LOVE IS UNDYING
Chapter Nine
LOVE IS UNDYING
Love cannot be ndasured ; love cannot be weighed; love cannot be dissected with any scalpel or instrument: but love exists. Love is the greatest power in the universe. Love is the fulfilling of the law. The whole universe exists because of love. It is this love which guides its destiny and the destiny of every living creature throughout the whole of being. This love is the motivating power and is responsible for breaking down the barriers between the two worlds of matter and spirit. It enables those who have made the greatest journey of all to retrace their steps and to proclaim that message, old, but new, that love conquers death.
Give yourself to the power of love which has led you and tries to increase your receptivity so that you can become a greater channel. As sure as night follows day, as summer follows spring, as the seed bears its fruit, so the power of the spirit will unfold itself and each step on the ladder will bring you nearer to the fulfilment of your own being. Retire when you can for a few moments from the earthly scene with all its hustle and bustle and allow the inner spirit to manifest so that the tremendous latent, dynamic power of the divinity within yourselves finds expression.
Have no fear in your heart; banish it completely. The power that has guided your life for so many years will not desert you. It has sustained you throughout and will fulfil its task, as you must fulfil yours. The gifts with which you were endowed still have their part to play. Behind those who love you in our world there is the power of the Great Spirit itself. That power is incapable of failing.
The universe exists because of divine power that is infinite, limitless. Yet the overwhelming majority of beings in your world can register only the tiniest fraction of all that power because they do not provide the conditions to allow it to reach them. You have to learn, all of you, how to open your hearts, minds and souls to receive the fullness of the divine benediction which could be yours. To do so, you must learn to cultivate confidence, trust, faith, peace, tranquillity.
In that atmosphere you become recipients of the vast riches that infinity has to offer. That is the law. That is how it works. The power is limited to your capacity to receive and to assimilate. Increase the capacity and you will receive more. It is as simple as that. As you gradually banish sadness and sorrow, the clouds lift and the sunlight of certitude can reach you in growing measure.
It is divine love that makes the universe possible, that guides the universe and those who dwell in it. The reflection of the divine love which members of the human family feel for one another enables them not only to serve those they love, but others who are in no way tied to them by links of blood relationship. Love inspires them to serve those who are less fortunate than themselves. The love that is the apex of all life, the foundation of all life, the source of all life, filters through human beings, seeking to express itself in greater measure, so that in the fullness of time the whole universe will be encircled with the love of the Being who endowed it all.
It is easy to love those you love. There is no virtue, no saintliness, in that. But to love those you do not love, that is the attribute of an evolved soul. To go to those who hate you, to serve those to whom you are not attracted, that is hard. It is difficult, but the ideal of the difficult must always be in front of you, to strive to achieve that which is hard, for that is the true measure of service. To be charitable to those who win your sympathy, that is not difficult. To be compassionate to those to whom you are attracted, that is not difficult. But to serve those who are your enemies, that is the hardest.
The highest is the most altruistic form, loves because it must, loves because it knows that love is the fulfilling of the divine law. To heal a child with an appealing face, that is easy, but to heal someone who is misshapen and whose very appearance induces repulsion, that is difficult, that is service. True love never seeks to be measured. It loves because it has no other means of expressing itself. The Great Spirit is infinite love and seeks nothing for itself. The higher you go in the scale, the greatest beings that you can reach, never demand, never request, never ask. They merely give.
I wish that could be said for people in your world. We are condemned by those who do not understand us, but we require nothing for ourselves. We only desire to serve those whom we can serve. May you all learn to respond to the highest planes of spirit. May you all realise that you are never alone, but always encompassed around and about by a host of those who love you, who seek to guard and guide you and to help and inspire you. And may you, as you un-fold your own spirit, realise that you are being drawn closer to the greatest spirit of all, becoming more in unison with His laws.
Faith, that is faith alone, sometimes fails when the winds of bitter experience blow. But the faith that is born of knowledge provides a foundation which is so strong that no wind of circumstance can disturb it. Blessed are those who believe and have not yet seen. But thrice blessed are they who know and, because they know, place their faith in that which is not yet revealed to them, because they know that the laws of the universe are operated by a power which is love and wisdom.
We are able to demonstrate that life is continuous because it is life and because it is spiritual. Thus every individual can be aware whilst on earth that he is a spiritual being, not a physical one, that he is a spirit with a body, not a body with a spirit. His entry into a world of matter is part of a priceless heritage. He associates with matter because he is spirit, and spirit gives animation and life to all that is material. That spirit is part of the Great Spirit, divine in essence, similar in quality, different only in degree.
As live lives of unselfishness and altruism, with the desire to serve, so the Great Spirit that is within you finds fuller expression and you begin to fulfil the purpose of your being. It is not wrong to have a personal love. It would be better to apply it to a wider circle. It is better to have love in action than love in inaction. There is no quality that is incapable of having its highest and its lowest forms, its brightness as well as its darkness.
Very often love of a family is selfish, a love of blood ties. Often it is governed by a protective instinct and is a rem-nant of the animal ancestry in the evolutionary stream. But love is capable of its highest aspects when it will strive to love all without thought of self, without reward, without warmth, but because it is self-abnegation, the divine in action. Love desires to serve, to uphold, to comfort. Love is expressed in mercy, compassion, kindliness, goodness. Love is revealed in renunciation and sacrifice.
