IMAGINE FEELING MORE LOVE from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you were ever loved by your father, your child, or your most intimate lover—anyone. This lover doesn’t need anything from you, isn’t looking for personal gratification, and only wants your complete fulfillment. You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success
—none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
Imagine that being in this love is like relaxing endlessly into a warm bath that surrounds and supports your every movement, so that every thought and feeling is permeated by it. You feel as though you are dissolving into love.
This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the
universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”
This is your deeper heart, your intuitive heart. It is the place where the higher mind, pure awareness, the subtler emotions, and your soul identity all come together and you connect to the universe, where presence and love are.
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not “I love you” for this or that reason, not “I love you if you love me.” It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in love.
If I go into the place in myself that is love and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness. That’s the space I entered when I met my guru.
Years ago in India I was sitting in the courtyard of
the little temple in the Himalayan foothills. Thirty or forty of us were there around my guru, Maharaj-ji. This old man wrapped in a plaid blanket was sitting on a plank bed, and for a brief uncommon interval everyone had fallen silent. It was a meditative quiet, like an open field on a windless day or a deep clear lake without a ripple. I felt waves of love radiating toward me, washing over me like a gentle surf on a tropical shore, immersing me, rocking me, caressing my soul, infinitely accepting and open.
I was nearly overcome, on the verge of tears, so grateful and so full of joy it was hard to believe it was happening. I opened my eyes and looked around, and I could feel that everyone else around me was experiencing the same thing. I looked over at my guru. He was just sitting there, looking around, not doing anything. It was just his being, shining like the sun equally on everyone. It wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. For him it was nothing special, just his own nature.
This love is like sunshine, a natural force, a completion of what is, a bliss that permeates every particle of existence. In Sanskrit it’s called sat-cit-
ananda, “truth-consciousness-bliss,” the bliss of consciousness of existence. That vibrational field of ananda love permeates everything; everything in that vibration is in love. It’s a different state of being beyond the mind. We were transported by Maharaj- ji’s love from one vibrational level to another, from the ego to the soul level. When Maharaj-ji brought me to my soul through that love, my mind just stopped working. Perhaps that’s why unconditional love is so hard to describe, and why the best descriptions come from mystic poets. Most of our descriptions are from the point of view of conditional love, from an interpersonal standpoint that just dissolves in that unconditioned place.
When Maharaj-ji was near me, I was bathed in that love. One of the other Westerners with Maharaj-ji, Larry Brilliant, said:
Howdo I explain who Maharaj-ji was and howhe did what he did? I don’t have any explanation.
Maybe it was his love of God. I can’t explain who he was. I can almost begin to understand howhe loved everybody. I mean, that was his job, he was a saint. Saints are supposed to love everybody.
But that’s not what always staggered me, not that he loved everybody—but that when I was sitting in front of him I loved everybody. That was the hardest thing for me to understand, howhe could so totally transform the spirit of people who were with him and bring out not just the best in us, but something that wasn’t even in us, that we didn’t know. I don’t think any of us were ever as good or as pure or as loving in our whole lives as we were when we were sitting in front of him.1
Welcome to the path of the heart! Believe it or not, this can be your reality, to be loved unconditionally and to begin to become that love. This path of love doesn’t go anywhere. It just brings you more here, into the present moment, into the reality of who you already are. This path takes you out of your mind and into your heart.
When someone asked Maharaj-ji how to meditate, he said, “Meditate the way Christ meditated…………………………. He
lost himself in love.”
Love is a natural human inclination. People in other times and places have found this path in many different cultural situations. In India it’s called bhakti yoga, finding ultimate union through love, a tradition that stretches back many centuries. Bhakti yoga practices are a way to enter into unconditional love, into the radiant heart, to dissolve oneself in the ocean of love, in the One. Later in the book you will meet a few of the Indian “saints” who have become that love. We will look at ways you can also tread on that path. There’s no formula. Each of us has our own key to unlock the reality of our heart.
Falling into Love
The first time you experience unconditional love as an adult, it may be a gentle melting of a glacier. Or it may be more of a cataclysm, like a giant earthquake that shakes you to your inner core. You are falling in love, but the act of receiving love that intense and all- encompassing changes your conception of yourself. You can’t swim in such a vast ocean and remain entirely in the small pond of your limited self. Even if
that opening is only for an instant, even if it goes away and is apparently forgotten, that moment of realization, of the heart opening, colors the rest of a lifetime. There’s no going back. The lingering taste of that ultimate sweetness remains and won’t be denied.
