Love is a Being, a great Magnet, a great Energy Who out of His own substance created everything that exists. This is a fact which is not well-known, although many philosophers and disciples have hinted about it throughout the ages.
The more love you express, the closer you come to that great Creative Power in the Universe. As you increase your love, you become a co-worker of that Great Power. If you decrease your love, you become a contradictory force against that Being.
In the same sense, when you increase your love, you become capable of cooperating with the Plan and Purpose of that Great One. If you are lacking in love, you cannot fit yourself to the rhythm of the Plan and the Purpose.
God is love, and if everything is created by Him, it means that everything He created is love. When people hate each other, they cannot be in harmony with the Creator; they divide themselves. When love is divided, man suffers. All suffering, disturbances, sicknesses, cleavages, wars and revolutions in the world are the result of the lack of love.
Similarly, man is love in his essence. As he loves, his essence comes into existence. We are living as bodies, emotions, thoughts, but essentially we are love, hidden within our form. When we start to express love, our essence starts to manifest. As we love, we externalize ourselves.
This is the process of creativity, the process of externalizing yourself. Creativity, heroism, and all great actions in life come into being because of love in the process of manifestation. You become a great talent or genius in any field because your True Self is coming into existence. When you come into existence, you become a God in manifestation, a son of God in manifestation. You become like your Father. As your Father created the Universe and the galaxies, you create your own galaxies—poems, music, books, paintings, relationships, great activities, and organizations. All these are the result of the manifestation of your True Self.
Creativity is nothing else but a process of building a mirror and watching yourself in it. In creativity you build an outer image which exists within your inner being, and you bring that inner image out and look at it.
The more you love, the more you become yourself. And the more you become yourself, the more mastery you gain over your weaknesses. Everything that is ugly, limiting, disharmonious, or contradictory within you is not you. It is the not-self. As you become yourself through love, you conquer everything that is the notself. This is why we say that love leads to self-actualization.
Every beauty created in the Universe is the result of an act of love. If there is love in your home, there is beauty there. If there is love in your nation, then peace, creativity, achievement, and fulfillment are there in your nation.
Love does not mean sentimentalism or feelings.
Real love has three branches—intellect, compassion, and power.
The first branch of love is pure intellect, light. This is why a great disciple once said, “Whoever loves has light. Whoever hates has darkness in him.”
If you have real love, you understand people. You read their motives and intentions. If you have real love, nobody can deceive you. This is a very important idea. Whenever people manipulate you or cheat you, it means that you have a certain degree of lack of love in you.
Love is not “goody-goodyness.” Many people think that if you have love, everyone can use you, sexually, physically, emotionally, and mentally, and then throw you away like rubbish. This is not real love. Real love cannot be exploited. Love is not a surrender to the devil or to a self-destructive process.
Light means penetration and even Intuition. If you love someone, your love opens the door of his heart and tells you what is going on in its depths, no matter what the surface appears to be. Love, compassion, and power work together.
Compassion means unconditional care, understanding, and help. Compassion is not emotional sentimentalism; it is unconditional help. Whenever you help someone unconditionally, you do not help an individualized form, but you help the divinity or the Divine Presence within him.
Love and compassion are sources of power. Whoever has love and compassion has power. The power of the Great Ones originates from Their love and compassion.
No one can defeat you unless you have hatred, jealousy, greed, anger, separatism, or ugliness in your heart. These things create holes in your aura through which the dark forces can penetrate and defeat you. But if you have love, you have a shield around you. The Teaching says, “God is your shield.” God is love, and His love is a shield around you.
Our Teachers in the monastery told us many times that when a dangerous animal approached us in the forest we should “love, love, love him.…” We tried it and it worked; they actually ran away from us!
When you love, you create eight positive effects in your life:
1. Through love you heal your physical, emotional, and mental illnesses. When you start expressing love, you radiate that innermost radioactivity which cleans you physically, emotionally, and mentally, creating tremendous magnetism and joy within you. This is why we say that joy heals.
Whenever you have some weakness physically, emotionally, or mentally, go back and observe yourself and you will find that you yielded yourself to some wave of darkness—hatred, criticism, gossip, etc. When you do these things, you weaken yourself and germs can penetrate into you. We are even advised to love our body when we become sick.
The great Masters are called “Masters of Love and Wisdom.” Love is the essence of harmony. Increase the love in your life, and you will see that miraculously all illnesses and disharmonies will disappear from your life.
One day I wanted to create some music, but it was not coming out the way I wanted it to. Suddenly I said, “Let me think about love.” Then I forgave and blessed all those I really didn’t like. I created great love and forgiveness in my heart, and suddenly something clicked inside of me and I could create my music. Love integrated me and created harmony in me.
2. Love heals not only you, but your friends as well. You can try this experiment with your own friends: If you have a friend who is sad because his girlfriend left him, show him love, send him loving thoughts; and you will see how his grief disappears.
3. Love brings right human relations and goodwill. Hate someone and you will see how he increases his own ill will and plans to harm you.
One day I visited a home and the little boy there was acting so nastily—creating trouble, showing off, trying to get attention. I asked his mother, “Why is he like that?” His mother said, “He is always like that.” I went to him and said, “What a beautiful boy you are!” I shook his hand and played with him for 10-15 minutes.... Later I talked with his parents for two or three hours and that boy sat quietly at my feet without speaking a word!
If a person is acting in a nasty or obnoxious way, check his life and you will probably find that he has a lack of love in his life. Give love to that person, and you will see him creating right relations with you.
