Love is at the core of things. It has been said that God is love. It has been said that the Creation occurred because of love, God’s love. God’s love for us is the cause of our creation. When one thinks about the implications of what love truly is, one must be careful in talking about love.
Love is a portal and a gateway. Love is an acid that does away with that which is contrary to God’s qualities. Love is a reducer, it reduces ego, it does away with anger, and it destroys the qualities that bind us to illusion. Love is the great equalizer. When love overwhelms us and we are caught in its midst we are then without the capacity to assert our own will.
Love does many, many things, and we, in order to follow this path of light, must learn to love. Love has taken on various connotations in the world that is illusory. There’s love tied to lust and these are often confused. There’s romantic love which is the kind of love that’s tied to lust. Many of the romantic poets had a very powerful ulterior motive behind their words of love. The motive was quite simple very often.
But we need to talk about divine love and our ability to comprehend divine love, and our ability to dive into divine love. Divine love is what separates Sufism from religion. In religion there is not a prerequisite that says you must love. However, if you understood the core of religion which is “La illaha il Allah”, nothing exists but God, you would understand that to understand that you have to understand love. So Hallaj loved and said, “Ana-Al Haqq – I am reality” transcending the world by riding the magic carpet of love.
Love goes beyond religion and love annihilates the lover. Love annihilates all that the lover brings with him. Love annihilates the illusory world, and love annihilates all that we adhere to in the world. Yet simultaneously, within this annihilation, we are still physical and part of this world, and therein lies the subtle understanding of the ability to follow law even though we are in annihilation, follow law even though we have transcended being. Because we can’t stay as a transcended being, and we shouldn’t assume that we have become a transcended being.
Pray to be transcended, act as if you were bound to the law. Pray to be without restriction, act as if you were bound to restriction. Within this subtle understanding of burning away all of the restrictions of existence yet adhering to the restrictions of our existence is the subtle path that we follow. We must lose ourselves yet be bound, we must be annihilated yet be bound, we must disappear yet be bound, and it’s in the freedom of being bound by that which is appropriate that we are given the springboard for annihilation.
If we cannot respect the rules of physicality, and the rules that control our physicality, we can’t make the jump from physicality because these rules set the groundwork for our ability to escape. So love transcends all. It is a cosmic ray…