Jesus used the metaphor of a fisherman. When you first feel that depth of joy, you are caught in the net of pure love by the divine fisherman; you’re hooked on that love.
My guru is like a fly fisherman. The ego twists and pulls and runs out the line trying to escape, but each time the hook of divine love sets more deeply until finally the little you, the personality and all its habits, the bundle of thoughts and desires, surrenders to the greater Self, that being of pure love and consciousness that keeps pulling you in to merge.
When I was first got to India, I abhorred the idea of gurus. I was attracted to Buddhism, which appealed to the psychologist in me. How did I end up sitting in front of a Hindu guru? When I first met him, I hardly knew what I was doing there myself.
But when Maharaj-ji immersed me in his unconditional love, it altered the course of my life. My
view of myself completely changed. That meeting opened my heart. In that moment I opened up to the guru—not just to the old man in the blanket sitting in front of me, but to a place within him that reflected my true Self. That spiritual Self is the source of unconditional love.
When I returned to the States after that first time in India, I felt as though I was carrying a precious jewel in my heart and I wanted to share it. I could talk about my heart opening and the new awareness it had brought. But the guru—I didn’t really talk much about the guru, because the idea seemed so inappropriate for the West.
For one thing, there is always a mixed reaction to the notion of surrendering to another person. Surrendering in our culture is almost always seen as negative. We don’t like being told what to do; we like to figure it out for ourselves. Surrendering means giving up our power, and it usually has to do with ego power or sexual dominance.
The term “guru” evokes images of con men and hucksters rather than spiritual masters. Of course, we are right to be cynical when we see so-called gurus get entangled in money, sex, and power.
Seductions, tax evasion, expensive cars, high-priced mantras—even Hollywood had its fun with gurus and cults (e.g., The Love Guru). The image of charismatic corrupters preying on weak-minded followers is hard to avoid. Most people wouldn’t know a real guru if they fell over him or her, and certainly few have ever met one.
At first Maharaj-ji seemed almost like a magical being to me. He had incredible spiritual powers, but slowly I began to appreciate that it was the ocean of his love that had truly hooked me. And that was the real thing. Here was a flesh-and-blood being who was living in a state of unconditional love all the time. That love allowed me to surrender, to accept his guidance on the inner journey to find that love in myself.
Later I encountered other beings, some living and some gone from the body, who helped me see more of the road map for this path of the heart. These beings come in all shapes, sizes, and manifestations, as we all do. They are signposts and guides to help us on the bhakti marg, the road to love, even though we each have to travel it ourselves. Some of the beings who have inspired me are the
ones who have also inspired this book. I hope they will help you on your way too.
Unconditional love dissolves any rational hesitation as we become drunk on its sweetness. We are like moths circling a candle flame, immolating ourselves in a fire of living love.
LIVING FLAME OF LOVE
Oh, living flame of love, howtenderly you penetrate the deepest core of my being! Finish what you began.
Tear the veil from this sweet encounter.
Oh, gentle fiery blade! Oh, beautiful wound!
You soothe me with your blazing caress. You pay off all my old debts,
and offer me a taste of the eternal.
In slaying me, you transform death into life.
Oh, flaming lantern!
You illuminate the darkest pockets of my soul.
Where once I wallowed in bitter separation now, with exquisite intensity,
I radiate warmth and light to my Beloved.
Howpeacefully, howlovingly you awaken my heart,
that secret place where you alone dwell within me!
Your breath on my face is delicious, calming and galvanizing at once.
Howdelicately, howlucidly
you make me crazy with love for you!
—St. John of the Cross,2 translated by Mirabai Starr
Whatever your metaphor (and you can choose— and mix—your own), whether it’s succumbing to the softness of the ultimate romance, being submerged in a tidal wave of love, or being pulled into the gravitational field of a star, once you have experienced unconditional love, you have nowhere to go. You can run, but you can’t hide. The seed is planted, and it will grow in its own time. You can only grow into who you truly are.
You may think you’re free to come and go and play
where you will, but the Beloved has taken you for his or her own, and in reality you can only surrender more and more to that divine attraction. Slowly but surely, in a moment or over thousands of lifetimes, the Beloved reels you in until you merge back into the unitary state of sat-cit-ananda, the truth- consciousness-bliss of the Self.
B
e love now
the path of the heart
Ram dass
with rameshwar das