This is what we are lacking in our world life. We think we can solve our problems with guns, by demonstrating with force that we are a great nation. This may create a temporary solution, but then it creates reactions and greater problems that are even harder to solve. Why to spend all that money? Demonstrate love; find ways and means to express love. When you love people, they will surrender to you.
Napoleon once said that with all his armies he could not conquer a little part of Europe, but one naked man with twelve disciples could conquer the whole world. Christ’s power was love.
4. Love increases creativity. If your creativity is becoming more shallow or stuck on one level, love a little more and you will see that you are making a breakthrough in your creativity.
Once I knew a girl who was a beautiful singer. She came to me one day for advice because she felt there was something lacking in her singing. I told her, “Yes, something is lacking. You need love. You need to love somebody.” “Well, I have my boyfriend…,” she said.
“Not like that. You must have a love that will touch your heart and bring the real fire out.” A few months later she came and told me about a book she had found and how she loved the man who wrote it. (It was written by The Great Sage) I went to one of her rehearsals. She sang so beautifully.… I asked her how she did it and she said, “I was singing for Him, not for the audience.”
5. Through loving, you increase your intellectual light and your Intuition.
6. Through loving, you build communication with the Higher Worlds. When you start loving, your instruments become very sensitive to the creative waves that are flying around you in space. You don’t need a magnet to attract them because your magnet is your aura. If your aura is purified by love, you can attract these creative energies, ideas, visions, revelations, and inspirations.
7. In loving, you increase your sensitivity to higher spatial impressions from the Subtle Worlds. We are divided here. We live in the human level, but millions and billions of people are living in a different dimension, and we do not have contact with them. Love puts you in contact with them and makes it possible for you to start receiving guidance, light, help, and inspiration from them.
8. In loving, you eventually become a co-worker of the Great Ones. Once I was reading about a Master Who would not accept a certain disciple into His Ashram. “But why not?” the others asked Him. “He is so beautiful. He wrote many articles. He is a great leader. He has many scientific inventions.…” The Master refused to accept him because he was not increasing in love.
Knowledge in the hands of a person whose love is not increasing becomes a dangerous weapon. Without love, such a person will misuse everything he has, he is, and he knows.
When the love in your heart increases, you feel that the power of your observation also increases. You handle people in a way that they do not hurt themselves and their future, and, also, they do not create complications in your life.
Many people have sentimentality but not real love, and because of that, in the name of love, people manipulate each other and eventually complicate each others’ lives.
Love not only attracts friends but also repulses those who have darkness in their heart. The period of repulsion can be a period in which the dangerous elements of the repulsed ones can come under control. Love acts as an agent of purification. Love cannot grow in darkness.
How can we increase our love?
1. Learn not to speak evil about anyone. Gossip, malice, and slander are like poison in your aura. Whenever you do these things, they increases like microbes and cover your whole aura with their poison and contamination.
Do not speak ill about friends, even in jest. One day a girl came to see me because she was having some troubles with her husband and she could not find any cause for it. “Can I ask you something?” I said. “Do you sometimes criticize or talk ill about your husband, even for the sake of fun?” “Oh, yes, I do that a lot.” “That’s it. You are weakening your whole relationship. With your little words, you are putting one drop of poison into a barrel of pure water and contaminating the whole barrel of water.”
Whenever you speak ill against a friend, you will find there is a wall built between you and him. This wall must be eliminated if you want to increase your love.
2. If you hurt anyone, ask his forgiveness. Do not think that you are becoming smaller by asking for forgiveness. On the contrary, you are building your love. It does not matter whether the other person did something wrong, too. If you were wrong, ask for forgiveness. Actually, it does not matter who is wrong or right. If you know that you hurt someone, ask for his forgiveness. Forgiveness can change the whole atmosphere of your family, office, church, or group.
3. Meditate on the fact that people are different from each other, but God is one within them. Think about the oneness in all living forms. We are separate individuals, but within us, God is one.
4. Help those who are in need. This will create tremendous love within you. Once I was visiting a household and the fourteen-year-old son was struggling with his algebra. He had an exam the next morning, and he needed help. I sat and worked with him until three o’clock in the morning. I was the most happy man; I went home full of love—because the boy was now enlightened about his algebra problems.
5. Daily, monthly, and yearly share something with others.
6. Never carry the thought that you are better than others. This is the greatest human weakness and a feeling that really defeats you.
7. Rejoice for those who do something for humanity. This greatly increases your joy. Sometimes I see someone in the United Nations or Senate speaking so beautifully on television and I shout from my chair, “Good for you! That’s so beautiful!” It is so important to encourage people.
What if we would start printing in the headlines the beautiful things that people are doing to help others, instead of printing headlines about crimes and murders? We must go in the right direction—which is toward increasing love.
8. Do not kill, and do not make others kill. The commandment, “Do not kill,” was given to us 6000 years ago, and still we do not understand it. It was Buddha who added the second part, “And don’t make others kill,” when He saw people claiming they were not killing while they were making other people kill for them.
You cannot destroy what God built. If you kill somebody, that same person may eventually kill you in another life. This is the Law of Karma: whatever you sow you are going to reap. How can we make people listen to this advice?
9. The less you hurt people, the more love you have. When you hurt people, you really destroy the reservoirs of your love. Do not waste your love by hurting others.
10. Increase gratitude within you. This increases your love.
11. Do not condemn people but understand them.
12. Sometimes do the following exercise for two to three minutes: Visualize a closed, golden lotus behind your shoulder blades. Then visualize it opening with golden petals and a blue light manifesting.
When you increase your love, you increase your life. When you increase your life, you become more creative and more useful for the One Life.
The light of the One Life shines in the heart of every true disciple.
-Torkom Saraydarian
Education as Transformation, Volume II, Chapter 18
