The Yoga of Love

The yoga of love is the yoga of acceptance. In the yoga of love, following the pathway of love, we're not trying to put our own interest forward. Love teaches us that that which is most important is self-acceptance. We begin by loving and accepting ourselves. We realize that we have many, many different selves inside of ourselves. There are many different voices that speak through us. We learn that those around us are an extension of ourselves or that we are an extension of them, not only the people, but the plants, the animals, the things, both animate and inanimate. All things have life and form and existence, and we learn to love all. Beyond what we call existence is nonexistence. Beyond the form is the formless. Beyond matter is spirit and in spirit there is nothing but love. Its very nature is love.

So to practice the yoga of love, to follow the pathway to enlightenment, we need to become aware of the spirit's residence in matter. In the yoga of love we come to see that matter and spirit are really one. They're not separate. It's only the ego that separates. Our ego, our sense of identity, says, "I am this, I am not that." The ego lives in duality, it divides everything. It says, "This is good, this is bad; this experience is happy, this experience is unhappy," but the ego is really a false perception of self. It's an idea, a transitory identity that we've picked up, just as when we're out walking in the woods we might pick up a little burr. Now if that burr begins to dig into our skin and it gets deeper and deeper inside of us, it starts to hurt. It begins to cause a wound that will eventually fester, and if it's not properly treated that one little burr could incapacitate us completely. It could make us very ill, perhaps even cause our death.

So the ego, while seeming somewhat innocuous, while seeming small, perhaps not worthy of paying too much attention to, is very, very dangerous - dangerous in the sense that if you love light and joy and perfection, if you want to bring a transcendental beauty into your life, you simply can't mess around with it - it's dangerous. All things are not good for those that live. If you eat something that's poisonous, you'll die. While God exists in poison, as He does in all other things, still it's not proper for us as human beings to eat poison because while you may be consuming God, you'll die.

So it's necessary to realize that we have a specialized nature, that in this world, and in all worlds, there are things that for us as beings in this world, in this form, are harmonious, and there are things that are not. The ego is not harmonious with happiness and spiritual development. It's something that we have to live with for a while, but in the process of spiritual transformation we refine it. In the fire of love we melt the ego down again and again and again. What is there when the ego is gone? Eternity, love. The ego is not our identity, it's our false conception of identity. Our real identity is eternity. Each one of us is much vaster than we realize. We encompass all of existence, yet a particle of our awareness is focused in this world, in the moment.

So the art of love is to embrace both the moment - the people in the world, the experiences - and also to embrace that which lies beyond the moment, eternity; to accept both the finite and the infinite; to realize that we have a human nature, at least in the beginning stages of our evolution, which wants certain things, which desires, which dislikes, which seeks pleasure and wants to avoid pain; and that we have another nature, a deeper nature, our real nature - real in the sense that it lasts forever, while the other nature is transitory and passing. That is our higher nature. Our nature is spirit.

Throughout spiritual history people have tortured themselves and made themselves miserable because they simply couldn't accept the fact that they had two sides, and that they really weren't two, they were one. It was only because they were looking through the ego and through the limited mind and the body consciousness that they thought that they really had a body at all. There is no body. There is only eternity. That's our real body. The stars are our blanket. Time doesn't even exist, except in our own minds.

So in spirituality we take a trip on a boat, we cross the ocean and we go to another shore. And in that shore there is nothing but light and perfection. Then we come back and we try and tell others about it - some believe us, some don't. The shore, of course, is not in a physical place, it's within us. The ocean is nirvana. We cross nirvana on the boat of our love to reach the shore of eternity.

It's necessary when you follow the path of love to love those around you first. You need to feel that the people in your world are the right people. Desire tells us that we should have someone else in our life, and you should feel that if someone else is supposed to be in your life, they will be in your life - you can't stop them from coming if it's the will of eternity - and that if someone is in your life currently and they shouldn't be, they will leave, otherwise they should be.

On the path of love we don't feel we necessarily have control. In some of the other yogas we feel that we have control. We determine our own destiny and that's the proper way to feel in those yogas, but in the yoga of love we feel that it's only God who does everything. We can't breathe one breath without God because God is breathing in and through us and God is our beloved. We love God. We love truth. On the path of love we feel that if we love today, it's only because God is loving through us, because there is a special grace present with which we can love. If we find that we're not loving tomorrow, we accept that because we know that that's not the will of God.

