There is a Power within that knows beyond
Our knowings; we are greater than our thoughts,
And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.
To live, to love are signs of infinite things,
Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Savitri, Book V, Canto II, page 397
The Quality of Love
In order to know how to love truly, should the nature be transformed?
The quality of the love is in proportion to the transformation of your consciousness.
I don’t understand.
It is childishly simple. If you have the consciousness of an animal, you will love like an animal. If you have the consciousness of an ordinary man, you will love like an ordinary man. If you have the consciousness of an elite being, you will love like an elite being, and if you have a god’s consciousness, you will love like a god. It is simple! That’s what I have said. And so, if by an effort for progress and inner transformation, by aspiration and growth, you pass from one consciousness to the other and your consciousness becomes vaster and vaster, well, the love you experience will be vaster and vaster. That is quite clear!
You take the purest water, water from the crystalline rocks, you collect it in a fairly large vase, and then, in this vase there is a little mud, or much, or a huge quantity of mud. And you could not say it is the same water which came down, yet it is the same, only you have mixed it with so many things in your vase that it no longer resembles it at all! Well, love in its essence is an absolutely pure, crystalline, perfect thing. In the human consciousness it gets mixed with a fairly considerable amount of mud. So it becomes more and more muddy in proportion to the amount of mud.
It has been said that the tiger’s need for devouring is one of the first expressions of love in the world. I think that long before the tiger, there must have been primitive creatures in the depths of the sea which had only this one function: a stomach. They existed only as stomachs. And so they swallowed — that was their one occupation. Evidently that was one of the first results of the Power of Love infiltrating into Matter, for before this there was nothing: there was perfect inconscience, complete immobility, nothing stirred. With Love movement began: the awakening of consciousness and the movement of transformation. Well, the first forms, it may be said, were the first expression of Love in Matter. So we can go from the need of swallowing which is the only consciousness — a need of swallowing, of uniting — right up to… Excuse me, we say that Love is the power of the world — it is a primitive way of uniting with things, but it is a very direct way: one swallows and absorbs the thing; well, the tiger indeed takes a great joy in it. So there is a joy already, it is already quite a high form of love. You may go higher and end up with one of the highest expressions of love in human beings: the total selfgiving to what is loved, that is, to die for one’s country or to give one’s life to defend somebody, and things like that. That indeed is already… fairly high. It is still mixed with some mud. It is not the highest form but it is already something. And you see all the steps, don’t you? Well, from this one has still to climb a good deal to reach the true expression, to reach what I have described, which is at the summit of the ascent — I would not like to travesty my own words (Mother takes her copy of The Four Austerities” and reads:
“Love is, in its essence, the joy of identity; it finds its expression in the bliss of union.”
At first, before the emanation of love, there is something which we may express very clumsily by “the joy of identity”. That indeed is very difficult to conceive, for human thought cannot conceive of things except by their opposites, while the final stage is when love has gone full circle in the universe in order to go back to its origin; then it has the result of all that experience it gained and it returns to its starting-point. It goes back to its starting-point with something more which it did not have before starting: the experience of the universe. And fundamentally, that is the very raison d’etre of creation. It is because the consciousness would not be what it is if it had not expressed itself in a creation. Well, the return from creation — which, mark it, is not something that takes place in time — is very difficult to conceive, for we conceive time and space and for us things are successive, one thing follows another, but if it were possible to conceive a total movement which would englobe everything and be at once the beginning and the end, and which would contain everything, well, this return, which would not be a return in time, which would be a return in consciousness — how shall I explain that to you? — the return of love to its origin, instead of being simply the joy of identity, becomes the ecstasy of union — and obviously, if one sees from the pure psychological point of view, there is an enriching of consciousness which comes from the experience gained in the universe; that is, there is a richness of content and a plenitude of consciousness which would not be there if there had been no manifested universe. And that obviously is the most logical explanation, the most logical reason for the creation.
The Mother, Questions and Answers 1954, CWM volume 6, page 102 – 104.