10. P. Vittal

Our dear brother rev. K.C.Narayana wrote: “To serve means to love, to obey means to love, to sacrifice means to love. Without these three characteristics there is no point in talking about love. Love demands all these three”. I construe the three requirements to be closely related to yagna, dana, and tapas. In the path of love towards Infinity, I have taken very few steps. With limited understanding of Master’s literature (yagna), assisting those who are serving Master (Dana), and performing daily sadhana (tapas), I may be permitted to share my thoughts.

I think love is both a means/path to adopt in sadhana and an advanced stage in sadhana to be experienced. That love is a path or means to adopt in sadhana through conscious effort is evident from the second commandment. The initial state of love may result in true love for Master during our progress just as remembrance itself a means for “constant remembrance”.

Love is very much important & relevant in sadhana. But for love, our sadhana would have been very dry. Love is very much related and connected to God, as it is intimately connected to feelings (the language of God) and heart (seat of God). Master has talked about love and devotion together most of the times. This is telling us that both are equally important and related. I felt that love is a precursor to devotion. Master has also indicated that love involves certain amount of affection while devotion does not. Devotion with the support of love helps us in strengthening the Master-serf relationship.

Master has advised, “remembrance” and “constant inward looking” as, means to develop love. He indicated that it is only through remembrance that an opportunity for love arises. He said that remembrance has the additional benefit of helping in cessation of samskara formation. In our system we have various avenues that we can utilize in endeavoring the “remembrance and inward looking”.

That brokenness in our love is evident because we generally feel that our love towards father, mother, wife, child, neighbor etc are not at equal standing. Intuitively we feel that “love” must be unity, yet we do feel the brokenness along with it. In the context of the trinity- self, Master and God, Master indicates that the path of love is too narrow even to fit a duo. The instruction that he gave towards eliminating this confusion is to “Love Him who loves all”.

We do not directly wake ourselves from deep sleep. The awakening happens through some other means –alarm clock, internal body clock, etc. Analogously, it is possible that actually Master awakens us and who himself does all the loving rather than the other way especially in the light of His statement “Real love develops in purer mind having its nature divine.” We are yet but slaves of wishes and do not consider our mind purer, yet. To truly love Master I need to go up to that stage and is no small matter. Perhaps I partake and have awareness of His love every now and then but mistakenly think that I really love Him.

The Reality I felt several times is the reality of the experience of calmness, reality of underlying simplicity and lightness, reality of pranahuti and a feeling of slow transformation. The only God and Power I can ascribe for these is Master.

In the similar vein to what our brother rev. K.C. Narayana said, I might say that only through the repeated awareness of His love to us can we love Him. We should also additionally be thankful to all our brothers and sisters who through their daily 9pm prayers constantly help facilitate love towards Master.