Signs of Love : When You Know, You Know!
Love is not a happening. Love is being. Love is not an act, it is existence. Love is not an emotion, it’s your very nature.
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Feelings change, thoughts change, ideas change, and the body changes all the time. But the thirst deep within us is for something that is not changing, that is eternal. That’s why we use these phrases or expressions when we are in love – I want to be like this forever. Because love takes you beyond time. The origin of life is love and the goal of life is also love.
You don’t notice the time, you feel it’s only five minutes. You might have spent 5 hours.
If there is anything in this universe that cannot be defined, it is love. If you can describe love, then it is far from the truth. The nature of love is that which you cannot express or define. You give flowers, you hug, you prostrate, you make offerings but still, something remains unexpressed. We can only find a little expression, just a glimpse of it.
Love’s Peek-a-Boo Game
You can hide thoughts; it’s not difficult. You can hide feelings also but it’s a little more difficult than the thoughts. You look at a man or a woman, and you don’t know what they are thinking but you can make out what they’re feeling sometimes; though not all time. Feelings are difficult to hide. One may try to hide a lukewarm feeling but an intense feeling just shows up in the face, in their expression, in their life. Look at somebody, their eyes, you can see what is there behind those eyes. There is love or hatred, there is anger, there is fear, what is there you can make out. This is not the same case with thoughts; someone is scheming, and planning, you look at them you don’t know. Feelings are subtler than thoughts so they are difficult to hide and subtler than the feeling is love. Love is almost impossible to hide and the more you hide the more it comes into expression.
The more you try to hide it the more it shows up in your actions.
11 Signs of Divine Love
Though Divine love is only one, you can see it coming out in eleven different forms. In order to praise something, it needs an intense feeling of love inside.
1. Endless Praise, Admiration
You see nothing wrong with them. Even if you see a fault in them, you justify it in some way – “Everyone does that; it is normal.”
Have you noticed when you’re crazy about something, that you talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it? Like, when someone has fallen in love with a girl or with a boy or with somebody, then they always talk about them, talk about them, talk about them, talk. This is the first manifestation.
So when you’re crazy, when you’re experiencing Divine love, the sign of it is in the form of praise, seeing all the qualities of the Divine. Any amount of praise, you won’t feel is sufficient or that you are done. Qualities do not have form.
When you have been in love with something, you like to talk and talk and talk about it. It never tires you. Just a mild interest cannot evoke such an amount of praise. That’s why I said you have to be crazy to praise so much, so much, so much. That is a sign of Divine love. One would go on praising continuously, nonstop, non-ending, and still one feels, “Oh, it’s not sufficient. I have to do it more, more, and more.”
2. From Form to Formless
What you speak does not mean much at all. Many do not even know what they are speaking.
Even if you are aware of the formless nature of Divinity, a form makes it more interesting. It kindles the love in your heart. It just relates, because your mind is always used to forms. You open your eyes, you see forms. You deal with forms. All your life, even when you’re sleeping, forms appear. That is what dreaming is.
For example, when you appreciate a flower, you appreciate the form. When you see truth in the form as a quality and glorify it, it takes you beyond the qualities. In the same way, if you love a flower, and deeply appreciate it, you will see that it dissolves into the formless. You will see the space that is hiding deep inside that flower.
3. Adoring the Beloved
You want to see them happy always, and you want them to have the best.
The third one is puja. Puja means worship, honoring, offering, offering one’s self. Sense of giving, and offering, is one of the expressions of Divine love.
Whatever you love, you want to possess it. And in the process of possessing, you bring ugliness to that beauty. You make the beautiful thing ugly. Your expression gets distorted.
Worshipping is just the opposite of wanting to possess. Whatever you appreciate, adore, recognize the beauty, you worship it. Nature is worshipping you. God is worshipping you in so many forms. So a puja is a replica of what nature does to you.
4. Daydreaming
They are always in your mind.
That memory comes again and again. It’s not that you make an effort to remember Divinity or Divine love. As soon as you wake up, the first thought comes about the Divine, about the loved one.
If you have loved anyone, you know how the thought keeps coming. You don’t make any effort to think about that person. But the thought constantly comes, you remember, and you go deep and deep in the silence within you. That becomes meditation. A deep interest in meditation or a deep interest in remembrance is one of those qualities that happens.
5. Selfless Service
You think you have not done enough for them, and the more you do, the more you want to do for them. They are always in your mind.
One form of expression of Divine love is so much of humbleness and service, as one’s nature. Not even the thought comes, “I am doing some service.” You can’t help but do the service. Even if one wants to try to abstain from it, it doesn’t happen. One finds oneself back into it. Love gets expressed as service.
