What is divine love?

What is divine love? How does an enlightened person experience love?

First let us look at the question itself. You must have been waiting to ask it. It couldn't have come to you just now; you must have decided on it in advance. It was waiting to be asked; it was forcing you to ask it. Your memory has determined the asking, not your consciousness. If you were conscious right now, if you were in the moment, this question would not have come. If you had been listening to what I have been saying, this question would be impossible. If the question has been present in you, it is impossible for you to have heard anything I have been saying. A question that is constantly present in the mind creates a tension and because of the tension you cannot be here. That is why your consciousness cannot act with freedom. If you understand this, then we can take up your question.…

And those things which pretend to be love have a few benefits too, a few advantages. They give safety, security, comfort, and they promise you all kinds of things in the future. Those promises are never fulfilled, those goods are never delivered, but for the moment those promises are enough to keep you hanging on. Those promises go on like carrots hanging in front of you, and you go on moving, hoping for the best, but it never happens. Whenever love is love it is divine, and whenever love is not love it is very evil; it is just the opposite, it is very devilish. And out of a hundred, ninety-nine point nine percent it is not love. Hence the world is in such misery, in such hell. To know love, to know true love, is to know God; that's why I say love is divine.

So don't miss a single opportunity to love: love people, love animals, love trees, rocks, rivers, stars. Don't miss a single opportunity, and whatsoever you are doing do it lovingly. And start the journey from yourself: the first love is to love oneself. For centuries we have been told the opposite; it has been engrained in us that it is bad to love oneself -- love others, of course, but don't love yourself. Now that is sheer stupidity. If a person is incapable of loving himself he cannot love anybody else in the world. Love begins at home, just as everything else begins at home. Love yourself, then go on radiating love. Radiate it to the whole universe. The farther the reach of your love, the bigger your consciousness. Love functions like wings and you start soaring higher and higher. Love can take you to the ultimate abode of god.

The alchemists were really working in a different dimension. Their chemistry was just a show to befool the church and the people; hiding behind that facade, they were transforming consciousness from the lowest point to the highest. That was their real work, and that's my work too. This is an alchemist's school, and love is the bridge from the lowest to the highest. Love is the ladder: it touches the lowest -- the sex center, and it touches the greatest, the highest, in you -- the God center. Love is the only way to transform you. It can make you golden. Live a life of love and you live a religious life. [Deva Prem -- divine love] Ordinarily love is animal, very rarely human, and very very rarely divine -- but love has the possibility of all these three dimensions.

The child's love is animal. No animal goes beyond that. The moment the children of the animals are ready to be on their own they forget all about parents and all about the family; they simply disappear. Their need is fulfilled. And they don't know the love, the romantic phase of love that young human beings know. It remains a sexual phenomenon, done in a hurried way, in fact, without any pleasure in it... almost a natural instinct, functioning automatically. There is no mutual give and take; there is nothing really. It is just a natural instinct which forces them to make love. It is not love at all -- it is only reproductive. It is only in man that the second love, the human love, arises.