SWAMI OMKARANANDA

The Light of Love

CONTENTS

The World is Fashioned by Love

Results of Love

Love is Divine and Jesus is the Grand Embodiment of that Love

Love is an All-inclusive Virtue, an All-embracing Power, an All-transforming Light

Love Unfolds Spiritual Capacities

The Great Blessings of Love

Love is the Light of the World - Christian Character is Inconceivable without Love

The Living Image of God is One though Enshrined in the Countless Many

Growth in Love Grants us Knowledge of the Divine and Blessedness

The Nature of the Spiritual Christian Intelligence

Love is the Builder of the Church Within the Heart and Outside

The True Christian has Worldwide Sympathies

Love is the Essence and Genius of Life

Factors that Increase our Love

Real Nature and the Effects of Love

Love is the Nature of the Living Image of God in us, Love Unfolds High Powers - God-Experience Everywhere, is the Gift of Love

The Power of Love Transforms our Unconscious and Conscious Nature

Our Life is to be Lifted up to the Ideals Framed by our Highest Spiritual Potentialities

Enrich the Earth by the Love Divine

The End of Human Evolution Lies in the Fulfilment of Life in the All-Embracing Divine Love

Our Heart of Love as a Centre of Cosmic Feelings

In Love, Let Us Make All Creation Ours

Numberless are Our Inner Spiritual Possibilities

The Peace of the World Rests on the Peace in the Hearts of the Individuals

God is Love, and the Human Problems Emerge from Lack of Love

Strengthen the Powers of Goodness and Love in the World

Let the Will of Love be Done, Here on Earth as in Heaven

Life is Fulfilled in Love

Comment: The Design between each chapter leads back to the CONTENTS

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Bearing a living experience of the all-seeing, all-loving God in my heart, I offer my deepest adorations to our most respected and blessed priests here, and also to the Image of God in you all.

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The World is Fashioned by Love

The world is God's world. It has been fashioned by His Love. It is being sustained by His Love.

Love is God in action. God manifest, is Love. The Light of God in self-expression, is Love. When real, divine, unfailing Love expresses itself through the human personality, we find something of the Kingdom of God revealed through man. Love is Light, Beauty, Sweetness, Peace, Wisdom, Truth, God - it is like the single white light magnificently spread into the seven colours of the rainbow. Nature is formed by the hidden Beauty of God, and man is created in the Image of Truth.

The world is full of discord, restlessness, wars, problems, worries, sorrows, unhappiness, because Love has been put off from human life, by human ignorance and the human ego. Where there is Love, there is harmony, happiness, creative activity, progress, prosperity, welfare and true fulfilment. Where there is Love, there is Wisdom, Patience, true Power and real Freedom. Dominated by hatred and estranged from Love, human nature makes wars, is unjust, cruel, destructive. It creates discord, disharmony, destructive wars, with disastrous results for the whole world. Nature reacts to human hatred, injustice, evil, by inflicting on mankind natural calamities. Everything returns to man, or pays man in his own coin, in his own wickedness, by inflicting on him all kinds of calamities.

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Results of Love

Where Love is operative, there is harmony, beauty, peace, joy, creative activity, growth, wisdom, calm divine power and grace. Love is affected by nothing, and triumphs over everything. It is equal to all situations, and masters every circumstance silently, calmly, almost unnoticed. It is conscious of the wondrous Truth in itself, and therefore not troubled by the might of the foe, however great and titanic that be. It is not disturbed by the apparent initial difficulties, trials, and seeming failures which, in fact, conceal and bear its victory.

Love has wisdom that can solve every problem. It possesses the great patience which waits until, drop by drop, an ocean is formed. Love is royal in dignity, brave in spirit, unbreakable in substance, and divine in nature. It does not complain, does not judge. It transforms everything that it touches. It rules everything to which it presents its own Light. It understands and yields only to conquer fully, as does always Light, Truth, God. Love has numberless resources and inexhaustible energies.

For Love, the world is beautiful, and everyone is wonderful and worthy of service. And, Love has the strength to make the world beautiful. It has the all-conquering softness and wisdom that ejects from the bad man his venom, and makes of him an angel. Where love is limited and therefore human, it does not always succeed, and fails as it should. Such a love is not love, but only a semblance of real Love.

