A beautiful verse in the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘What is day for a worldly person is night for an enlightened person and what is night for a worldly 
person is day for an enlightened person.” Just as a person who has not 
fallen in love never understands what love is, a person who has not been set 
free of the doer by the knowledge “I am Awareness” will find it nearly impossible to understand para bhakti, unconditional divine love.

More 
people than you might imagine have unconditional love, maybe not with reference to everyone and everything…which is the definition of para bhakti…but with reference to a specific being: the mother of the brutal serial 
killer who on the witness stand testifies that her Johnnie is the sweetest kindest person, totally incapable of the grotesque acts of which he is accused, the man who jumps into a raging river to rescue a drowning stranger and the devotee who loves God beyond all else.

Although I love words and am told I am skillful using them, describing para bhakti is probably beyond my ability but I am going to try anyway. The topic of this blog is the result of direct experience, not the study of 
devotional literature. Nonetheless, devotional texts…Narada Bhakti Sutra, 
for example…will be helpful in structuring this article. There are two kinds of spiritual love, guna bhakti and parabhakti. 
Spiritual love is called bhakti. Bhakti comes from the Sanskrit root bhaj which means to worship. Ordinary daytime love is called kama because it is of 
the nature of desire. A kami, a person who loves an object with desire, does not worship the object. He or she wants something from the object, it could be anything, perhaps even to be worshipped and adored. There is nothing morally wrong with this kind of love…it is the coin of the realm in
samsara…but it is severely limiting. One’s feelings are constrained by the behavior of the love object.

Although it is called love it is actually
the antithesis of love because love is free. It wants nothing. It fears nothing. It is self satisfied. Desire feels like love, however, because 
when its conditions are being met by reality, the mind is settled and bliss is experienced. When desire’s conditions are not met, the mind is a veritable sea of storms. Worship is free of desire. It is appreciation. You appreciate the beauty or goodness of something that stands apart from you. You do not want to 
possess it or make use of it in any way. There is a feeling of gratitude born out of the understanding that you have been privileged to experience 
it. You do not desire a sunset. You love the sunset.

Guna bhakti and kama have one thing in common: there is a doer, a lover,
and this doer loves someone or something other than his or her self even
though it is for the sake of the self that he or she loves. A kami feels
incomplete and loves another person in order to feel complete. A bhakta, 
a devotee, also feels incomplete and loves God because it makes him or her feel happy to love this way. And there is always a sense of separation from the love object, just as there is with the kami. The advantage that the bhakta enjoys is the fact that God is always available to love, whereas the kami does not have this luxury; the object of his or her love is sometimes available and sometimes not owing to subjective and objective 
factors.

Consequently, the mind of a devotee…depending on the intensity of his or her devotion…is generally serene whereas the mind of a desirer is rarely settled. Another advantage enjoyed by the devotee is that when you love God, God has no choice but to love you back, whereas when you love a person the love may or may not be reciprocated. God is consciousness and consciousness is responsive. When it is invoked, it responds predictably with love because consciousness is love. In the discussion on love, it is always difficult to understand the equation between awareness or consciousness and love because it seems like awareness is free of feeling whereas love seems to be a feeling quite separate from awareness. But there is actually no difference because reality is non-dual and feelings are never apart from awareness.

If this explanation does not ring your bell, think about this. You love what you pay attention to. To say you love music or your dog or your child only means that you pay attention to these things. You do so because they are symbols of your self, which is love. When you contemplate them, the self is invoked. What is attention but awareness directed to an object through an instrument, the mind/heart? Love is simply willing attention. If I hold a 
gun to your head and ask you to do something, you will definitely pay attention to my request but not because you love what you are doing. However, love is involved in this situation also because you do what I ask because you love your life…which only goes to show that fear and love are both consciousness. In any case I say mind/heart because there is a common misconception in the spiritual world that love has nothing to do with thought, that the heart and the mind are two different things and…depending on your orientation…one is superior to the other. Heart centered people always feel that the heart, 
the feeling function, is superior to the thinking function. But it is not 
true. They want to keep their thoughts at bay because they have found that certain thoughts obstruct the flow of love, but a feeling person thinks day and night, just as a thinking person feels day and night. You cannot 
separate the mind and the heart because reality is non-dual. What happens in one aspect of reality affects everything else in reality.

