thy Light may manifest, Thy Peace radiate. Thy Love cover the world. When Thou wiliest I shall be in Thee, Thyself, and there shall be no more any distinction; I await that blessed hour without impatience of any kind, letting myself flow irresistibly toward it as a peaceful stream flows toward the boundless ocean.” ²

"O my divine Master, my love aspires after Thee more intensely than ever; let me be Thy living love in the world and nothing but that! May all egoism, all limitations, all obscurity disappear;

¹Paradiso, Canto I.

² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, Dec. 7, 1912.

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may my consciousness be identified with Thy Consciousness, so that Thou alone mayst be the will acting through this fragile and transient instrument.

"O my sweet Master, with what an ardour my love aspires for Thee!

"Grant that I may be only Thy divine Love, and that in everything this Love may awake powerful and victorious.

"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace...”¹

Though we have cited these two Prayers as an illustration of the psychic love, we can already discern in them something transcending it, some wider, mightier, sovereign Love, occupying the Mother's consciousness, shaping, stimulating and transmuting her psychic love into its own image and pouring out upon the world to redeem and illumine it. Let us quote another Prayer in which this process of dynamic union between the psychic love and the Divine's Love is more elaborately depicted:

"O Lord, Thou of whom I would be constantly conscious and whom I would realise in the smallest cells of my being. Thou whom I would know as myself and see manifested in all things. Thou who art the sole reality, the sole reason and the sole aim of existence, grant that my love for Thee may go on increasing incessantly, so that I may become all love. Thy very Love, and that being Thy Love, I may unite integrally with Thee. May this love become more and more intense, complete, luminous, powerful; may this love be an irresistible élan towards Thee, an invincible means to manifest Thee. May all in this being become pure love, profound, disinterested, divine, from the unfathomable depths to the outermost substance. May the God in form, who is manifesting in this aggregate, be wholly moulded of Thy complete and sublime Love, that Love which is at once the source and the realisation of all knowledge; may the thought be clarified., classified, enlightened, transformed by Thy Love; may all the forces of my life, solely

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 9, 1914.

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penetrated and moulded by Thy Love, become irresistible purity and constant energy, power and rectitude...and may this body, becoming a burning brazier, radiate Thy divine, impersonal, sublime and calm Love through all its pores... May the brain be reconstituted by Thy Love. Finally, may Thy Love overflow, inundate, penetrate, transfigure, regenerate, animate everything with the power, splendour, sweetness and force which are its very nature. In Thy Love is peace, in Thy Love is joy, in Thy Love is the sovereign lever of work for Thy servitor.

"Thy Love is vaster than the universe and more enduring than the ages; it is infinite and eternal, it is Thyself. And it is Thyself that I would be and that I am, since such is Thy Law and such Thy Will.”¹

This important Prayer foreshadows in some detail the working of the Divine Love in the Mother's being for enlightening and transforming her thought, reconstituting her brain, moulding her life-forces and making her body radiate "Thy divine, impersonal, sublime and calm Love through all its pores." The working continues, the transition is effected, and the Sun of the divine Love blazes forth at last against throbbing, incandescent background of a pure psychic consciousness. This rapturous union of the two loves, the psychic and the Divine, is beautifully brought out in the Prayer of 3ist May, 1914 :—

"If it is a sweetness to be Thy divine Love at work in the world, it is as great a sweetness to be the aspiration which rises towards that infinite Love. And to be able to change thus, to be successively, almost simultaneously, that which receives and that which gives, that which transfigures and that which is transfigured, to be identified with the sorrowful darkness as with the all-powerful splendour, and, in this double identification, to discover the secret of Thy sovereign oneness, is it not a way of expressing, of fulfilling Thy supreme Will?”

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 23, 1914

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Divine Love

What is Divine Love ? What is it in its essence and in manifestation? Can a human Being incarnate it in its purity and radiate it in the world ? Does it consist only of delight and sweetness, or is it also a Force ? What is its proper function in the material world ?

Describing Divine Love, the Mother says,

"Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep, it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, 'There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love !' And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace. Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of Love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. This world was a world of dead Matter, till Divine Love descended into it and awakened it to life. Ever since it has gone in search of this divine source of life, but it has taken in its search every kind of wrong turn and mistaken way, it has wandered hither and thither in the dark. The mass of this creation has moved on its road like the blind seeking for the unknown, seeking but ignorant of what it sought. The maximum it has reached is what seems to human beings love in its highest form, its purest and most disinterested kind, like the love of the mother for the child. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is. The moment man's consciousness awakens to the divine Love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human

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forms, he knows for what his heart has all the time been truly longing. That is the beginning of the soul's aspiration, that brings the awakening of the consciousness and its yearning for union with the Divine. All the forms that are of the ignorance, all the deformations it has imposed, must from that moment fade and disappear and give place to one single movement of the creation answering to the Divine Love by its love for the Divine. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine Love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.”¹

This long paragraph—is it not rather short, considering the great delivering knowledge it imparts in its pregnant words ? —answers almost all the questions we have put to ourselves. Love is not only joy and sweetness, but a supreme, probably the supreme Force of the eternal Consciousness. Its function is to release the submerged Spirit in Matter and carry it back to its infinity, not for extinction or immersion, but for a revelation of divine splendours in creation. We shall understand this better if we go a little deeper to glimpse the origin and essence of love. The primal principle of creation is delight, Ananda, from which everything in the universe is derived. Ananda is the first sheath, koṣa, in which the Spirit clothes itself for individual manifestation. It is at once the womb of the universe and its eternal sap and sustenance. Out of this essential delight of the eternal Existent, Love emerges, the first-born of the delight. It is the delight itself, but with a significant qualification : it is a seeking and uniting delight. It seeks, discovers and unites God's multiple self-representations; it is the one principle that makes for the infinite interrelations of the universe. A beatific blossom of essential identity, it is the one all-pervading cohesive principle in the midst of the teeming diversities and discords of the universal forms. But for Love the world would have gone to pieces, its relativities clashing and colliding, and its magnificent

¹ Words of the Mother, pp. 111-113.