Love feels the world, with the Heart of God. It sees the world, through the eyes of God. It enables you to live in the world, with the Life of God. It breathes Peace, emanates Wisdom, disseminates Light. Its substance is Truth.

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Love is Divine and Jesus is the
Grand Embodiment of that Love

Love is the inextinguishable Flame in the inner being of man. In the bad, it is completely hidden; in the good, it shines dimly through veils; and in the pure, it is fully visible. This flame of Love has in it beauty, power, art, sciences, heaven, perfection.

God is Love. The living Presence of this Love in our constitution awakens our aspirations, urges us to do good, impels us to seek higher knowledge, causes in us the longing for perfection and sets our will and energies striving for the attainment of true freedom, peace, illumination by the transcendence of human limitations.

If God were not Love our breath would be pain and our life an inextinguishable sorrow. Of Love, we are born, by Love, we are sustained, and in Love we shall subsist for ever and ever.

If God were not Love, the human affections and sympathies would have no foundations. If God were not Love a flower would be neither colourful nor fragrant, there would be no desire in life to live; and hope, faith and trust would be non-existent. If God were not Love, truth would have no substance, beauty no reality, and life no meaning. Love is all.

Jesus Christ is an embodiment of this divine Love of God. He is the Personality of boundless Love. He is a manifestation of God's Love for the redemption, salvation, illumination of mankind. His life and teachings are a glorious illustration of the divine Love.

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Love is an All-inclusive Virtue, an
All-embracing Power, an All-transforming Light

Our salvation consists in our capacity to express Love in an ever-increasing measure. Our feeble human nature obtains tremendous strength, power, grace, beauty, the moment it is lit up with Love.

Love has in it all the virtues you can conceive of. It exalts the human individual above the limitations of human life. It transfigures the human character. When the transforming divine Love grows in us, and flows from our heart to all creation, Christ is born in us, Christ becomes visible to us, our spiritual sensibilities and powers of perception unfold themselves. We begin to behold Christ and God everywhere.

The physical universe is perceived by the physical senses. The moment we open our physical eyes, everywhere matter encounters us as the greatest reality, the physical body becomes too real to be denied in its existence.

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Love Unfolds Spiritual Capacities

When Love arises in our hearts, it brings into manifestation a number of spiritual capacities; and with the help and aid of these spiritual capacities, we perceive the spiritual world in, above, around this material world.

The physical world is an undeniable reality to the physical senses. God and God's Love form an undeniable reality to the spiritual senses in us.

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The Great Blessings of Love

When man is dominated by lovelessness, and the consequent moral imperfections, and looks at people and the world, he finds everywhere the predominance of hatred, evil, error, suffering. He sees, and mostly adds to the strength of, the negative forces. When the higher qualities made manifest by love come into activity in daily life, man sees the higher dimensions of the world, perceives the higher truths that sustain all existence and which are more real than the lower order of realities, and therefore capable of changing and transforming the latter.

When Love takes possession of our hearts and our lives, we are lit up by a new spiritual vision; all creatures, great and small, become our brothers; we have patience, we have faith that moves mountains; we have the peace that passes understanding.

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Love is the Light of the World - Christian
Character is Inconceivable without Love

As a matter of fact, the true Christian character is essentially a character formed, fashioned, dominated by Love. The Christian character and absence of Love are antitheses.

Love has amazing patience; it is full of understanding, full of calmness, full of sweetness. It grants us a strength that can transform the venom of the enemy into inspiring Love. Love is like the ocean that takes in the hatred of the rivers that bring in their coloured, soiled, dirty waters, and deplete themselves into it, and transforms them into its own lucid, clear, pure waters of Love. This is Love. Such Love is everything.

Love takes its own heaven even into hell and thus at once converts hell into heaven, even as the pitch darkness in a room is converted into light the moment the light is flashed. Love is never tired; its energies are inexhaustible, and it is ever new.

When it animates man, he becomes wise, beautiful, great, powerful with the power of the Divine. Love makes us real artists in spirit, aestheticians; it turns us into geniuses, rich in the intuitive knowledge; it makes us giants in the strength that endures the temporary assaults of circumstances. It is divine, and is the impelling and sustaining power behind all glorious, creative, constructive and illuminating works.

The heart of Christianity, the soul of Christianity, the immortal, imperishable essence of Christianity, embodied in Jesus Christ, - this is Love. This is Light. It is the Light of the World. It redeems, it saves, it exalts us. It divinizes our life. It gives us that fearlessness, that indomitable spirit, which subsisted in St. Paul.