In other words, we feel that everything is the will of God, that we are only instruments of Her will and we learn to just love and accept. Our love is not for personal reward. In the yoga of love, while we certainly love those around us, we love our life, our love reaches even deeper and farther. We learn to love that which we don't see with our eyes, hear with our ears or feel with our bodies, that which is beyond the senses - consciousness. Consciousness is existence. It is the very stuff of which life is composed, and when we meditate and still our thoughts we begin to feel consciousness, we become more conscious of consciousness.

Maya is illusion. It's a Sanskrit word, which means that we're not seeing the totality of existence. Rather, we're looking through a very dark glass and only seeing an obscured vision of existence. Love teaches us how to penetrate the inner worlds, to clean the glass of existence and see reality in its perfect essence.

If you want to follow the path of love, it's a good idea to meditate on the heart chakra every day. The heart chakra is the chakra in the center of the chest. As you know, there are seven major psychic centers in the subtle physical body. The subtle physical body, of course, is the same size and shape as your physical body, and in the center of the chest, not exactly where the physical heart is, there's a spot that we call the heart - anahata. It's a doorway that leads to love, higher love and light.

When you meditate each day, if you follow the pathway of love, at least for the first five or ten years, you should meditate on the heart chakra, at least to start out your meditation. While you meditate there, while you fix your awareness just gently on the center of the chest, you should try to feel love. As you feel more and more love, begin to smile, let go, be free. As thoughts come in and out of your mind, ignore them. Just focus on love. Sit and feel love, gratitude or joy. If the meditation takes you beyond these emotions, that's fine. Let it take you where it will, but always try to start your meditation, or somewhere in your meditation, by feeling and focusing on love and beauty.

In the yoga of love, one has a teacher. The teacher is a very important element because it is the teacher whom one loves. Now this is a concept that's been somewhat prostituted by many phony teachers who have attracted lots of followers and allowed themselves to be worshiped and put on a pedestal, told people limited truths and then made slaves of them - the cults of personality.

The actual concept is as follows. Right now there are many, many things in your life, many people, experiences and ideas, habits, ways of seeing and so forth. It's very hard to let all of this go, to focus on what is right and what is true. Ultimately you want to focus on God, the unmanifest, that which is beyond this world and all worlds and yet that which is within this world, and meditate on that. This is a very hard thing to do in the beginning. It's like trying to think of the thin air all day. Try to think of the thin air sometime for more than a minute or two, and you'll find your mind will wander. So, if one has a teacher - an enlightened teacher, one who is absorbed in eternity, who's gone far beyond the plateaus that most human beings have reached and merged their awareness with nirvana, someone who has knowledge and a pure heart - if you come to this person with love, they will show you the ways of love. The ways of love are not always, perhaps, as we think they might be. Sometimes they're quite gentle and fun and filled with laughter and light. Sometimes they're quite abrupt and strict. Love is a many-sided taskmaster.

When you go to the teacher, what develops is a relationship. Once you find someone whom you consider to be the most enlightened person in this world you can find and you start to work with them, you fall in love with them. And if you can't do this, if this isn't to your nature, that doesn't say that there's anything wrong with you, it just means that you shouldn't practice the yoga of love. You should practice one of the other yogas. The yoga of love is for those who want an all-consuming relationship with their teacher. They see the teacher as an extension of God, of eternity, which all of us are, all people and all beings are. But for them the teacher becomes a focus, an object of adoration, of complete love, and by focusing so intently on the teacher they are able to drop their focus on the world and their limitations and attachments that hold them back. The teacher is a temporary step, a kind of a surrogate being whom you will fix yourself to for a time. Then when you've become strong enough and developed enough and the teacher has showed you the ways of eternity, or eternity has through the teacher, then the teacher is no longer necessary. The teacher will fall away, or let us say that you'll see that the teacher was eternity all along.

