LOVE RULES

The Mystic Christ - Chapter Preview

Innocence comes when there is love. Divine Love makes you like a child. Love makes you accept anything and everything. The lover does whatever the beloved says. We can see this even in ordinary love. When one really loves, one's intellect becomes empty; one stops thinking. No thoughts, no mind, nothing. Only love remains. This forgetting-all-else kind of love culminates in innocence." Ammachi, Awaken Children, vol. 4

The author will feel this book to be a success if the reader will come away from it with the conviction that, according to Jesus, the practice of love is the most important aspect of our spiritual path; love for God and love for others. This is the road to true and lasting happiness. In love there is peace and in peace there is love. Love is the light of the world. Where there is no love, darkness prevails and there can be no peace.

Every act of love is a work of peace no matter how small. Mother Teresa

Jesus makes it very clear that the most important activity for any person is loving God and loving others:

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Matthew 22:36-40, NIV

In order to be a follower of Jesus, we are required to take the practice of love more seriously than anything else. This is also true in other religions such as the path of the Bhaktas (devotion to God) in Hinduism and the devotional ecstasy practiced by the Sufis in Islam. In Buddhism it is the practice of compassion for others and devotion to the teacher.

Buddha comments on love for others:

Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world. Sutta Nipata, 149-150

In addition to Jesus, other saints in this tradition include Narada who wrote the Bhakti Sutras, Hafiz, Ramprasad, Rumi, Ramakrishna, and Ammachi. All of these great saints taught the path of love for God and others as a path to liberation.

Once love is felt, it will become obvious that we have gotten off-track to a great degree. Having been seduced by the ego at an early age, we have long forgotten how to love or even what love feels like. This is why the many scriptures and sayings of Jesus which direct us to the practice of love are ignored. It is as if they were written in every Bible with invisible ink. Only people who have discovered love will notice these scriptures. When we say, "Let's talk about loving God and others" it is as though the audience becomes so many stone statues. Then a voice whispers from behind the curtain and says, "They can't hear you." We become the proverbial deer staring with glazed eyes into the approaching headlights of divine love. There are numerous websites that offer ready made sermons and yet the subject of the universal nature of love and how to go about becoming a loving person is almost non-existent. This is astonishing when viewed from the perspective that the practice of love is the most important spark of wisdom that Jesus had to give us. This is what he talked about the most. In Mark 12:31 the Lord tells us there are no commandments greater than loving God and loving our neighbor. A few paragraphs back we read in Matthew 22:36-40 that there is no commandment greater than loving God with everything we can muster and the second commandment, to love our neighbor, is like it. All the law and all the prophets, meaning everything and anything of a religious or spiritual nature, hang on these two commandments. How could this be said any more clearly? And yet there are few who give even a thought to worshipping in the church of the heart. Preachers do not mention it from the pulpit. In contrast, Jesus says there is not much point in talking about anything else. There are few books written about love. The reason for this is simple. We have no love in our hearts and we do not know that we have no love. We don't relate to love or understand love or have any awareness of love. We are unable to feel love. Because of this, we have become the walking dead that Jesus referred to when he told the man to "…let the dead bury their dead" (Matthew 8:22). This was the condition of the Pharisees and the condition of many who claim to be followers of Jesus today.

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