Love makes us the centres of universal and cosmic feelings. It grows. It expands. It is a power in itself. It makes us personalities of the simple greatness of St. Francis of Assisi. We begin to talk to the birds. We find a friend in every living being; and in everyone around us, we find our own God's Image.

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The Living Image of God is One though
Enshrined in the Countless Many

The Image of God that is within us, the Image with which God fashioned our inner being, - this is one and the same in all. It is in everyone. It is the bearer of the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Father who is in Heaven, that Father is in the Kingdom of Heaven within us.

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Growth in Love Grants us Knowledge
of the Divine and Blessedness

That eternal divine Father is in the Image after which He fashioned our inner being. He is all-knowing. He is the infinity of Love, Beauty, and Sweetness. We know Him, when we grow in the Love that is Himself. And the growing Love unfolds from us a growing faith, and a growing surrender to That which is infinitely beautiful, peaceful, lovable. Our lives become richer and richer, - richer in vision, richer in the power of holiness, richer in happiness, the happiness that is born not of the senses but of the divine knowledge.

"In Thy Presence is the fullness of Joy", says the Bible. This Presence of God becomes a living reality, when Love waxes in us; we grow responsive to the Presence of God. The whole world stands lit up with a new light. We are renewed in our mind and spirit. It is the renewal in spirit and in mind that St. Paul speaks of.

We are cleansed by the power of Love. Our life becomes richer, - richer in every moral excellence, in every divine quality. Our intelligence becomes luminous.

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The Nature of the Spiritual Christian Intelligence

The spiritual Christian intelligence is not sub-rational, it is supra-rational. It is characterised by strong reason; because, it functions in the context of the Truth that God is, of the Love that God is. It is purified by Love; it is freed from the limitations and the distorting factors. It is luminous, clear-sighted, and its voice is imperishable. Its logic is infallible.

The thoughts of the Christian saints, of the great apostles, are imperishable. They transfigure the human conduct. They ensoul the Love of God, the faith in God, the knowledge that comes from an encounter with the Presence of God. They have the power behind them of a living spiritual experience.

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Love is the Builder of the Church
Within the Heart and Outside

When we develop real divine Love, all the world becomes for us a Church where we meet, greet, adore God, in everyone and everything; and, when we go into the church, we take in our hearts a Church, and our experience of God's Presence in the church becomes a very intense and dominating matter.

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The True Christian has Worldwide Sympathies

To the Christian, all mankind gives itself as the field for his service, and as the field for the expression of his Love. In the eyes of the true Christians, races, cultures, creeds disappear. All are children of God, all deserve the illuminating Light of Jesus the Christ. All need to be served with the redeeming, transforming Love of Jesus the Christ. All deserve to be served with the bread of the divine Knowledge embodied in the New Testament. To the true Christians, as the New Testament makes it clear, there is no Jew and Gentile, there is no difference between one man and another. It is the Love that breaks all barriers and limitations.

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Love is the Essence and Genius of Life

As this all-embracing, universal Love grows to the proportions in which it subsisted in the heart of Jesus the Christ, we have a true knowledge of God, we are true heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven along with Jesus the Christ. That Love has to be cultivated. That is the real essence, strength and genius of life.

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Factors that Increase our Love

The various capacities, powers, possibilities latent in the Image of God in each of us, come into manifestation as we grow in Love. God cannot be experienced without the development of Love. The growth of Love is simultaneous with the growth of purity in our inner nature. Faith, prayer, meditation, service, - all these increase the flame of divine Love in our hearts.

The study of the Bible and an assimilation of its spiritual content, heightens our love, renders our inner being more luminous, and thus eliminates from our nature the obstructions to the expression of divine Love.

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Real Nature and the Effects of Love

When we look at people with the eyes of Love, all are our brothers; we have a rare joy; we have a strength that cannot be shaken by anything; we have a patience and a peace that are angelic.

Love is the essential quality of the Image of God in us. The more selfless our Love is, the more luminous, powerful and divine it is.

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Love is the Nature of the Living Image of God
in us, Love Unfolds High Powers - God-Experience
Everywhere, is the Gift of Love

As Love is a quality of our inner divine Consciousness, the more we express it, the more of the spiritual powers and possibilities in ourselves, find their manifestation in our outer life.

