GOD AS INFINITE LOVE

 
The lover in the mental sphere has an even freer expression in Love. In him, though lust has not fully disappeared, it is sublimated, so that only about one-fourth of the original lust of the physical sphere remains in latent form without expression. In the mental sphere, lust does not have subtle expression. The Lover is detached from subtle objects and is free from possessive longing for the Beloved.

In the mental sphere, Love expresses itself as complete resignation to the will of the Beloved. All selfish desire, including the longing for the presence of the Beloved, has disappeared. The emphasis is on the worth and will of the Beloved, and there is abundant release of Love in its pure form. However, even in the mental sphere, Love is not infinite, since there is still present the curtain of duality that separates the Lover from the Beloved. Love, no longer under the influence of selfishness, is still experienced through the medium of the finite mind, just as in the lower spheres it is experienced through the medium of the lower bodies.

Love becomes consciously infinite when the individual mind is transcended. Such love is rightly called Divine because it is characteristic of the God-state in which duality is overcome. Divine Love is unlimited in essence and expression because it is experienced by the soul through the soul itself. In the physical, subtle and mental spheres, the lover is conscious of separation from the Beloved; but when these spheres are transcended, the Lover is conscious of unity with the Beloved. Divine Love is entirely free from the thraldom of desires and the limiting self. The Lover has no being apart from the Beloved. He is the Beloved.

God as Infinite Love first delimits himself in the forms of creation and then recovers his infinity through the different stages of creation. All the stages of God's experience as a Lover culminate in his experiencing himself as the sole Beloved.

The sojourn of the soul is a divine romance in which the Lover, who in the beginning is conscious of emptiness, frustration, superficiality and the chains of bondage, attains an increasingly fuller expression of Love and finally merges into the unity of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and eternal Truth of God as Infinite Love.