Devotion, Gratitude, and Love – Part 3
By its capacity to create in a state of absolute freedom, Love is an observable power. Love is its own proof, requiring no other.
Parts 1 and 2 of this blog have focused on the role of devotion and gratitude in spiritual life. In the context of that discussion, let’s consider why love is the third important aspect of our sādhana.
Love is a vital ingredient in what we might call “the cocktail of heart enzymes,” which digests all tensions, patterns, contraction, and most importantly, all resistance to being freed. This mix of devotion, gratitude, and love comprises the nectar within the heart, and its rasa is bliss. However, like when creating cocktails, if you add only one or two of the ingredients, the result is not the drink you are looking for. The flavor and effect changes.
We each need to discover that unwavering devotion, unshakable gratitude, and unconditional love. When we can combine those in our own heart, it dissolves all misunderstanding and struggle. We can’t buy that enzyme online, and it may not come naturally to us. Finding it requires the conscious intention to reach inside, past our resistance, to uncover the place that dissolves that resistance. Our devotion then must manifest as discipline in action — both in our meditation and as we engage our daily life.
Energy Reveals Our Resistance
Many people become alarmed when they encounter the intensity of the energy that is trying to free them. We have to remember that all the dynamics of our life are the expressed effect of our own state of consciousness. As that consciousness reveals itself, it will also reveal the obstacles to higher awareness in our understanding. It will raise the ugly head of karma and present situations to us that we must move through again, from a place that isn’t recreating that karma. What’s amazing is that we don’t have the devotion to walk through that revelation and to be grateful for what is being exposed to us. The part of us that is not grateful, that resists change, is exactly what we need to surrender.
Our resistance is packed in a box called ego. It’s a bit like having a toy box, but one filled with our thoughts, emotions, karma, resentment, and self-rejection. Everything fits in the box except that which is bigger than it. Just as children take out one toy after another, play with it briefly, but never find the perfect one, we keep looking for fulfillment in the things we have, the things we want, and in what we do. But here is no perfect state except the infinite one inside us. Our perpetual attempt to change the manifest dynamics of our lives is a profound waste of time because even if we accomplish that, we are not discovering the place in us that doesn’t need that change — the changeless state of awareness.
That same changeless state is the source of all the dynamics in our lives. Those dynamics are God’s expression of his devotion to freedom in Himself, as us — His way of expanding His own love, freedom, and joy. How amazing that we deny God day after day, moment after moment, because we are unwilling to be free! We are unwilling to know that we are pure Consciousness and the divine expression of Love. And the resulting poverty of the heart is devastating.
Freedom Depends on Our Choices
All sādhana, all spiritual freedom, boils down to one thing: what are we choosing? Not what we say we want, but what we are actually choosing in our actions, thoughts, intentions, and primarily, how we are investing our life force. Those choices reveal what a person really wants. We take the extraordinary gift of being alive, the gift of being the individualized embodiment of the bliss of Śakti, and invest it in our own limitations, intentions, restrictions, and in our resistance to letting go of all those things. We’re being bombarded with messages from God and all we do is cover our eyes and say, “I don’t want to know that because it costs me something.” All it really costs is that you surrender your limitations — but from another perspective, it costs you love and freedom.
The greatest gift of grace is the capacity to choose our state. And even if we can’t envision an exalted state of consciousness, we can see the opposite, which is our pain and suffering. Why not trade up? What do you have to lose except that pain and suffering? It’s truly amazing what we hold onto. Choose to hold onto devotion, gratitude, and love, and that’s what will blossom. And just as Jack found the beanstalk, it will create a gigantic pathway so you can climb to the top and discover the treasure.
Be resolute. Do not allow the same inner tensions and contractions to carry forward into the future. Resolve to not accept the lack of abundance within you and refuse to accept your projections that the conditions of your life must be perfect, as you envision them. There are no conditions necessary for us to live in the fullness of our heart. Be truly committed to living in devotion and expressing gratitude, and nurture those qualities through the love of your own life, whatever the conditions of it might be.
Love is the rasa of the heart. That joy of being, that ānanda, is the nectar that must overflow from your sādhana and saturate your awareness.