On this Wednesday, I started a new samyama (a yogic technology to express extraordinary powers and experiences through the body) on LOVE, which was taken from Patanjali Yoga Sutra (No. 130 Chapter 3 and verse 24). This samyama had given me deeper insights about love, self-love and universal love which really inspired me.
So what is love?
Love is a flower that blossoms within our being and sends out a sweet fragrance that we share it with others. Love is the most beautiful thing a human being is capable of feeling. Love is an energy that radiates happiness in all people as it brings many positive feelings such as compassion, forgiveness, fearlessness, gratitude, unity, courage and freedom. Love is the energy that is responsible for the sparkles in your eyes, the glow on your skin and the constant excitement and freedom you experience in life.
In the Vedic tradition, we worship the Cosmic Mother – Devi, who is the embodiment of causeless love (love without a purpose). Love without any reason or condition is the REAL LOVE. Love is the feminine energy in all of us, the Devi aspect which keeps us away from the aggression and violence of the masculine energy. Love also has the power to heal all kinds of restlessness – be it physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. This is because love is such a concentrated, caring energy that whenever we express real love, we become a channel for healing energy. With love, it brings tremendous patience in us. Whenever love is missing, we get irritated with others.
Love also gives us intense courage to completely surrender and experience the causeless love of Existence. According to Paramahamsa Nithyananda (fondly known as Swamiji), he said the “when the glimpse of enlightenment happens in you, what happens in you between then and till the point you become enlightenment is love. Inside all of us, there is an intense super consciousness constantly waiting to break through our body and express itself.”
How did we disconnect ourselves from experiencing causeless love?
- Corruption in Love. Swamiji shared one sacred secret in one of his discourses this year. He said that when the life energy is moving and expanding itself in Consciousness, the smell of the Consciousness is “friendliness”. However, the moment we forgot about the friendliness of life and started creating different divisions and labelling them such as compassion of a mother, relationship with a spouse, sense pleasure of food, sex etc. as life, when these possibilities are all denied, we believe that part of our life is death. This is a corruption that happened in the level of love. We define our life based on whatever we perceive or are unable to perceive. But life is not based on whatever we are able to perceive or unable to perceive; it is based on what exists. Sometimes, your mother may not show friendliness. That does not mean she has lost her love for you. Sometimes when your health does not allow you to have your favourite food, that does not mean life is dead. The change of concept of your love does not take away the basic friendliness. It is the labelling which makes you feel you have life or you don’t have life. This cognition corrupts the truth that “you just move and expand in the space”.
- Ego and logic. When we start to think we know it all and become assertive about what we think, there comes the ego which shuts down the inner space and all energies around us. Ego is the opposite of causeless love. Consciousness can do 2 things: it can either create ego or it can create egoless. With ego, life will be hell whereas when you become egoless, you live in paradise.
- Fear of exploitation. When your secure low-mood logic goes on saying that if you are so open, you will be exploited physically, mentally and economically. Men feel if they are too loving, women will exploit them economically; women feel if they are too loving, men will exploit them physically; and both feel they will be exploited emotionally! Hence you always have the fear if you express love, you will be exploited. So there is a certain logic in you which completely bans you from flowing with love. But the fear of love and the secure logic which created the obstruction to love, goes on creating ideas against love in you is like a dam. With a dam, you completely stop the life force in you. As long as the separation remains, we can never experience the energy of the ocean – that is love.
In this powerful samyama, Patanajli approves the expression of love and instructs all yogis and aspiring seekers to excel in love. He says love is a strength which has 3 different definitions: 1) You will radiate the quality of causeless love, 2) You will be able to transmit the quality to others and 3) You will know how to make that quality a strength for you. Love will become a strength in you and it will make you creative and alive. By doing this samyama, you allow yourself to experience the love which opens up in you and the love towards the Whole.
It was through this samyama that I was able to understand how the love of the Master made me experience the love for self which, in turns, expressed as my love for the Master and the love for the Whole. It is the love of the Master which completes me and flows as love for the Master. For the first time, I experienced the complete circle of love with the Guru’s grace. When that click hit my inner space, a sense of deep gratitude towards the Master overflowed in me, the next thing I realised was that I fell in the thoughtless zone of Samadhi, Advaita (non-duality).
In essence, love is a vast ocean and I feel that I am just beginning to learn how to swim in this amazing ocean. You can also experience this vast ocean of love if you understand the corruption in the level of love and the ego which separates you from love. Namaste 😀