The relationship between the student and teacher is ultimately important. In higher spirituality we don't really study a subject as much as we study a person, particularly in the yoga of love, the path of love. You have to learn their many sides, all their moods. What you're doing is fixating your consciousness on one being. However, this is not an ordinary being. The enlightened teacher is someone who has become absorbed in eternity. While they have a body like others, the essence of their being is light. Their personality is dissolved again and again in the white light of samadhi. They now embrace all of existence. If you look deeply inside them you'll only see eternity, whereas with most human beings, when you look inside, you'll see motivations and subconscious desires and all kinds of different things.

There are very few enlightened people in this world - fully enlightened, self-realized teachers. They're quite rare and when you find one, you'll know. Your being will tell you. Sometimes, unfortunately, people fall in love not because they really love but because they're in love with the idea of falling in love. So some people think that they have honestly liberated teachers who they work with, but they don't really. They wanted a teacher so badly that they didn't wait. They took who was out there, who came along first, and instead of seeing that the person was perhaps somewhat advanced, or perhaps not advanced at all, they looked into and saw in that person what they wanted to see. But if you really look deeply you'll be able to tell. When you sit in meditation with one who's really liberated there will be light and joy, their personality will have many forms - sometimes it's childlike, sometimes it's strong, but really, all they are is light. There's very little self, just enough to exist in this world, no more.

Now, with such a person, on the path of love, you'll fall in love with this person completely, in rapture. Not necessarily all at once, although even when you first meet them there will be a very strong pull. As you fall in love with them, that is to say, as you feel love towards this being of light, whom we call the teacher, something really exciting happens. The more you think of them and the more you focus on them, the more you become them. There's a spiritual law that whatever we focus our field of attention on, we become. It's very, very difficult to focus our attention on God the unmanifest, just on God as an absolute reality or the formless reality, but when we see God expressing itself through one who is enlightened, then we can love that form. We as human beings find it easier to love other human beings than to love the thin air.

When you see that the teacher works constantly and endlessly for the welfare of others, really wants nothing for themselves, gives beyond exhaustion, when you see that the teacher's power and light and humor begin to affect you and that you begin to change and that your world dissolves and improves, then you begin to love them more. In other words, the love doesn't come all at once. Real love, while it may start immediately, develops over years, and so the relationship between the student and teacher on the path of love, which is the path of love, develops for many, many years.

There are some dangers on the path of love. One danger is an over-focus on the teacher, to some extent, or that the love is self-deluding. As I said before, you're not really in love with the teacher, you just wanted one so badly that you decided to fall in love with the one who's there. Some people tend to give away their identity or their independence to a teacher, which is improper. A real teacher will never ask you for your identity or your independence, but the real danger is not so much in abuse. Provided you have an honest teacher, the teacher is going to tell you if you are overdoing it, or the teacher is simply not going to let you give them your identity - they don't want it (Rama laughs). It took them long enough to eliminate their own, let alone to accept yours. Rather, the danger is that the level of your love descends. You see, every day when you love someone you have to bring them a new love. Yesterday's love isn't good enough. It has to be a higher and deeper love. So the path of love is not ecstatic love. It isn't that we just love someone or something and that's that. Rather, what we're doing is learning to love in a more deep and a more complete way, all of the time.

So the love grows and grows and grows. In time it develops, and as it develops we change. As the teacher sees you changing, the teacher focuses more light and more love and more attention on you. If the teacher sees that you're not changing, the teacher might hold back for a while; this might be a healthy approach. Or if the teacher sees you're becoming addicted to attention, the teacher will hold back. But in the study of love there are no rules, to be honest. The world may say you're a fool for loving your teacher. They may say that you're wrapped up in idolatry, but if they talked with the 12 disciples of Christ, if they talked with the Buddha's students, with Krishna's students, with the gopis, if they talked with anyone who has ever studied with a person who has attained liberation, they would find that it's always the same. How can you stop your heart when you love?

People in this world do the most foolish things for love. They'll settle down in one town to be with someone they love, they'll give up a career, they'll change the way they dress, dye their hair, give up vast sums of money, they'll do anything for love. And that's for love of a human being who doesn't necessarily fulfill you, who may get tired of you in a couple of years and push you away or whom you'll get tired of. So what can we say of a person who gives their all for love of a teacher who leads them to God or for love of God? This is a sensible person because their love brings them something every day - it brings them the light of immortality and eternity. So if you follow the path of love you really shouldn't expect to be understood by others. The path of love is its own reward. Your love itself, that experience, is what completes you. There's no place to go, there's nothing to attain, there's nothing to be reached. Love itself is all that you want, and that's certainly what you receive.

