The Complete Yoga Community

One atom must stick to another otherwise life would fall apart. But what is this glue that holds and keeps everything together? It’s love, says Kavi Yogiraj Mani Finger

An ancient Greek philosopher once said: “If everybody, every creature, every human being – who is the most powerful of all – hated at the same second, the world would disintegrate”. The Source, The Divine, Brahman, has given us this power of holding the universe together, called love. And this is the cosmic phenomenon that, like breath, is something given to us and yet we spend our lives never realising or contemplating its cosmic nature.

If man could only understand this concept that love holds the world together, even with a small part of our consciousness, a new world would open up, and we would begin to look at life from a different perspective. It may be strange at first, but you begin to realise that, “Ah! This is what I have to learn; this is what I have got to exercise; this is what I have got to develop!” The cosmic phenomenon of consciousness in me, an unconditional state of being – this is the state we call love.

Let us examine the way most of us consider love, the way I call “committed clinging”. We like to regard everyone around us as our children and, as such, we like to give the orders and tell them what to do and what not to do. Or, we like to regard ourselves as a helpless child and leap into somebody’s lap. This “lap” can belong to an individual, an organisation, a community, a teacher, a person – any parental concept – and so, this love relationship takes one of two patterns – either we are fed by someone or we are feeding others.

But this is a false, distorted kind of love. This is a love of clinging and not the kind of real love that holds this world together at all. The saying goes that “He that clings to anything, suffering must come”. Clinging means to get or use something for our own happiness. Love means to give – loving, we learn, is about the “other” and not the “I”. In clinging you are important; in love you make yourself an instrument of that love and a channel to higher love.

The urge to committed clinging, to belong, to be someone’s child, or them to be our own child, is easy and yet tremendously powerful – we are either jumping into somebody’s lap for protection and advice, or we are giving protection.

While these patterns of love have the potential to give us pleasure, it is merely to entertain. It may be used in as simple a case as a casual friendship, a search for excitement, a means for escape, or as complicated as marriage or, our choice of career. Either we want to control the pleasure or we want to become part of it.

There is another way to love and it involves simply being whom and what you are. The sacrifice in love is your ego. Love is surrender while clinging is aggression. Look lovingly at any object and it gives it special life. Whom or whatever is beautiful, whatever is creative, is so delicate that if you try to grab it directly you will destroy it.

We must simply be what we are in this world, in life – no acting, no motivation – just loving. Neither the lover nor the beloved be, be the loving! Be that where there is no motivation and then, if you can be what you are, situations will be as they really are, automatically. Then you can start to communicate directly, accurately, not indulging in any kind of nonsense, any kind of emotional or philosophical, logical, interpretations about love.

This way of loving allows tremendous space and room for creative development – space in which to dance, to exchange love. Then we will not be playing the game of hypocrisy, of self deception, entertainment or clinging for a purpose. We will be loving and creating a new world for others and for ourselves.

By Kavi Yogiraj Mani Finger