The Year of Love

Swami has declared this year to be the year of love. What is the nature of love and why is it important for us to cultivate love? Here is what Swami says.

“Love is my highest miracle. Love can make you gather the affection of all mankind. Love will not tolerate any selfish aim or approach. Expand your heart so that it can encompass all.

Man is love embodied. He thirsts for love and find real joy in loving and receiving selfless love. Love all as the embodiments of of the same divine principles. The bliss that you give the love that you share, these alone will be your lasting possessions. Love alone can bind you to to others and to God, who is the embodiment of love. Love knows no fear, no untruth, no anxiety, no grief. I am love. I shower love.

God is love and can be won only through the cultivation and exercise of love. Love is expansion and expansion is divine life. Sow love, it blossoms as compassion and tolerance. It yields the fruit of peace.
Unless you cultivate love, tolerance, humility, faith and reverence, how is it possible for you to realize God?

Love activates. Love fulfills. Fill your hearts with the sweet fragrant water of love. Then every act of yours, every word (which is like the water drawn from the tank through the tap) will be sweet and fragrant. If the tank is polluted how can the word be helpful or the thought beneficent or the deed commendable?

When you know that you are but a spark of the divine and that all else are the same divine spark, you look upon all with reverence and true love. Your heart is filled with supreme joy and the canker of egoism is rendered ineffective. Man is seeking joy in far off paces, in quiet spot, not knowing that the spring of joy is in his heart, the heaven of peace is in himself. Love is God; God is the embodiment of perfect love. So, He can be known and realized, reached and won only through love. You can see the moon only with the help of moonlight. You can see God through the ray of love.”

Spirit and the Mind, pp. 133, 136