The path of love has many opponents - fear, self-doubt, self-pity, anxiety, hate, lust, greed, avarice - all the usual friends. All of these are obstacles to your love. The most successful way to combat them, these dark clouds that pass between the light of you and that which you love, is to feel that love itself will rescue you. That is to say, love will come from afar, from the distant skies, if you cry deeply enough within yourself, and take care of everything.

One who practices the yoga of love is like a child. When the child has a problem, when it can't cope with something, it cries, and when it cries someone comes and helps the child. So in the path of love, rather than pulling our willpower together or using our discrimination or working, we just cry inwardly. We sit in meditation and we cry to God, we cry to the light. With our whole heart and our whole soul, we reach and reach and cry and cry, as little children, knowing that God will do everything for us, that we're too insignificant and small to really be able to do anything, except cry - not unhappily with unhappy tears, but an inner cry, a feeling of reaching to God, saying, "Oh God, God, please come to me, please illumine me, please act in me and through me. I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I can't tell anymore. I could be doing what I feel is right and perhaps I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps it's all my ego and my vanity. Please show me what's right or don't even show me. Please just do it, whether it brings me happiness or unhappiness, riches or poverty, sorrow or joy. Please act in and through me. I love only you."

If you have a teacher you would feel, "Oh teacher, I love you more than anything and anyone else in all of existence. When you smile at me the world lights up. If you frown, my world ends. If I create a block between us through my foolishness, my pride, my arrogance, my jealousy, my fear, my self-love, then I suffer. I suffer and suffer and it's only when I remove those obstacles that I'll feel happy again, but I know that you love me no matter what I do because you are all love. You may be strict with me, you may be lenient. I trust you and I know that whatever you do or say is for my own good. I've looked into your heart and seen eternity and I know that eternity, through you, will always guide me and shelter me and protect me. I will do what you wish, I'll do my best for all, but even so I know I'm an insignificant creature and not capable of fulfilling the dharma. So please show me, please guide me. If I make a mistake please correct me, but more than anything please love me, and let me love you. Because as we merge our beings, as we fuse the light that is our reality together, that's my completion. That's when I see that I am you and that you are me. 'I am thine and thou art mine.'" This is how one should feel about the teacher.

One should feel that one's friends, the people who meditate around you, who are in your spiritual center, who seek, are likewise pilgrims on a journey. They're traveling to eternity also. You should love them, respect them, and whenever you see a good quality in them, you should admire it. If you see the friend as strong or self-giving, if they meditate well, then the proper attitude for one who follows the path of love is to respect and admire that quality because whenever you respect and admire a spiritual quality, it starts to grow inside yourself. If you see faults in others, look the other way.

You must feel that everyone is growing and developing, everyone has to go through a trial and error process of finding what is right, and actually, everything is right - even the errors are right. So look the other way. Don't linger on imperfection. Know that if you were in a perfected state of consciousness, you would only see perfection in all things. The child in fourth grade who's just learning algebra is not imperfect. While there may be a child in 12th grade who's much better at the subject, more adept because of their years, the child who's learning is not imperfect. The child is perfect in its current stage of evolution.

So when you follow the path of love you should feel that each one is perfect in their own right, and that while you can love others and admire them, you should never, ever, ever judge them. You can discriminate and see what's good and what's bad - there's nothing wrong with that. Lack of judgment doesn't mean that you don't see what is or is not. It simply means that you realize and recognize that everyone is constantly changing, that everyone is made up of consciousness, which assumes new forms constantly, and that the judgment that you pass today will only hinder a person in their spiritual evolution. Because your thoughts have some power, and all you do is say to the person, psychically, "This is what you are, you're fixed, you can't change," whereas in reality everyone is a flux. So it's good to suspend judgments forever. Rather, let everyone be what they want.

Don't try and hold people to you, don't try and push them away. Let life do everything for you. This is the proper attitude on the path of love. Focus your attention towards your teacher, your spiritual friends and do everything out of love. When you find that you're unhappy, know that it's because you're not loving properly. Don't blame others, don't have self-pity. Rather, just meditate, go deep within, and again find that strand of love, not simply the one that you found before but a higher strand of love, a deeper strand of love that will take you more and more into the core of reality.