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planetary systems, marvels of harmony and rhythm, disintegrating in a dance macabre. Speaking on this cohesive aspect of Love, the Mother says :

"Love is nothing else than the tie which unites and holds together all the flowers of Thy divine bouquet. It is a rôle unobtrusive modest, not recognised; a rôle essentially unselfish, which, only in this impersonality, can find all its utility.

"It is because I become more and more this tie, this link, assembling the scattered, fragments of Thy Consciousness and enable those fragments, by grouping them, to reconstitute better and better Thy consciousness, at once single and multiple, that it has been possible for me to see clearly what love is in the play of the universal forces, what is its place and its mission. It is not an end in itself but a supreme means. Active everywhere and between everything, everywhere it is veiled by that very thing which it unites, and which, while undergoing its effects, sometimes does not even know of its presence.” ¹

If we can step aside in consciousness, be it even for a moment, from the stupendous whirl of the cosmic forces, we shall be able all the better to study the rôle Love plays in the world of multiplicity. A conscious, eternal, universal Force, it moves amongst the divisions, differences and disparities of life, combining, co-ordinating , harmonising the conflicting elements, seeking for the beings who are ready to receive it into themselves, up-holding the world from disintegration and destruction, and leading the march of Time to the Timeless. "Love does not manifest in human beings alone; it is everywhere. Its movement is there in plants, perhaps in the very stones; in the animals it is easy to detect its presence. All the deformations of this great and divine Power come from the obscurity and ignorance and selfishness of the limited instruments. Love, the eternal Force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment, it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 5, 1917.

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divine gives itself and asks for nothing.”¹

Divine Love can be incarnated in a human being if psychic love has cleared the whole consciousness and nature of all selfish distortions and the individual has opened wide—receptively wide—to its mighty influx. Often it is seen partially and temporarily occupying the being of an individual and working through it; it retires as soon as egoism or the unredeemed obscurities of the nature re-assert themselves. Except in a few extremely rare cases, it has not been possible to house this "guest of the marvellous hour" permanently in a human body. Even a most developed psychic love, leading a purified heart and mind, may not be able to incarnate divine Love so long as the body and the general physical consciousness have not been radically converted by the conquest and illumination of the subconscient which exerts such a fundamental, darkening sway over them. It is only a completely psychicised human nature upon which divine Love can take its stand and base its operations in the material world.

Human Love

A derivative of divine Love, human love is dwarfed and distorted in the ignorance of man's nature. It is infected with desire, clouded by mental ideas, and darkened and weighed down by the dross of the physical being. It has become an inconstant, hectic hunger, clamouring for possession and exclusive enjoyment; giving, but only to receive; insisting on its demands and receding, if there is no requital. It has degenerated into a barter, an unabashed bargaining, and bears little trace of its universal origin. Even at its best, it has a short-lived or intermittent intensity; it is crossed or thwarted by the contrary elements of nature and nipped by the frosts of life. But whenever it survives these assaults and grows into its full stature, it betrays something of its divine birth, and shines like a star over the grey fields of earthly existence. However brief it may be, it is one of the most beautiful movements of life.

¹ Words of the Mother, 4th Edition, p. 105.

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But

"If the movement does not last, it is because it is not conscious of its own aim and seeking, it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after, but the union of all beings with the Divine.”

The Mother thus indicates the issue out of the cramping intensity of human love, the point of release. Love has not to be killed : a loveless life is a dreary desert, arid and infertile. Love has to cure itself of desire and soar above attachment; it should be a bond of union between the individual and the Divine, and through the Divine between the individual and all beings. It has to transcend all personal limits and widen itself into infinity and impersonality. What it has really been seeking after is not any particular finite form of a fugitive duration, a sparkling bubble on the moving ocean of Time, but the Timeless in time, the Archetype of all forms, the eternal and transcendent One who beams and beckons in and through all forms. He is everywhere, embodied in all things and all beings, and to be united with Him in them all, not abolishing the awareness of, but embracing and enjoying Him in all phenomenal distinctions, is the inmost urge of love. The discontent and the persistent sense of insecurity, disappointment, and disillusion only point to the intrinsic infinity of its seeking which no finite, perishable form can ever fulfil. It is only the Infinite that can fulfil it, and it is the Infinite, the infinite Being or Purusha, whom love has been seeking in the ignorance of the terrestrial nature. The awakening of man's consciousness to this truth of love is the end of the night of his ignorant quest and the dawn of a new life of growing light, happiness and harmony.

Love the Victor

The sole business of human life is to strive to rise superior the witchery of the senses and the importunities of desires, a evolve the psychic love to such an extent that it pervades ;

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possesses the whole being and makes it a single consecration and appeal to the Love of the Divine. This appeal is echoed in the Mother's Prayer of 27th August, 1914 :

"To be the divine Love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this Love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being ! Transmute me into that burning brazier, so that all the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its flame.

"O, to be Thy Love infinitely!”

When the entire being has become one psychic flame, pure and intense, the divine Love descends and unites with it, and carries on with a victorious might its work of transfiguration of the earth-consciousness. It is a long and extremely difficult work, involving a dive into the subterranean bases of life and a deadly fight with the ageless forces of ignorance and inconscience. But the Force that has released the Spirit from the cavern of "supreme obscurity" can and will transform that cavern into an illuminated temple and install the Spirit there as the undisputed sovereign of the material world. Love, the initiator of evolution, will consummate its mission of divine manifestation in Matter as Love the Victor.

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