Certain thoughts do obstruct the flow of love but this does not mean that thinking is in any way contrary to feeling. It is quite possible to love completely and simultaneously think brilliantly. The word guna means quality. So guna bhakti is worship according to the qualities that condition the instrument of love, the mind/heart. If the 
mind is dull, superstition and fear inform one’s worship. Common religious worship is fear oriented. The devotee keeps to the straight and narrow for fear of God’s wrath. If the mind is passionate, desire informs one’s 
worship. The devotee wants something from God and is continually making 
business. Give me this and I will give you that, a donation to the church, for example. If the mind is pure, the devotee loves God for God’s sake. But even a pure mind sees God as an object. Para bhakti, is nirguna bhakti. Nirguna means without qualities. 
So how do you describe this kind of love, since words are only suitable for describing qualities? You reveal it by implication.

In this kind of 
love, God is not an object. God is known to be you. Until the age of thirty I did not have this kind of love. Until that time I did not even know that I was seeking this kind of love, although a year or two before it happened I had glimpses. It did not happen all at once, although there was 
a moment when it was impossible for me to love in any other way. It happened through my association with someone who had this kind of love. It 
happened by osmosis and it happened through understanding. Para bhakti is terribly attractive. Imagine getting everything you want and knowing that it will never leave. Imagine the feeling of a mother whose child thought to be dead for many years returns to her. It is a feeling of limitless satisfaction, parama sukka is the word used in the texts. It came to stay when I realized my nature as awareness. The self, awareness, is parama prema svarupa. Parama means limitless, svarupa means nature. Prema is a special word reserved only for this kind of love/knowledge. Just as the beauty in a sunset is a pale reflection of the 
beauty of the awareness that reveals the sunset’s beauty, even pure spiritual love is a pale reflection of prema. Prema is the nature of awareness.

When you know you are awareness you are prema, limitless love. 
I say love/knowledge because prema is conscious and intelligent. It is not a passive experience available to the doer. It happens when the doer
has been negated by self knowledge. In my last blog I made the point that knowing you are the self does not remove the doer, the experiencer. It negates the doer. The modern spiritual world…God bless its pointed little head…has a big misconception about the doer. When you hear the stories of the so-called enlightened people these days, in general the best they can do as far as enlightenment is concerned is to claim that there is no ‘me.’ It often seems like a kind of oneupsmanship. “I am not a me. I am spiritually superior to you because
you think you are a doer, a me.” It seems lost on these people that if there is no me, there is no one to claim there is no me…but there you are. And it is clear that they do not know that they are the self, except perhaps indirectly, because the self has no problem with the me at all. The me is the self appearing in a form.

When I say that the self knowledge negates the doer and makes the experienceless experience of parabhakti a reality, I do not mean that the doer stops doing/experiencing. There is no reason why the doer should stop doing, even if it was possible…which it isn’t because awareness is illuming the body/mind/sense complex from womb to tomb, making non-doing impossible. Negation means that you understand that your nature is parama prema, unconditional love. If you experience water on the desert and know it is a mirage, the apparent water does not disappear with the knowing. If you know your nature is limitless non-dual love, the doer does not disappear. It is negated. It is you but you know you are not it. It does not stop experiencing. But when the knowledge “I am limitless non-dual 
love” is firm the doer gets an experience it never thought possible. It experiences a deep unconditional feeling of non-object oriented love that never stops. This kind of love has a very interesting impact on the doer, the experiencing entity.

In the apparent reality, the experiencing entity has two modes, doing and enjoying. There is a feeling “I am doing” (aham karta) and there is a feeling “I am enjoying,’ (aham bhokta)…not necessarily at the same time. The basic psychology of a samsari is that he or she does what he or she does to enjoy the result of the doing. The doing is not necessarily enjoyable but he result is, or is meant to be. For example, many people work dead end jobs and hate them. They do not hate the paycheck. The paycheck temporarily converts the doer to an enjoyer. Self knowledge also converts the doer into an enjoyer. But the conversion is permanent, not temporary. Previously the doer did to enjoy, now no doing is necessary because the direct appreciation of one’s nature is pure enjoyment. 
And when the knowledge is firm the experience of satisfaction is limitless because the self is never not present.

