If Love is the Goal, then What is The Way?

LOVE —- There is one principle to be remembered in the path of sympathy: we must do all we can with regard to the pleasure of those whom we love and whom we meet, but we must not expect the best from those whom we love and meet, for we must know that the world is as it is. We cannot change it, but we can change ourselves.

The one who wants others to do what he wishes them to do will always be disappointed. That is the complaining soul; all day long, every day of the month, that soul is complaining. He is never without a complaint; if not about a human being, then it is the climate; if not about the climate then about the conditions; if not about someone else then about himself. Something is hurting that person all the time.

He must remember that self-pity is the worst poverty. The person who takes life in this way, saying, ‘My poor self, crinkled, forgotten, forsaken, ill treated by everybody, by the planets, even by God’ – that person has no hope; he is an exile from the Garden of Eden. But when one says, ‘I know what human nature is, I cannot expect any better, I must only try and appreciate what little good comes from it, I must be thankful for it and try and give the best I can to others’ – that is the only attitude that will enable man to develop his sympathetic nature.

One may think, ‘Is there any reward in sympathy if it leads only to disappointment?’ I shall answer, ‘Life’s reward is life itself’. A person may suffer from illness or disease, be most unhappy and sad, but ask him, ‘Shall I turn you into a rock?’, and he will say, ‘No, let me live and suffer’. Therefore life’s reward is life; the reward of love is love itself. Loving is living, and the heart that closes itself to everyone closes itself to its own self.

The Sufis have therefore considered the development of the heart quality as a spiritual culture, and have called it the culture of the heart. It consists of the tuning of the heart. Tuning means changing the pitch of the vibrations. Tuning the heart means changing the vibrations, bringing them to a certain pitch which is the natural one where you feel the joy and ecstasy of life, which enables you to give pleasure to others even by your presence because you are tuned.

When an instrument is properly tuned you need not play music on it; just by striking it you will feel a great magnetism coming from it. If an instrument well-tuned can have that magnetism, how much greater should be the magnetism of hearts that are tuned.

Rumi says, ‘Whether you have loved a human being or whether you have loved God, if you have loved enough you will be brought in the end into the presence of the supreme Love itself’.