Love: The Ultimate Alchemy

 

Ravindranath Tagore says, “Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment.” The great mystic and poet very suitably sees it as “the ultimate truth that lies at the core of creation”.

Love defines the countless pathways to the cause of creation as Lord Byron points out with poetic precision: “Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.”

Do you think fear, anger, hate, envy, jealousy, ego, lust and greed have their own standing? No. Just like darkness is simply an absence of light, all these tortuous tools that lynch our self are nothing but phantoms doing painful rounds in the absence of love. Like a tiny lamp puts out darkness simply by casting light, without fighting the dark, a simple ray of love, a symbol of our true self, chucks out the flimsy appendages of the unreal self.

There is definitely limit to everything in cosmos. But there is one exception: Love, prem as we say it in Hindi. Yoko Ono feels the mankind’s regret in not fully absorbing their self in the sea of love when he says: “The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough.”

One need not fight fear, fury, hatred, jealousy, distrust, ego, lust and greed at various fronts to defeat them. They have a common root: burial of your loving self, your essential nature, under the peripheral dust of illusions and ignorance, making you identify with what is essentially not your real self. Remove the grime, allow the light of love to emanate from your soul, enter your behavioral self, and all around you see peace, harmony and balance. The vices, which you yourself condemn against yourself after being judgmental on your own self, just dry up, like fresh rays of sun dispel the last traces of dark clinging to the morning twilight.

A house—an assemblage of concrete, mortar, bricks and steel—turns a home only with love and care. Without affection decorating it from inside, it’s merely a soulless structure. Billy Graham says it very aptly: “Nothing can bring a real sense of security into the home except true love.”

The mankind’s fears driven by greed have already resulted in nukes and super-nukes having the capacity to destroy not just earth but many planets and stars around. Does it serve any purpose? The modern civilization sitting on the stockpiles of death and destruction is always one button push away from annihilation. No man, we don’t need hate anymore. We need more loving people around. The moisture of love will dampen the explosives of death and destruction.

Love for your man, your woman, your family, friends and near and dear ones is the seed that holds the potential to blossom into universal love for all and everything making you a loving person. So guys start your journey on the love path as a lover, as a caring husband, wife, parent or friend and proceed onto nurture the seed to help it grow into a robust tree of loving kindness for all. This basically is supposed to be the natural evolution course for your consciousness attached to this mater, this mix of materials called body comprising water and few kilograms of matter found in earth. The consciousness, the blueprint, the carrier of your previous journeys, is on the path of evolution, to merge into the all pervading super-consciousness, like a drop of water is moving to mix with the seas.

Do you think you can fight darkness by flailing your arms and fists in the dark? No man, that’s not the way. Darkness cannot be dispelled. It stays irrespective of your fusillade. All you need is a small lamp. It simply leaves darkness redundant by itself.

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Love definitely is the panacea for thousands of ailments afflicting human society. The Modern Gandhi of the West further says, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Haven’t you felt almost fully alive when in love with your man or woman? Well, that sums it up. This feeling is just a glimpse of the eternal bliss available on the higher rungs on the same ladder. Move up. There are no alternatives. This is the sole destiny.  

Mind you, there are no sinners. We just have loving and less loving people. Come, join me in tilting the scale in favor of love. That is your destiny. Later or sooner, in this avatar or in the ones coming up next, you have to get along. Just like a river’s natural destination is the sea, your soul’s journey is to merge into all-encompassing love of the eternal entity. The so called sinners, who we scorn at, are nothing but strayed selves, like the river exploring its final path to the sea gets into a lake somewhere but finds it unviable to stay there and takes on the journey again. All of us have to explore and find the fallacy of many a thing that our disillusioned self makes us believe and come face to face with the ultimate meaning of life.

Max Muller says: “A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.”

Come, let’s explore the path of love, the alchemy, which remedies the suffering self, making it a beautiful, loving entity.     

Love is the seed of spirituality. Holy people of all religions and faith reached one single point, all-encompassing love.

Saint Basil: “A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”

Love, compassion and kindness are the biggest commonality across various faiths and belief systems. Love is basically the essential nature of soul. Kindness, compassion, gratitude, generosity, truth, beauty, and all other virtues we hold in high esteem are simply the manifestations of love. Love is the light that shows everything as it is. It dispels the dark corners surrounding our selves. It is the guiding light that takes us on the path of our individual and collective destinies.