When this kind of love happens, one experiences the amazing experience of being loved. By being loved I do not mean the idea that someone else loves me…which is nice enough…but the direct certain experience that LOVE IS LOVING ME. It is not like Jesus loves me, Jesus and me being two different things. It is not a love sitting somewhere else, like God in heaven, loving me from a distance, but the love and the I are one. I am God. I am God’s Heart loving. The doer, who has been negated, is now effortlessly doing love, for no reason whatsoever except that he or she cannot do otherwise. To say he or she is doing love only means that each and every action is soaked in love.

Another aspect of this kind of love is that it does not matter if it is consummated physically. The experience is so pure that the mind is terribly refined and would actually have to come down into the denser level of consciousness…the body…to consummate it. To actually have sex would dull the instrument of love, the heart. This love is not of the nature of desire because desire is gross and emotional. To unrequite desire is to anger or depress it. Also no material circumstances are required to maintain it, unlike desire. It is out of time. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances throughout 
the world.

When I posted my blog telling of my marriage I received hundreds 
of emails congratulating me. Three people I heard from…although perhaps there were others…were not happy with the news, one of whom said some unpleasant things but changed her mind when she had time to think about it and the other said I was a hypocrite. Although no reasons were given, I presume that she misunderstood statements about relationships made in my public talks and writings, which is reasonable. But many were surprised by the suddenness of it. I have lived as a single man for about seventy five percent of my adult life and I have not been particularly positive about ‘relationships,’ not because I was unsuccessful in them but because as conceived in modern times, they are inherently dishonest.

So it is not surprising that they were surprised. If they understood the nature of this love they would not have been surprised. Emotional types…people who value their feelings above everything else…in general misunderstand my mild negativity about relationships. To set the record straight, I am not against relationships per se. I think the modern idea of relationships without marriage is stupid but I am all for people loving each other in whatever way they see fit. However, it is common sense that if you are seeking freedom, a relationship 
as conceived by someone wanting one is not going to produce freedom, except perhaps intermittent freedom from loneliness, which is not real freedom and which does not remove all the other bondages that that an unenlightened person is subject to, attachment to money, status and power, to name a few. And while samsaric relationships may produce intermittent intimacies, they also produce almost non-stop anxiety because they are always in danger of going south.

Free beings are very rare because the obstacles to freedom are
many and seemingly intractable, not the least of which is the idea that you need love from someone else. If you want freedom, you have to love your seeking totally. You have to convert all the emotion that flows toward objects toward your self until you have attained ‘a devotion that knows no 
otherness.’ I would be remiss in my duty as a teacher of Vedanta if I did not point out the downside of desire prompted relationships. In any case this kind of love surprises many because people only know love that exists in time. Both Isabella, now Sundari (the beauty that makes beauty beautiful i.e. the Self) and I have this kind of love so we were married even before we met. That is the feeling. That is the knowledge. I have always known you. I have always loved you. I did not marry someone 
else; I married myself appearing as someone else. And that ‘someone else’ sees it in exactly the same way. It does not take time to fall in love and work out all the details when your love is backed by self knowledge. It is instantaneous and eternal. You do not have to consult anyone, discuss it with your friends and make a big story out of it. If you do, it means that you do not have this kind of love. It is a knowing that takes place far away from the world. And the most wonderful part of this kind of love is
that should the other stop loving you…which is impossible but let’s say it isn’t…it would not affect your love. Why? Because there is no other. It only seems like it.

Another feature of this love is gratitude. The doer enjoys a feeling of 
gratitude beyond measure. I feel like the luckiest man alive and my wife 
feels like the luckiest woman alive. At first you wonder what you have done 
to deserve it…it seems like grace. And it is. But when you think about it a bit you realize that grace is earned. Of the forty or fifty people I have met in my life enjoying this kind of love all had something in common: they lived their lives impeccably, authentically. Usually at great expense, they
consistently heeded the intimations of the infinite as it charted their paths home. I have been exceptionally fortunate in life. It would be hard to imagine a more blessed existence. The first time this happened was with my guru. When it was time for me to go, I hated to leave him because this kind of love was reasonably common in his world. And knowing it, I became sensitive to it. As I subsequently roamed around India and the world, I met others who had it 
too.