Relationships are a proving ground for love. That is to say, the friends and associates that we have give us an opportunity on the path of love to practice love. We cannot say that you are spiritually advanced if you are unkind to those around you. The only way you can really evaluate spiritual advancement is to see how someone treats those who are close to them. Someone may be able to meditate well, but if they can't manifest that meditation in just good common sense by loving and being kind to those who are around them, then I can't say that they're spiritually developed. They may have learned to flex one muscle, but we can't say that their whole body is evenly and properly developed. Real spirituality and love always manifest. That is to say, it always goes to those who are with us and around us.

So practice love in your relationships. The key to this is avoiding expectation. It's expectation that makes most people miserable in love - remember the return on the investment. When you love someone, you shouldn't feel that they should love you in the same way in return or love you at all. If you do you'll be sorry because no one will probably ever love as you do, they'll love in their own way. You have to give people freedom. If you really want people to love you, you should free them.

You cannot compel someone to love. Love is like the wind. It comes when it does, it stops when it does, it changes direction when it does. Who are you and I to criticize the wind? So you should feel that love has its own independent form and formlessness, and when someone loves you accept their love and be grateful for it. If they love another, let them love! Who are you to say what they should or shouldn't do? If they stop loving, you should be grateful for that. Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life. A new situation will develop.

If there's no one in your life to love right now, then love yourself. A large part of the path of love is learning to love yourself - not to love yourself in the egotistical sense but just to enjoy being with yourself, hanging out with yourself, doing things by yourself. You have to love yourself even when you don't measure up to your own expectations. You have a certain idea of what you should do and what you should be and what you should become. But from my point of view, it's only a silly idea, one in a continuing series of silly ideas that passes through your mind.

It's good to be inspired. If you have a real inspiration of what you should try to do, do it. But if you don't measure up to your expectations, realize that you should just be life without expectations, that your expectations weren't necessarily correct then. You need to accept the fact that you will often do exactly the opposite of what you think is right, what you think is proper and natural, and you need to be able to accept that you're going to do that and still love yourself for doing that. Love yourself when you change, love yourself when you don't change. Love yourself day and night, in season and out. Love yourself when you're modest, love yourself when you're immodest. Try to have a more expanded sense of that which you are. Try to feel that you are eternity. There is no morality in this kind of love. There's only goodness. There's only light. And who can say what's right or wrong? Love is its own truth, and if you live the truth, the gospel of love, then you will be fulfilled and happy.

As your love grows - for spirit, for light, for the God within all - you'll find that your attachment to this world will begin to fall away, which doesn't really mean that you won't think it's a fabulous place, but you'll just be less concerned with it, or you might see it a little more correctly in perspective. One of the great things that happened to the astronauts in the early flights was they got up above the earth and suddenly they realized it wasn't very big. John Glenn and others looked down and they saw this little tiny globe, just one little dot among millions of dots. Down here on earth, in one country, in one state, in one city, in one house, the world seems pretty important, our world, but once you get up there and get a little perspective on existence, it's just another dot.

So what you need to see is that your current life and all the things that matter to you, are not really so important. They have their place but it's just a little dot and rather, you need to get some perspective on your existence. When we meditate with love we go very, very high - above thought, above form. We go out into space and we see existence in a truer way. And if you love very, very deeply, if you love truth and God, your love will cause you to have a union. You'll merge for a while, for a short time, with that truth. You'll become it. Each time you merge with God in your meditation you'll be freer and purer afterwards. It's as if you're going out into the sun, again and again, and each time you go out you get a little tanner.

So the light of eternity purifies, and it is only that real love of the infinite that will motivate you. While pain motivates us to a certain extent to go deeper within, to go higher, pain can only take us a certain distance. If we follow the path of pain, that is to say, avoidance, we'll make a certain amount of spiritual progress until we feel comfortable, but once we feel comfortable and the pain has stopped and we don't think it will start again, we'll stop evolving. Love is far superior as a spiritual device, as a spiritual vehicle, because when we follow the path of love we go higher and higher and higher. Our velocity actually increases as we go on, rather than decreases as with aversion, because our love grows and becomes more strong and more perfect.