Do you know what brings authority? It’s being a servant. A perfect servant has total authority and total responsibility. A caretaker, a servant, has full authority over the home. If the master is out of the place, he acts as the master. He gets that authority. A servant is one in whom the master has bestowed his trust. Being a servant is to acknowledge the fact the Divine has bestowed this trust in me. It has given me this job to carry on. So it is my job. It’s not somebody else’s job.
All the prophets have spoken with that authority because their love for the Divine was so deep. This is strange mathematics. If you don’t want to be a servant, you can never be a master. If you don’t want to be a disciple, you can never be a guru, a master. Its first qualification is this, being a servant.
6. Best Friends Forever
To someone above you, you may have a lot of respect but there may not be love. You can have respect, and honor. You may honor them, but your heart may not start speaking. In such cases, the master will come and put his hand around you, “Come on, what is it? What is the matter? How are you doing? What is happening? Open up.” Love is expressed in the form of a friend, or companion.
You get hurt over even small things.
Friend means playfully. The wisdom is not preached to you in a very serious manner but in an all-playful manner. To me, a friend plays. As one’s beloved.
7. The Better Half
You want them to be yours exclusively.
The purpose of a life partner is to rejoice and to share life with and to talk to someone who you can depend on. Feeling that the Divine is part of you, and, ‘‘He cares for me so much that He cannot exist without me! How can He exist without me?’’
8. Like Mother’s Love
Ordinary things become extraordinary.
A baby winking at its grandmother becomes an extraordinary event.
This attitude is also in you naturally. Anyone whom you love, you immediately go to care for them and feed them and take care of them. Motherly affection for, the parental affection to, the Divine. Loving the Divine as your child, as having been born out of you. “Oh, it is mine.” Sense of ‘mine’. And it has all these qualities. This happens. Wherever you see that magnanimity, enormous love, you start dissolving and you start caring for. That magnanimous love.
There was an instance, where a teenage boy beat up his mother. They were both traveling on a train and he was beating his mother and the police came. She was bruised and just bleeding. The police came and arrested the son. They were going to take him to custody but the mother pleaded with the police, “No please leave him. He’s my son.” She was all bruised and she was almost half conscious. In that half-conscious state, she pleads to the police, “No no no don’t beat up my son. Don’t don’t punish him. He’s my child.” He’s nearly 20 years old. She could not see any imperfection in the child. Divine Love brings such perfection in life, that you see everything with wisdom.
9. Complete Surrender
With wisdom, when one sees life, with experience, when one looks at life and says, “Even if this life can be a flower on the path of the Divine, it’s worth it. This life is offered to the Divine. This belongs to the Divine.” Completely offering your life. That very moment, the worries disappear. You will not start worrying. You’ll smile. You will smile through all, smile through all situations.
That is a great expression of love, ‘‘My very breath, my very existence is Yours. Every particle of my existence is offered to You. Every breath I breathe in is Yours. I am Yours.’’. That total surrender, letting go. ‘‘You do whatever You want with this life! It is Yours!’’. This flavor, of not even keeping any bit of ‘‘me, I’’ inside, is atmanivedanasakti.
10. I Belong to You
If you are loving, then you are welcome everywhere in the world. If you feel and be one with people anywhere you go, then people are ready to do anything for you.
This is seeing everything as You. That everything belongs to You.
11. Longing
Many of you have experienced intense longing, and at some point that longing itself becomes a joy. And that very longing itself becomes blissful. And that very longing is so enjoyable.
What We Learned?
Love is something that cannot be hidden or expressed. This is the pain of lovers around the world, they cannot express it 100% and so they feel incomplete. And they cannot hide it, it just shows up.
Love Maths
The purpose of creation is to go from two to one. Two implies a sense of separation; painful separation, hence love seeks to become one. The nature of love is to unite, to become one.
Mystic Feeling of Divine Love
When you love somebody, what do you love in them? Do you love their qualities, attributes, or the person? The love for someone just because they are great, have wonderful qualities, look very beautiful or they are kind, these are all business and not Divine love. Often love diminishes. A child loves its mother and as the child gets older, the love for the mother goes to the background because it starts loving its friends, then their husband or wife, and then their children. But Divine love is contrary to this: Every moment it grows, the more time you spend, there is a feeling of wanting more.
Sukshmataram Anubhavarupam: It’s a form of experience. You can live it, you can be it, you can shed tears of gratitude, you cannot express it. You cannot fully share it with anyone.
Sukshmataram Avichinnam: Divine love is uninterrupted, there are no gaps in it. There are no flaws there. Divine love is continual. Your love is so unconditional, it does not depend on the behavior of the other person.
It does not depend on the attributes of the other person. It does not depend upon what they do or don’t do to you. You are in love because you can’t be but in love. You have no choice as it is your very nature.
You shake the world. You don’t get shaken.