In my late thirties I married a woman who had it. I would still be married to her today had the marriage not ended tragically. Sundari captured this love in her wedding vows, a portion of which I reproduce here. “I offer myself in the service of Love This Love that is not mine, nor yours nor ours This Love that belongs to no-one and everyone, that cannot be sought or kept, only given,
that has no more begun than it will end I bow in humility to this Love that loves us and through us, that is us, that creates and destroys, that can neither be denied or ignored Flowing with its own unstoppable course, it is
a strength so strong
mere force is feebleness Unknown, unknowable, all happening within us, the knower,
a singularity 
of complete simplicity Demanding no less than everything, it
strips away all but Self Nothing is hidden, all is given, all is known,
all is seen,
all is one” Such is the power of limitless non-circumstantial love that even not knowing what it is, everyone seeks it. If you have it nearly everyone you meet is uplifted by it. I say nearly because there are perverse souls in whom envy arises in the presence of this love and they will be tormented by it. They will speak ill of you and revile you, but you are not bothered. If you have it you do not have to worry about anything in this world. All of life’s wheels are greased automatically and they stay greased.

In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna, speaking as the Self in charge of the world, says, “With a 
mind/heart that knows no otherness meditate on me alone. I will take care of your getting (yoga) and keeping (kshema).” If you multiply the deep unconditional feeling of love by two you are talking about something extraordinary. The total is much greater than the 
sum of its parts. This love has amazing consequences. I am not surprised that many of the emails I have received in the last few days have
said that just knowing that such a love exists is terribly inspirational. It
gives hope. We are all fed up with the tired old ‘I love you’ love, even
those still seeking it in relationship. You pretend that you want it but in your heart you know that it isn’t what it purports to be. At best it is a band aid for a lonely mind. This love that is ours but not ours is also for the world. We will make ourselves available as I travel the world teaching scripture.

In a subsequent blog I will publish our wedding vows and I am now going through our love letters and editing them to give you an idea of how it happened. You might 
find this strange because they are so ‘personal’ but there is nothing 
personal about anything when you think about it. We are all one being. We 
have the same body, mind and heart. We live for each other. Neither my wife or I can find any distance between ourselves, where then is the 
boundary between us and the world?

Rise in Love

Once when I was excessively familiar with my guru in public he looked at me with an icy stare and said, “Never forget, Ram.  I am not a human being.  I am an institution.”  Well, he was an institution, no doubt, but he was also a human being who through hard work…”brick by brick’ he said…had actualized his full potential here on earth. 

There is a strange notion in the myopic and self obsessed world of Western advaita that ‘you’ don’t exist.  What this half baked teaching is meant to mean is that everything that exists is just consciousness and that there is no separate, unique ‘you,’ no person.  This statement is true if you look at reality from the point of view of pure consciousness and is partially true when you look at it from the point of view of the samsaric life.  While this teaching is meant to reveal the highest truth and confer on those who ‘get it’ the exalted status of the enlightened, it is a half baked teaching because the ‘you,’ the person who is supposed to not exist, actually does exist.

The existence of individuals is established by common sense experience.  The very fact that the existence of the individual is denied proves its existence because you cannot deny something that does not exist.  In fact non-existence is purely a concept because there is only consciousness and consciousness is existence.  In Vedanta we say the individual definitely exists but that it is not real, a statement that sometimes takes a bit of contemplation to make sense of.   It makes sense when reality is defined as what never changes, what lasts.  Individuals pass into and out of time like elementary particles pass into and out of a cloud chamber.  They exist and then cease to exist, although not really.  They just pass into an unmanifest state and then reappear.   There is nothing that does not exist because consciousness is everything  

To deny your existence here is a great shame.  When you do so, you deny yourself the amazing pleasure being a part of a world shot through and through with light, a world of intense and wonderful love.  This blog is about love.  Those that criticize Vedanta as a merely ‘intellectual’ path do not have a clue about Vedanta or a clue about love.  If consciousness is all there is and love exists then love is all there is and anything that reveals the nature of reality by stripping off ignorance about it is definitely a path of love.