Though no words are sufficient to cover the fathomless power of love, let's try to know a bit more about our loving self and its miraculous powers in shaping our lives. 

This book is meant to set up an instructional manual to help one rise higher on the scale of evolution by changing one's limited love, defined by family and relations, to universal love for a compassionate and all-loving being.

The work is meant to help one hone the art and craft of building a loving character, which in turn sets up the base for a happy and joyful life. All the chapters in the book are full of commonest of the common day-to-day techniques, which can build up our compassionate self, like we work in the gym to strengthen our muscles.

Things are rapidly aggravating. It's an angrier world than ever. Material progression has proved counterproductive. Mother Nature is ailing due to our greedy onslaught, which borders on raping mother earth. Now an ailing nature is handing over its pain and miseries to the human society in the form of wars, diseases and strife. Irony is that we are materially the most advanced society in history with the USP of being the most miserable one at the same time. Isn’t it the right time to go into a pause and rethink our collective priorities? Through my work, I am simply trying to ask individuals and organizations to reconsider their values because there has been a basic flaw, otherwise why would there be so many problems.

My work involves simple tools and techniques of going into self-discovery to see things in a larger perspective. It’s a semi-spiritual journey looking within and out to be aware of the bigger plights written everywhere, to inculcate a basic loving nature almost at the instinctive level, to be more observant of the self as much as we observe things outside. It breeds self responsibility, leading to a considerate nature. These are the basic building blocks of a compassionate self.

For decades I have been into spirituality and meditation. All the simple instructions, guidance tools and observations are born of my own experiences. Spirituality is not something about mysteries in the farthest corners of the universe. It’s simply about being a more aware person. It’s about realizing the basic loving nature in each and everyone around. It’s about harnessing joy out of the mundane incidences of life.

Working on this book itself has been really rewarding. I cannot ask for much other than writing it. It has given me so much of unconditional love and peace while working on it. I am not looking much on the material front from this treatise on love. All I need is one more partner in spreading the message of unconditional love, peace and harmony. 

I firmly believe that ordinary beings possess extraordinary potential to win against odds, to jump over hurdles, to smile over tears, and, most importantly, to be happy when there aren’t enough reasons to be. People like you and me are the faceless constituents of a massive commonality. We are surrounded by a swiping generality. We are coloured in the monochromes of mundane reality. Still we are special. And that speciality is love at the core of our being.

Through my work, I acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary people. I see heroes and heroines on the common stage of life chugging around. And most importantly, we have the very same essentially loving nature at the core. Just that the flimsy clouds of ego and apparent sufferings keep it buried inside. I try to help people unearth the basic seeds of goodness inside to help them grow into luxuriant trees of compassionate beings.

We fight, and oftentimes fail, but write a little passage in the infinite book of life: an ordinary life that was lived substantially. On the small stage of life, we live very intensely. Somehow, the world would not be the world that is still beautiful without our contribution. We heave humanity onwards in its march to some better destination. Just that all this gets overshadowed by the shifting clouds of ego, stress, frustration and jealousy. We simply need to look beyond the clouds to spot the glorious sun.

With our essentially loving nature fully acknowledged in our daily lives, all of us can be the heroes and heroines of our stories. The seed in us, the seed of love, carries the potential to be the tallest, luxuriant-most tree. The powerful force of creation propels the potential for maximization. Nature doesn’t want it to be a world of half-smiles, half-growths, half-blossoms and half-potential. There is a tendency for fullness. It pulls the process of evolution for the maximum, for completion, for what we call greatness. And the driving force for all this is love. It exists in each and every atom in the cosmos. All we need is to be aware of it. And this awareness needs practice. I have put an effort to nurture this habit of always reminding ourselves of our basic loving nature.

O my mind, my seat of potentiality, take my journey further,

Be the seat of my strength, not weakness,

Be the seat of kindness, not cruelty,

Be the source of light, not darkness.

You, me and all of us are born for the stories of greatness. Let’s acknowledge our loving nature to see through the journey. Please be my partner in sharing this message of universal love.