"The most important aspect of spiritual life is love"
Love is the closest emotion to the human spirit. The human spirit desires to be unified, to feel whole, to feel connected. And it is that love, that connection to everything that is, that is the natural essence of spirit. When you are close to your source of being, you feel a great love, a communion, a connection to everything that is. As that source of being becomes more distanced and your consciousness abides in your individuality, you begin to feel less connected. And you feel as if you need to search for love, because love doesn’t feel like it’s there with you.
Love can be found in human relationships, but also with yourself, in your relationship to the divine. There, love is endless, and leads to the unitary whole and nonduality of being. The relationship you have to that inner beloved, to that inner manifestation of divinity is the relationship that you have to your own soul. And as you grow in that love, you feel a peace and a wholeness of love fulfilled. In your relationships with others there is also this search for love, this search for closeness, connectedness. So on the inside, so on the outside. And this love, this connectedness, is the healing balm of the human heart.
Your beloved of your heart, your inner divine presence is an unconditional love, an immortal Self that is filled with compassion and love for you at all times and in all ways. The journey of spirit is a journey to come to know that immortal love that is undying and unconditional. This is a journey from the head to the heart, from the mind to the soul, from ideas and beliefs to direct experience.
And there are times in that journey when there are challenges, when Samskaras, reactions to past experience, come up and dominate the mind and separate you from your beloved. And when these mental stresses and strains come to mind, they are patterns that you have fallen into: beliefs, ideas, feelings that you have developed lifetime upon lifetime. And they rise to the surface when you meditate. And as this happens, the opportunity comes to bring them into the light of day and to work with them and to heal them. This is a part and parcel of the practice of Sadhana. This is a part of meditation: to bring to the light of day all those things which have been hidden, so that you can heal them, so that you can burn away the clouds, and the clarity of truth will shine through.