In the first place love is not a feeling.   It appears as a feeling and it appears as all feelings including those that we do not commonly call love.  Hate, for example, is just love passing through an unpurified heart.  Strip the heart’s impurities and hate becomes love.  To understand that everything is consciousness, love, is to fulfill one’s true purpose here.

By invitation, I have been blogging here for about year now and I have more or less taken the stance of a Vedanta teacher.  I am not a Vedanta teacher.  I teach Vedanta in a professional manner but it is not my profession.  At best it is a hobby that I have pursued with passion for forty years because I never felt like earning a living and being part of a society whose values I cannot, in general, relate to.

By the standard of most people’s dull little lives, my life as a Vedanta teacher has been terribly interesting, exciting and glamorous.  I get invited all over the world, meet the most spiritually interesting  people on the planet, am treated to exotic locations too numerous to mention, don’t have to worry about money and am shown 0great respect by nearly everyone.  But even an important role like this is just a role, a lifestyle.  It is not who I am.  When I say who I am I mean awareness as it exists in the form of the person named James who was born seventy years ago and who, by all accounts has led a very exotic life. 

When you teach Vedanta you teach truth.  Everyone wants the truth. So when you surrender your mind to the Vedantic methodology you very often see the truth and it transforms your life.  I am very clear that it is the truth that is making the impact and not me personally, although the dedication that I bring to the teaching is certainly a major ingredient in the transmission.   When a person becomes awakened to the truth, he or she reacts in a very positive way toward me.  Mostly, this means that I am loved and respected.  If I had a love deficit, which I would if I did not know that I am love…which is the message of Vedanta…I might be tempted to take advantage.  That I have an excellent reputation is a tribute to the fact that I do not take advantage of my position to satisfy my personal needs. 

Perhaps you will object and say that if a person is enlightened he or she will have no personal needs, as if needs were somehow unspiritual.  In a way it is true, in so far as nothing is actually personal.  In a non-dual reality personal and impersonal are just concepts and are easily resolvable into their source, awareness, which is neither personal nor impersonal.   But it is never the person that is enlightened.  It is the self that is enlightened, not that enlightenment is a good word for the self because it implies endarkenment, which is not a fact because there is only consciousness.  The self is always the self and the person is always the person.  The person is always much benefitted by the knowledge that it is non-separate and completely dependent on the self for its very existence, assuming that an understanding of the this dependence cancels the person’s sense of doership. 

Knowing that consciousness is all and that I am consciousness does not imply that there is anything spiritually wrong with being a human being with various needs.  In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna, speaking as the self appearing in the world as a human being, says, “I am the desire that is not opposed to dharma.”  This is a very interesting statement because it says that the desire operating in the dharma field that respects the physical, psychological and moral laws operating in the field is actually awareness.  It could only be that way if reality is non-dual, which it is.  The implication of this statement is not always appreciated by spiritual types who are often afraid of human love for any number of reasons.  It simply means that you get to be the person you are, feel what you feel, do what you do and think what you think as long as you are mindful of the non-dual basis of the life’s rules and laws.   In terms of human love, it means that if I play by the rules of love, I am quite within my rights to love another human being as a human being or as a manifestation of the divine, or for any other reason.  

Anyone who says he or she is not interested in love is a liar.  Love is the very essence of life and the nature of every being.   People pursue it in innumerable ways because they are driven by the desire to know it.  When you know it, you do not pursue it.  You see it.  You experience it in everyone and in everything and you graciously give and receive it.  People who have read my autobiography often come away with the idea that I am a big lover boy, out to have a good time with the women.  They are wrong.  I have had numerous loves and love affairs, some very deep and meaningful, some not so deep and meaningful, but I can honestly say that I never had a bad one because I was only looking to understand how to give and receive the love that is my nature.  I was seeking the knowledge of a love that would make every human contact a loving one.  And with persistence and God’s grace I discovered…or should I say rediscovered it…it one fine day.  It is always a rediscovery because love is the essence of every experience and those moments of joy and peace that come frequently…or infrequently as the case may be…are always moments of self love. 