We begin to become more and more responsive to God's Presence everywhere; Nature will disclose to us everywhere a divine Beauty; all the world slowly turns out to be the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever may be the world in the experience of the people, to a person of divine Love, it is a grand field of God, and every creature, every being, spontaneously compels his great heart to unfold its Love, to express its Love.

When real Love takes complete possession of our being, we have also a strong sense of our immortality, in God; we have a strong sense of our unity with the one Essence in all beings; we begin to love the neighbour as ourselves, because we have a strong conviction that the God whom we adore resides in the inner Image of God in that person.

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The Power of Love Transforms our
Unconscious and Conscious Nature

Love not only transfigures our whole conscious nature, but renders our feelings universal and cosmic, and makes our intelligence brilliant, brilliant beyond the rational functionings of the cultivated intellect.

Love is the essential soul of all saintliness; and saintliness is a normal and natural characteristic of the Breath of God in us.

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Our Life is to be Lifted up to the Ideals
Framed by our Highest Spiritual Potentialities

As we are created by the hand of God, bear the Image of God in ourselves, carry in ourselves the boundless potentialities of the Divine Consciousness, it is unworthy of us, and can be a shame, to live a life that falls below the patterns set up by the Love and Light in Jesus the Christ.

A Christian is he who is constantly struggling to approximate himself, in his conduct and character, to the ideals of life embodied in the immortal words and deeds of God-centred and man-redeeming Jesus the Christ.

God is everywhere. He is all-seeing. He is with us, in us, and around us. He is infinitely more real than the matter with which we deal every day. A day will arrive when we grow in Love to such a degree that we will be granted a living experience of God, and where our heart will declare with St. Paul that we live, move and have our being in God. We would declare at every step and turn of our life, that the Lord strengthens us from within.

We are children of the Kingdom of Heaven, the children of Light. We forfeit our rights to this grand status when we have no faith, when we do not believe in the glory and the grandeur of the life, the teachings, and the works of the supreme Redeemer, Jesus the Christ.

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Enrich the Earth by the Love Divine

Our life on earth has to be enriched each hour, under the power of Love, under the growing light of Love, under the transforming impact of Love. All the grounds should be sacred to us. Earth is holy to us, when we are illuminated by Love. We need that amount of Love which can make our enemies our friends.

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The End of Human Evolution Lies in the
Fulfilment of Life in the All-Embracing Divine Love

We need that degree of Love which unites us, in consciousness, and in heart, to the entire creation. We need that abundance of pure Love which makes Jesus the Christ take His birth in our whole being. That is our destiny. The sooner we arrive at this destiny, the better for us, the better for the world.

We are the living Images of God, and therefore, we have the heavy responsibility of faithfully following the footsteps of the great in heart, the heroic in truth, the noble spirits of true wisdom, peace and freedom.

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Our Heart of Love as a
Centre of Cosmic Feelings

Let our hearts be the centres for the flow of the thoughts and feelings of Love and Peace. Let us look at North and South and East and West, and release feelings of Love and Peace.

Let best wishes and goodwill constantly stream forth from our being.

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In Love, Let Us Make All Creation Ours

Let the Love that we bear extend beyond the body we live in, beyond the immediate network of relations that we live in, and extend to all creation. Let us smile with the blooming flowers. Let our lives bloom in Love, flower in Truth. Let us secretly, in our inner heart, extend our reverence to all beings.

Let us make all creation ours, in our faith in the Divine, and in our Love for Jesus the Christ, the leader of spiritual evolution. Let the various spiritual qualities which enrich the earth and make a Heaven of our life, constantly express themselves through us.

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Numberless are Our Inner
Spiritual Possibilities

Let us not live below our grand, spiritual possibilities. We are not born to die, but to claim eternal life which is our right. We are children of immortality. The sooner we learn to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, and cultivate in our life to some measure, to some degree, the grand qualities that characterized his personality, the better for us, and the better for the world.

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The Peace of the World Rests on the
Peace in the Hearts of the Individuals

Let us not depend upon others for making peace in the world. Let the grand function of making peace in the world proceed from our own hearts. Let peace flow from our hearts. Let each of us feel that she, or he, is responsible for the welfare of the world.

Though we may not be in a position to illuminate the whole world, we can still be a little candle illuminating our own life and the life around.