Why do you think that your loved ones who have passed to our world return to you? For the vast majority death is a reward, a liberation, a release from prison. They are entitled to all that our world has to offer them. They have said farewell to old age, infirmity and the many prob-lems that harass the denizens of your world. Yet, despite all the tremendous obstacles that stand in the way of com-munication between the two states of life, they return of their own free will because they love you. Where their love is they are. Where their love is their treasure is also. They desire to serve because they love. It is for this supreme reason that no matter what hostility may be directed against us, no matter how gigantic may seem the forces which oppose us in our world, they will fail.
Rejoice at what you have received. Rejoice in what you have been able to share. Rejoice in the knowledge that love is stronger than death and that whatever stands in the way is overcome by love seeking its own. Let the love that is around and about you comfort, uphold and sustain you. It is there in a richness of measure that I cannot convey to you. I try so hard sometimes, but even with my command of your language I find it too inadequate to express thoughts which can convey the depth of love showered upon you by those who are closer than the beating of your own heart.
You have seen love in your world enable many wondrous acts to be performed, of altruism, heroism, service, self-abnegation, but you cannot measure the potency of the love that comes from an evolved spiritual being who gathers part of the life force itself to enable him to place the protective mantle around your shoulders. You cannot receive unless you are ready to receive. This is the way the spirit works. It is so simple when you understand it; qualify and receive. The amount to be received is infinite. What restricts it is your capacity. Always in our world are those who are ready to give you more when you are ready to receive it. They cannot give you what is beyond your capacity.
Always look up, never down. The sun's radiance comes from above, not from below. The sun is but an emblem of an eternal radiance. The spiritual sun can fill you with illumination and vitality. It can stimulate the spirit within yourself. There is nothing in your world of matter that need cause you to be downcast, as long as you remember you are eternal by nature and all that happens is part of a pilgrimage. You cannot learn spirituality in a book. You cannot be taught spirituality by a teacher. You have to earn it by your own life, by your deeds. Spirituality is the burgeoning of divinity within the individual.
It is the power which holds us always in its embrace of infinite love, which seeks to guide us so that we truly fulfil our noble heritage and thus achieve our divine destiny. It is the greatest power in the universe, responsible for all mani-
festations of being, majestic or minute. It is the power which is conscious of our needs and strives to show us how we can attain them. It is the power which would lead us always into those paths which would make us increasingly aware of who we are, what we are and what we could be. Let us, therefore, in this knowledge rest content that it will always guide us with benevolence. Let us surrender ourselves to its loving care and know that we are in the hands of the Great Spirit of love and wisdom.
Perfect love casts out fear. Knowledge dispels fear, for fear is born of ignorance. Where there are love, trust and knowledge, there fear cannot reign. An evolved spirit cannot be afraid at any time, because he knows there is no experience that can come to him in any phase of life that he cannot master, for he is the Great Spirit. The love which has surrounded you will never fail. It is the infinite love of the Great Spirit, shedding its luminous rays through count-less channels, striving to reach and uphold all those who seek to serve. This mighty power will always sustain you. In your time of weakness it will give you strength and in your time of sorrow it will give you comfort. It is the protective band welded around you, unbreakable because it is divine.
What we have to offer is the proof that love is undying, that death is powerless to separate those whom love has joined together and that death cannot act as a prisoner for a spiritual being once it has escaped the thraldom of earth. It is not until you come to our world that you under-stand the real meaning of love, because love, in essence, is of the spirit. Love is the quality that binds souls and minds. Love is an expression of the Great Spirit. Love is the desire to make whatever sacrifices are necessary in order to serve. Love sees no ill, no hurt, no harm. Love desires nothing for itself.
Death is a reward; death is freedom; death is liberation; death is the second birth; death holds the keys of life and opens the prison door to allow the inmate incarcerated for so long to enjoy life as it could not be enjoyed in your world. Death, as you call it, cannot part those whom the willing tie of love has bound. This is only another way of saying that the Great Spirit's laws will always prevail. Love is an expression of the divine law and triumphs over all man's foolishness, ignorance, wilfulness and prejudice.
The real love is the union of two souls. The Great Spirit, with infinite wisdom, has ordained that each of the sexes is complementary to the other. And where there is the complete merging there you have the real love, for each supplies what the other lacks and the duality forms the unity. Because it is part of infinite spirit, it has an infinite number of variations, ranging from the lowest to the highest, from the magnetic and physical bodily attrac-tion through the mental, to the spiritual which is the basis. In your world it is very rare, it is the exception not the rule for the two halves to meet. When they do, they find one another and become whole. This is the natural marriage of souls.
It is the ancient teaching of the affinities, the soul affinities, finding expression. In a process that takes millions and millions of years you can see that the meeting of two halves or affinities is not usual because they have to be born at about the same period. When they are, it is part of the divine plan. And beyond your world these two beings. continue in their merging through aeons and aeons of time, not only shedding all aspects of personality, but as the individuality emerges, so the process of blending continues.
Love is stronger than blood. Love is stronger than death. Love is the permanent force because love rules the universe. Those whom the Great Spirit has joined in the bond of love cannot be separated in life or what you call death. The grave has no power to curtail love. Love is triumphant because it is part of the Great Spirit. And what belongs integrally to the Great Spirit is indestructible.