“Love the Divine alone and the Divine will always be with you.” Mother wrote this to one of her children. It is the key to solve problems, the magic mantra to cure the ills of human life and consciousness, the one remedy for all inner and outer ailments.
Take ego, for example. It epitomises, in a way, the problem of man, and all spiritual disciplines urge the need to get rid of it, to surmount or uproot or suppress or annihilate it. Ego is a dangerous and perilous pitfall and must go. As to the methods by which this is to be done, well, the teachings vary: be disinterested, grow detached, serve others, forget yourself and your self-assumed importance, etc., etc., and all these methods are good: they help to control the ego, to tame it, to keep it under check, and even to master it. Yet the ego remains, it is there all the time; it is not uprooted, dissolved, annulled.
The method suggested here is simpler. Dissolve the ego through divine love. First you love the Divine — but you can love the Divine only when he has already entered into your heart, when he is already there; it is his Love that radiates through you and you love him. The fact that you love the Divine shows that the Grace has touched you, has come down upon you; and it is this Grace that cures you of your ego to the extent that you let it work. Grace alone can do it.
The Vedantin imagines he is rid of the ego when he merges into Sachchidananda. It is not wholly true — for man is a complex being, an entity made of different parts and of different levels of consciousness — and even when one has attained the Divine in one part of his being, the other parts, however dormant, keep the stamp of ignorance and ego. If you want the Divine in his fullness, you must plunge in, whole and entire — or rather, you must let the supreme Consciousness come down and inundate your being, possess it and mould it into its own being — and what else is Grace if not this delivering approach and touch of the Divine.
To love the Divine means to open wide the gates of your house to this Grace, and after that there is nothing that is impossible, be it the effacement of the ego or a new birth of the entire being.
Published November 1981