Though we may not be in a position to stay the powers of destruction and war in the world, though we may not be in a position to influence the great leaders of the great nations and bring about peace in the world, yet each of us carries in himself the capacity to spread peace by the radiation of peaceful thoughts and feelings. Let each of us stand uncompromisingly upon a peace that emerges from the faith in the all-seeing and all-loving God.

Our blood is from God, and it is enriched by our love and faith in Christ. No character, no conduct is worthy of us which is not of the Christ. It is our individual responsibility to deepen and strengthen our faith, faith in that almighty Father, that God, who is described in the Gospel of St. John as Love.

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God is Love, and the Human Problems
Emerge from Lack of Love

God is Love, and the trials, the troubles, the wars, the battles, the difficulties that we encounter in daily life are not the creations of God who is Love. They are the results of our misdeeds, wrong thoughts. They are the reward of our faithlessness, our lovelessness.

Therefore, recognizing God to be Love, knowing Jesus to be an embodiment and a living expression of that Love, and an example before us which constantly calls us to develop that Love in ourselves, - let us every day strive to develop Love, and illuminate our lives by the various moral qualities which Love alone can unfold in us. Let us be the blessed children of God. Let nothing break the living sense of the immortality of our being in God. Let us not forget that we are always face to face with God, though most of the time we do not see Him.

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Strengthen the Powers of
Goodness and Love in the World

Let us continue to strengthen the hands of the powers of whatever goodness there be in the world, by the development of our goodness. All of us have the rich Grace of God; otherwise we would not be in this Chapel; otherwise there would be no desire for, and no possibility of, our listening to anything about God. Let us retain this Grace of God, increase our spiritual aspirations, receive into ourselves more of spiritual wisdom, render our life beautiful and our intelligence luminous, by the development of Love; and let us, in everyday living, consciously experience the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Let the Will of Love be Done,
Here on Earth as in Heaven

Let the Will of the Lord, a Will that is Love, a Will that is Beauty, a Will that is Peace, a Will that is Happiness, a Will that is Perfection, - let this Will be done in our daily life, here on earth, as it is in the Kingdom of Heaven.

If we read the Bible very closely, with a faith that it needs from us, with a refinement of nature that it necessitates, with the spiritual eyes that it demands, we find therein a number of passages which require us to flood the life here on earth with the treasures of the Kingdom of Heaven. The possibility has been demonstrated in the life of Jesus Christ and in the life of his great saints.

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Life is Fulfilled in Love

Let us fulfil our life in Love. Let God's blessings flow into us from every side. Let us keep our intelligence awake, alert, vigilant and perceptive. Let us not be led away by anything other than the light of the teachings of Jesus the Christ. Here on earth, let us live our lives as beloved and blessed children of the all-merciful God. We shall be sustained by the boundless Grace of God, and we shall continue to be blessings to the world.

As the aspirations have arisen in our hearts, discrimination has dawned on us, the blessings of Jesus Christ are with us, and because of our birth into the rich spiritual heritage of Christianity, we have the circumstance, the possibility, and the responsibility, of spreading Love everywhere, of radiating light everywhere, of demonstrating the imperishability of our inner divine soul, of living a life that is fearless and full of Grace, Peace and Sweetness. Ours is a life which accomplishes everything in that divine Love.

Let all the powers of the all-merciful God protect us from every side. Let Jesus Christ walk with us, wherever we walk. Let his illimitable Love find Its expression through the throbbings of our heart. Let his illuminating divine Wisdom find its manifestation through our intelligence. Let us live in peace, breathe in and breathe out peace, sleep in peace, rise in peace, work in peace, a peace that is Love, a Love that is God. 

I adore the Presence of the Divine that is now with us, and I accept you as most adorable, worthy of my deepest respect, and I pray with all my heart to the all-merciful God, to grant you health, strength, and long life, in order that you may develop your grand divine Love, in order that you may build up the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, to the extent possible for your blessed hands; in order that your glorious lives may prove to all the world, the dynamic power and the imperishable light resident in the true Christian style of life.

May the future saints of Christianity rise among your blessed selves. Let the Love that God is, find its fullest expression through your hearts, through your blessed actions and works.

Once again, my thanks and adorations to all of you.

  

Swami Omkarananda

(Third Speech in the Brother Klaus Chapel, Frauenfeld, 16.8.1968)

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