[Lester Levenson - Silence, Love and Grace - part 2]

Human love versus divine love. Human love is what

we think love is. Divine love is a constant, persistent
acceptance of every being in the universe fully,
wholly, totally as the other being is and loving them
because they are the way they are. Divine love is
allowing the other one to be the way the other one
wants to be.
Divine love is seeing everyone equally, and I think
that is the test of how divine our love is. Is it the same
for every person we meet every day? Is our love for
those who are opposing us as strong as our love is for
those who are supporting us? Divine love is
unconditional and is for everyone alike.
I guess the greatest example of it is Christ, but those
teachings of turn-the-other-cheek, love your enemy,
and so forth. If we as a nation were to practice this,
we could make every apparent enemy of ours
completely impotent just by loving them. They would
be powerless to do any harm to us. But we would have
to do it as a nation; at least the great majority of the
people would have to do that.
Love itself is something we can't turn on and turn off;
either we have it, or we don't have it. And it's
impossible to love one person and hate another. To
the degree that we hate anyone, to that degree, we
love the others. Our love is no greater than our hatred
is for any one person.
What we call love is simply need for that person. If we
say I love this person but not the next, we feel that we
need this person and therefore we'll be nice to this
person so we can get what we want. But that's not
love. Human love is selfish; divine love is completely
selfless. The methods we use should be the ones that
suit us best. The methods that we like we are able to
gain most from.
Therefore each one should follow that method which
he likes best. All methods will eventually lead to the
one method of self-investigation. Who am I? What am
I? And when that question is fully answered, that is
the end of the line; there's nowhere else to go. Once
we discover who we are, we discover that we are
infinite beings. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
So the outer teacher pushes us toward the inner
teacher, which is nothing but we revealing our real
self to ourselves. That which we have been seeking
over these centuries outwardly in the world has
always been right with us all the time, closer than
flesh. It's always been the eye that I am; we foolishly
have been looking away from it.
The moment we start turning our attention toward it,
the moment we start looking inwardly, we begin to
discover who and what we are. We should continue
this until it's fully complete, and discovering who we
are is the same as discovering that we are not the ego;
we are not that limited being.
Because we have strayed so far from the absolute
knowledge, it's almost necessary for us to start on the
negative side of eliminating the ego. To get enough of
it out of the way so that we can begin to see the self
that we are. If we work on ego elimination, we should
always balance that with getting quiet, worshiping the
master, dropping into the cell, reading inspirational
writings.
If we work too long or too much on the ego, we get
caught up with it; it becomes real to us, it becomes too
real. And then, instead of letting go of it, we begin to
try to sustain it. So anytime we are working on any
method of eliminating the ego, we should always
balance it with a positive method of dropping into the
self into the quietness, into the feelings of bliss. So that
we don't validate the ego too much.