Love is the strongest force in the universe. Once we harness ourselves to that force, it carries us to eternity. Yet at the same time, love is visceral and real. Love is physical. It embraces all things, all creatures and all beings. Love doesn't space you out or take you out of this world, it makes you conscious of your own immortality. But love also teaches you to love your own mortality; to love this body that's only here for a little while, just as we love the flowers that bloom for a short time and pass on; to love the skies and the scenes; to love all things in this world and all things beyond this world. As you do this more and more, you will move rapidly towards liberation.

Love leads us to ourselves - this is the mystery of love. What love does and why it does it? It's hard to say. It's an unknown chemistry. Who was it who started this great process? Who invented love? Who are we who experience love? Why does the wind of love blow hot and blow cold? Why are we spun around by existence? These questions can only be answered in your deep meditation.

It's difficult to stop thought, I admit it. It's hard to meditate in the beginning. Love is the shortcut to higher meditation. Above thought is love, and within and below thought is love. Love is a ladder that we can climb through thought. It's very hard to stop thought. Try with your willpower - it's very difficult. But if instead of trying to stop thought when you meditate you focus your attention on love - meditate on the heart center and just let that love grow and increase, more and more - then suddenly you'll find, guess what? Your thoughts are slacking, you're moving into a higher field of awareness, you're feeling wonderful. Light is everywhere and suddenly there's no thought. This is why love is said to be such an easy way to learn to meditate. You're using the positive power of emotion to take you beyond that which would be more difficult. There are other ways to stop thought, but love is certainly the easiest.

When you love, you should always watch the quality of your love. Become an observer and learn to be a little more detached. If you really love, then you're willing to step outside of your own love sometimes to do that which is right. As I suggested earlier, love has different levels. The highest kind of love is a very pure love. It's a love that just gives and gives and gives. In order for you to constantly improve the quality of your love, it's necessary for you to examine your love on a daily basis, not to go through a long, prolonged harangue with yourself about whether you're being good or bad in your love but rather just to look at it and ask yourself, "Am I loving as deeply as I am capable of loving?" Just ask yourself the question and then meditate. Don't try to love or force love in a certain way but just honestly ask your soul, ask your essence, "Am I loving as deeply as I can love?" Then if you meditate, your soul will answer you, not in words but in action. You see, whenever you really go to truth, truth helps you, but it's necessary for you to motivate yourself in a sense, to open yourself to truth. It's necessary to try to understand that while we all have a great capacity to love, very few of us will ever love in the proper way. But you must believe in your heart that you may be one of those few persons who will love in a true and deep way.

Now, you need to ask yourself, "Well, why is it that some people are able to love more than others? What are they doing that I'm not doing?" Don't try and do what they do, just ask yourself the question. Then go to God, your beloved, and say, "I would like to love more deeply and purely, more completely, and if it is Your will, I will do that, if it is not, I won't and I'll accept that. I'll just love You as best I can and love everyone as best I can." With that attitude, you'll find your love will grow and increase. If you just try to love more and more, you'll only get more frustrated. You'll be trying to do something, perhaps, that you're not ready for, that you're not prepared to do, that it's not time to do yet. When you don't get the result you seek, you'll think there's something wrong with you and you'll get discouraged and give up. Rather, the correct way is just to be, but to be very careful - careful in the sense that you want to be very honest with the way that you love.

Real honesty means that every day you have to go to the source several times, to meditate and to look into the eye of eternity and say, "Please act in me and through me. Please let my love increase, if it is your will. I feel that's the right thing, but even if it's not the right thing I'm willing to abide by your judgment." Then if you meditate very deeply, of course, you'll see that that which you were talking to is your own self - the finite portion of your being speaking to the infinite portion of your being.

