How are we going to cultivate divine love when the world as a whole has lost the real definition of the word? Man has abused the meaning of love so much that very few know what true love is. True love permeates our entire creation in the same way that the oil is within each particle of the olive. It is not easy to define love, just as it is impossible to fully describe in words the taste of an orange. With love you have to try its fruit to know and savor its flavor. Most of us have tasted love in one form or another in our hearts; this is how we know a little of its meaning. But most of us have not learned how to develop, purify and enlarge our human love into divine love. Man, unable to cultivate love, has lost the original spark that existed in all hearts from the beginning of life.

Many people recognize that the feeling or attraction they feel for their friends and family is love and find it unnecessary to discuss what love really is. There is much more to love than just that. The only real way to explain what true love is to you is to describe its effect. You could not contain yourself, it is so overwhelming… so great would be your happiness and joy if you could feel even a small particle of true divine love. The fullness of love is never in the feeling itself, but in the happiness and joy that feeling gives you. Those who think that love is the ultimate intoxicating happiness, do not know it; the ultimate is bliss, ever-conscious, ever-existing, ever-new bliss. Just as love is native to the soul, it remains secondary to joy because there is no love without joy. That is why the true experience of love is always linked to joy. Sometimes joy comes without any material cause as it is not subject to external conditions. Sometimes it seems to be absent from any material cause. You may jump out of bed one morning feeling “lighter than air” full of joy and not know why.

However, there are external conditions that can cause joy to be expressed from within; like receiving a large sum of money and yelling “I’m so happy!” this condition of receiving all this money has simply helped to release a cascading stream of joy from within the hidden pool of ever new happiness. In individual experiences there are particular events that are generally necessary to bring joy.

The universal nature of love is the divine power of attraction and it has many faces. There is paternal love that is based on reason, while maternal love is unconditional and based on feeling, there is love between the servant and his master that is based entirely on mutual benefit; there is the friendship that is the great relationship of human love that is pure and without compulsion, then there is the love of God that is the highest love and is the perfect love between the soul and the spirit. There is conjugal love which is idealistic and a great expression of human love where a man leaves his father and his mother and joins his wife. However, conjugal love is very deceitful, and most people will leave this earth with little satisfaction in their hearts. They have searched for material love in the wrong way.

Beware the whip of a beautiful face. Those who are mainly attracted by attractive faces and appearances find their soul mates in the graveyard in beautiful and wonderfully decked out ways, not realizing that a demon or devil may be dwelling within them. The souls of ignorance that inhabit splendid bodies are tombs of flesh that cover hideous skeletons. Living and being like this is the same as being dead. Therefore the most important quality there is for a perfect marriage is that if neither is spiritual nor do you find a spiritual man or a spiritual woman… you should not marry; you will not be loved Every mother and every father should teach this to their children.

Fear not, there is an occult prayer affirmation for those who pray, given by spiritual teachers and great ones, which is the promise to prevent you from making a mistake in choosing your true life partner or soul mate. These prayers have some prerequisites. They must be practiced for a minimum of six months with concentrated faith and have made a sincere attunement with the Heavenly Father during his prayers and meditation. By continually affirming this prayer wish, you will be blessed and marry a suitable partner; But if you were attracted to someone who is basically incompatible and doesn’t match, Heavenly Father will prevent you from making the wrong choice by changing the circumstances. This prayer request should be made at the end of your meditation and with deep attention; Affirm “Divine Father, in accordance with Your perfect law of soul union, grant me Your blessings to attract and choose my perfect life partner.”

However, there is an inner loneliness that a husband or wife can never fill. You can be totally in love with your husband or wife, but you can feel up to here with human love, and yet that love cannot reach what God has made for him alone. God has made the creation of him full proof… without him you will never know love. The less love you have, the more lonely you feel. The lack of love is the lack of God. Because your soul has forgotten its relationship with God through countless incarnations.

There was a very heated argument between two disciples, so they went to their preceptor guru (spiritual teacher) for advice to settle the argument and decide who was right. To his surprise, his response to them was to “love God more” and that was his advice to many others who had grievances against one another. They pondered, “how does that resolve our disagreements?” Loving God more changes everything because the only thing that God longs for and does not have in his blissful existence in heavenly Paradise is our love and attention.

God has imposed on himself the same difficulty as on his children. He has given man free will to reject it or seek it. God is persecuting every heart, watching and waiting for his children to reject his creation and move towards him and those who move towards him will attract the one who gives everything.

There have been so many reports of near death experiences where all these reports were found to be similar or identical. Those with near-death experiences who died and came back said they were asked who you loved. It’s so easy to love your immediate family, isn’t it? What about everyone else? Remember that it is God who dwells in the bodily temple of the righteous, the erroneous, and your loved ones.

There are those who feel dryness of heart and do not know how to love God while others lack faith and do not know how to be devoted. When they speak of God they think of Him as a venerable Being in some remote Heaven sitting on a throne. They think to themselves, “I don’t know God, so how can I feel love for an unknown God?” Don’t assume that God is amusing himself in his heavenly existence with selfish joy. God is definitely suffering from the disappointment of man’s denial of Him because it is He who has caused this separation and unless we come to Him voluntarily, He cannot deliver us from suffering nor can He himself in heavenly Paradise from it.

A student asked the guru Paramahansa Yogananda “what would you and the great ones tell us to do in our meditations to cultivate love for God and expand our love for all sentient beings?”

The guru replied, “here is the technique, it is called practicing the presence of God”. He closes his eyes and gently rolls them up at the point between the eyebrows and fixes them there without forcing. Put all your attention in the center of the heart, imagine and feel the strongest and greatest love you have ever felt for another human being. Saturate every cell in your body with that love. As that love encompasses and saturates every cell in your body, expand the feeling of that love as a surrounding sphere that encompasses all your loved ones, your friends and family. Now imagine your love growing and magnified a thousand times and include all the people of the state you live in, the country and the earth saturated with that love. Feel the whole world, your solar system, universe and galaxies bathing in this huge radiant globe of love. Immerse yourself in that sphere of love that saturates infinity.

It is important to know at the beginning of this visualization that the love you feel in your heart is human love. But once that love expands to surround all things, it becomes the universal love of God. Many of you light a small flame of longing for God, but do not add fuel to the fire and it goes out. The fire of love and longing must be lit again and again by the daily practice of self-discipline and meditation.

The love that most people feel for their dearest family and friends is human love. It is God who gives us all those we love; no human love should be greater than the love of God. The kind natures of our relatives were wisely selected for us as brothers and sisters with loving parents, so how much greater should our love for God be? Remember that it is God our continuing Father who through many incarnations of the present, past and future watches over us as an instrument of limitless parenting and family relationships.

People who love and adore family relationships while neglecting the God who resides within those relatives will have a sad awakening when death severs their family ties.
Behold, if someone died and was reborn as a neighbor from their previous home, their previous loving family would see them and treat them like a stranger who moved in next door. These are the mysterious works of reincarnation. Read the article “Beware the whip of a beautiful face.”