Practicing Universal Love

 

Gentleness in speech gives you self-assurance. Kindness in thoughts makes you insightful. Benevolence in your actions copiously produces love.

Your near and dear ones constitute the first step in your journey on the path of love. They are there to make you taste its fragrance. Your passion, commitments, responsibilities and duties to the immediate people in your life are the tangible proofs of the unseen, innermost core of your compassionate being. The journey from particular love to the universal love is your destiny. And of course just like any other goal, it can be practiced methodically.

Rumi says we are born of love; love is our mother. Definitely we are! We just need to remind ourselves of this ultimate truth as much as we can. This fundamental existential fact is most prone to be forgotten under the impulsive, incidental, circumstantial and instinctual insinuations of life’s spin-offs in our day-to-day tumbles. It simply helps to remember it. Try it for some time even in the most testing areas of your life, where you find yourself surrounded by biting dogs and hungry wolves. You will see the results earlier than you expect.

Albert Camus took it a further and found love to be his sole duty: just to love. Well, long before we start taking love as our duty, we start taking it as our right since childhood. But then the momentum continues late into our lives. Little do we realize that it makes the life system too lop-sided. So balance it out. Learn to accept love as a duty also. And love and duties pooled together make it a huge sea of humanity.   

Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to stick with love finding hate too great a burden to bear. It’s time for we lesser mortals to take to love. In any case, we have got too used to set targets and go after them systematically. Practicing love is no exception. Setting up a goal and persevering to achieve it is almost the primary aim of the modern man. So there is no harm in appearing to achieve a stage that is always there inside all of us. Well, if that makes us feel like achievers, nothing wrong with that. It makes us feel proud. It’s better than so many other vanities of life. 

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. cautions us never to forget the three powerful resources we always have available to us: love, prayer and forgiveness. Believe me brothers and sisters, these are the most potent faculties in human personality. Name a thing that they cannot achieve? There is a subtle and diligent art of keeping love, prayer and forgiveness by your side.