In love we listen. In this world people love to talk and be active. Everyone wants to express their opinion. But in love we listen. We listen to the song of the heart. We listen to what others say. We listen to what our own being is telling us about the nature of existence and the nature of truth. So try to be a good listener. Listen in meditation, not to your thoughts but to your feelings. The true teacher of love is the heart. The heart is very, very wise. It makes mistakes from time to time, but it has a wisdom all of its own. So begin to probe your heart. Certainly you may have been hurt before in love, you may have had some bad experiences, but just because you get one bad apple doesn't mean they're all bad, you know, and you can even learn from the difficult ones. So try to feel that love is a modest and immodest teacher who will bring you through the school of existence, which is the heart. While you may be hurt sometimes by your own attachments, you don't love perfectly without first loving imperfectly. You have to go through all the stages and steps. And it's far, far better to love imperfectly than not to love at all, and then, of course, to learn to love perfectly.

There are different levels of heart. There's the heart of just the emotional feeling - you like someone, you don't like them. Then as we probe deeper in meditation we find that the heart has a new meaning. The heart is a place of great light and there are different gradations of light that pass through the heart, just as there are different currents that pass through the ocean. So we begin to sail our little boat of awareness on the currents of the heart, and they change and they shift from day to day and from moment to moment.

It is only if you have the courage to follow your heart that you will succeed on the path of love. You can feel what's right and not do it. You can love but not follow that love. The real test, then, on the path of love, which you'll come back to again and again until you pass it, is are you willing to give up everything for your love, for that which you love? No one will tell you who to love or what to love, but you must have the willingness to follow your love as far as it will take you. Whether it's practical or impractical, whether it brings you to destruction or salvation or damnation, it doesn't matter because these are just words and ideas in the empty minds of people who should know better. All there is is love, and if you follow that love everywhere, at every moment, in all of its rhapsodic conditions, even when the critics say, "You've got bad taste. Your love is too formless," it doesn't matter. Who cares? Let them criticize away. You are still with your love and that's all that matters - on the path of love.

Naturally there are other points of view and perspectives. As we examine the path of knowledge and the path of self-giving and the path of mysticism, you'll find things that in a sense almost contradict what I've said about the path of love. But it only contradicts if you think about it. Each pathway is unique and special and they even have a seasonal accord. The path of love, of course, is synonymous with the summer, the path of action and self-giving with the fall, the path of knowledge with the winter and the path of mysticism with the spring. Love, in terms of the day, is synonymous with the morning, action with the afternoon, knowledge with the evening and mysticism with the night.

While you may not follow the path of love yourself, it's good to learn as much as you can about it because some day you may be a teacher and as a teacher you may have students who follow a path far different than the one you walked upon in your current life. And you will find the four paths really are not so separate. They weave in and out of each other. We have to have love, of course, as we practice mysticism and jnana yoga and karma yoga. We have to have discrimination when we follow the path of love because otherwise we'll love the wrong thing, in the wrong way. We need laughter and power, which we find in mysticism, to love properly, to not be so hooked into our own love that we begin to feel self-pity or attachment. Of course the logical direction of the path of love, the next path that one follows after completing the path of love or while still on it - the path that is closest to it - is the path of self-giving, because mature love has to inevitably lead to self-giving.

So practice love, learn love and live in love. Don't be afraid to experiment with your life and with your heart, your meditation and your being. Just love. Meditate on love, give love. Find that person whom you consider to be most spiritually advanced and be with them, if you love them. If you don't love them, they're not the right one. Then you should go to one whom you can love. Merge your consciousness with that of a luminous being and then from there to eternity. Love those around you and when you don't come up to what you think you should be, when you don't reach the standards that you've set for yourself and your divergent selves run in the other direction, love that too.

Develop self-acceptance. Love all your different sides. Only then will immortality come to you, the awareness of immortality, because as long as you're running away from part of yourself, you're so busy running away that you can't see immortality. As long as you're too busy trying to become something that you're not, you're so busy doing that that you can't see your own immortality. You see, the secret of love is acceptance, acceptance of our finite self, of our life, our birth, our growth, our decay and our death; acceptance of the world around us, of eternity. The message of love is acceptance - self-acceptance in the smaller sense, of the individual personal self, and self-acceptance in the larger sense, of the self as eternity.

So practice love and self-acceptance and you'll see you'll have a beautiful life, an absolutely beautiful life. Certainly this is the prettiest of the pathways, the most emotional and the most fun, to be honest, in a way. It's the best to start with and sometimes the nicest to stay with. The path of love. Good luck. May your love guide you through the bardo to eternity.