Ananda and Love

I have been experiencing calm and silence, but the Ananda and love which I was feeling have disappeared.

The basis of calm and silence should be there first — otherwise the Ananda and love may take a too vital character and prove unstable.

You once wrote about the disappearance of love and Ananda: “It is so with all the spiritual experiences. The ordinary consciousness is not accustomed to hold them.” But if calm and silence came, would it still be the ordinary consciousness?

I mean by the ordinary consciousness the human consciousness which has to be changed — it is into that consciousness that all these experiences from above come in order to change it first into higher mind and then into a still higher thing. Before divine Love and Ananda can be made to settle, there is much more that is to be done — first the psychic love must be there and other things besides.

How would you distinguish the psychic love from the divine love?

The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demands, but it is human and can err and suffer. The Divine Love is something much vaster and deeper and full of light and Ananda.

One is told that without a universal love there can be no real progress. But mostly one remains inwardly withdrawn and concentrated on the Mother.

You are not able now to have the universal love — it is not in your nature. Wait till your nature is widened by the higher consciousness, then your disabilities in that direction will disappear.

Sometimes the being feels something physically all over like a thrill, but it is not exactly a thrill. Is it what may be called a “glow”?

A glow means a subdued but rich light or else a sort of warm exhilaration of a luminous kind.

Somebody told me that the void is a Divine Darkness.

I don’t believe much in this Divine Darkness. It is a Christian idea. For us the Divine is Peace, Purity, Wideness, Light, Ananda.

A sadhaka need not give himself to an outsider, but can he express his psychic love to him? I would also like to know from you if the sadhaka might help him to rise higher.

It is safer not to indulge in such activities. One is more likely to be drawn into the other’s consciousness than to be able to help him — unless he is himself a truth-seeker.

To give oneself to an outsider is to go out from the atmosphere of sadhana and give oneself to the outer world forces.

One can have a psychic feeling of love for someone, a universal love for all creatures, but one has to give oneself only to the Divine.