When you know what love is you can love anyone…and you do.  But knowing what love is…who I am…is very rare and if you are a charter member of the love club…which you will be if you have lived and learned life’s lessons…this knowledge will want to share itself with someone who also knows, someone who is not constrained by the small conditional notions of love that bind people to samsara.  It will seek the company of someone who has been also set free by self knowledge.

In any case it was always my desire to have a partner who knew who she was and loved unconditionally.  I did not need her to love me unconditionally because only I can do that, but whose love for herself…and by extension everyone, including me…was unconditional.  It is very natural for love to want to be understood.  Love is understanding.  You see things through your eyes but it does not prevent you from seeing through the eyes of the other.  In fact, love demands that you see through the eyes of the beloved.  It is not lonely being free, although freedom means that that there is only one of us and that you are always alone, but being alone means being love and this love is its own reward. 

If you are a simple person living an ordinary life working hard to keep yourself afloat it a complicated demanding existence, the opportunities to meet someone you can love and who can love you are always limited, not just because of a host of external factors but because your ability to give and receive love will be constrained by unexamined likes and dislikes.  But when the knowledge of who you are has destroyed your binding likes and dislikes and you live large, the love that you are is unconstrained and flows into everyone with whom you come in contact, assuming it is not blocked by some idea in the mind of the recipient.  When you teach Vedanta the love behind the words gives them the power to awaken the self.  This awakening is little more than the self’s recognition of itself in the words.   The words point the mind back to the self and an appreciation of one’s nature as love ensues. 

When you are awakened by the words of truth by a teaching and teacher a heartfelt sense of gratitude arises.  If you do not understand how the teaching works you will assume that the teacher is introducing you to the love that you are and you may fall in love with him or her.   You can see my dilemma.  Here I am, a human being who would like to be in a love relationship with a woman who knows who she is and, because of my situation, I find myself surrounded by women who would like to…and do…fall in love with me.  I could easily have my way with them.  I don’t do it first, because it is a violation of the rules of the teaching tradition and second, because I want more than just another worldly or spiritual love.  I want someone who understands me as I understand myself.  It is not enough that someone project their fantasy on me and declare their love…which happens more than you can imagine…or be willing to love me because I have somehow been instrumental in changing her life or because I am a charismatic and an interesting character.   

Man proposes, God disposes is the essence of life.  If you do not understand this fact you will never be happy.  So even though I wanted to marry someone who understood me as I understand myself and God had not seen fit…until a couple of months ago…to act on my request this desire did not in any way make me unhappy.  It was a back burner, not a front burner issue.   I took the non-disposal of this desire as God’s will…and since I long ago surrendered my whole life to God, which means that whatever happens is absolutely perfect because it cannot be otherwise, it being God’s will…or grace as the case may be…it was fine with me.   In fact the non-fulfillment of this desire coincided with remarkable success in my Vedanta teaching and I have been having the time of my life. 

One never knows the ‘true’ reason for anything in the world because there is no one true reason.  There are ten thousand reasons for even the smallest event. When you want something that is extremely rare God is constrained by the availability of said object in the field of available objects.  Every man wants Angelina Jolie for a lover but there is only one of her and so only one man is going to get her, assuming she wants a man.  When you know who you are and you want to marry someone who knows who she is…assuming she wants to marry someone who knows who he is, which is not always the case…the odds are not in your favor.

I knew this all along.  I was not holding my breath. I had not resigned myself to the situation because resignation would have meant that I was attached to getting this desire.  I was not.  I just thought it would be nice, the icing on the cake of my life.  In any case about two months ago God finally came through on my request.   

She was out there looking for me forever and we rose in love.  Just as a person who has not fallen in love can never understand what love is until he or she experiences it, it would be impossible to tell anyone what this kind of love actually is because it is so rare.   But, in my next blog I am going to try. 

My wife’s name is Isabella Viglietti.  This is our picture.