Spiritual Wisdom

by Swami Vivekananda 

The world is full of the talk of love, but it is hard to love. Where is love? How do you know that there is love? The first test of love is that it knows no bargaining. So long as you see a man love another only to get something from her/him, you know that that is not love; it is shop keeping. Wherever there is any question of buying and selling, it is not love. So, when a man prays to God, "Give me this, and give me that," it is not love. How can it be? I offer you a prayer, and you give me something in return; that is what it is, mere shop keeping.

Bhakti yoga is the science of higher love. It shows us how to direct it; it shows us how to control it, how to manage it, how to use it, how to give it a new aim, as it were, and from it obtain the highest and the most glorious results, that is , how to make it lead us to spiritual blessedness. Bhakti yoga does not say, "Give up." It only says, "Love. Love the Highest!" -- and everything low naturally falls off from him, the object of whose love is the Highest.

The renunciation necessary of the attainment of bhakti is not obtained by killing anything, but just comes in as naturally as in the presence of an increasingly stronger light, the less intense ones become dimmer and dimmer until they vanish away completely. So this love of the pleasures of the senses and of the intellect is all made dim and thrown aside and cast into the shade by the love of God Himself.

He who cries out with his whole heart, "O Lord, I want nothing but Thee" -- to him the Lord reveals Himself.

A finite subject cannot love, not a finite object is loved. When the object of the love of a man is dying every moment, and his mind also is constantly changing as he grows, what eternal love can you expect to find in the world? There cannot be any real love but in God: why then all these loves? These are mere stages. There is a power behind impelling us forward, we do not know where to seek the real object, but this love is sending us forward in search of it. Again and again we find out our mistake. We grasp something, and find it slips through our fingers, and then we grasp something else. Thus on and on we go, till at last comes light; we come to God, the only One who loves. His love knows no change and is ever ready to take us in.

Why should we expect anything in return for what we do? Be grateful to the man you help, think of him as God. Is it not a great privilege to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow men.