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THE DAILY DOSE OF LOVE
Finding God's Love - Chapter Preview
Simply put, our goal is to love God with all of the intensity we can summon. We will discuss two methods of devotional practice. Sitting practice is a formal and regular event while walking practice is what we do as we walk through the events of our day. With devotional practice there is no single correct way. Anything that encourages and cultivates our feeling of love for God can be included as part of our practice. We are free to invent or discover our own way to do this. The battlefields of our minds and subconscious realms are littered with the wreckage and carnage of past emotional wounds, blockages, and traumas and we must find a way to get around or through these obstacles as we journey to the heart. Therefore what works well for one may not invoke any love at all for another. Each of us will explore those areas of passage in the mind and subconscious that will allow us to travel to the ocean of divine love. At this point we are not so concerned with stopping to clean the battlefield. Once the garden of love has begun to bloom, love will clean our minds and deep subconscious parts quite spontaneously with very little consideration from us. There are many paths to the heart but we only need to find the one that works for us.
In the beginning, we endeavor to find some small crevice into which we can plant our hook. We are finding and establishing the small spark. We can begin with something as simple as a casual interest in God or a mild curiosity. We may consider this to be a feeble position but it does not take much to start. A roaring bon fire begins by first lighting a few small twigs. We take whatever connection we can make and we work with that by making an effort to dwell on it. We try to keep the mind focused on it. We try to remember it several times each day. Eventually, mild interest will begin to visit us with fleeting glimpses of Supreme Love. The important ingredients here are patience and persistence.
Visualize Love
Love is something we cultivate like a rose garden. We kindle the feeling of love and then direct it toward God. We visualize with our feelings. This means to evoke or remember a feeling in the same way that we might use our mind's eye to visualize a tree or any other object. In this case we are using the "heart's eye." To illustrate, we might close our eyes and try to feel a gamut of emotions. Try to feel peace, joy, or sadness. This is what we mean by visualizing feelings. Instead of seeing something we feel something. In this way we begin to see how we are going to develop love for God. We will mentally visualize God in the form with which we are most comfortable and then "visualize" with our feelings our flow of love toward our Beloved. We will also visualize the feeling of God's love coming back to us. The form of God matters little. Our affections can just as easily be directed to an incarnation of God such as Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna.
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