WE MAY REPRESENT love as a triangle, each of the angles of which corresponds to one of its inseparable characteristics. There can be no triangle without its three angles, and there can be no true love without its three following characteristics. The first angle of our triangle of love is that love knows no bargaining. Wherever there is any seeking for something in return, there cannot be any real love; it becomes a mere matter of shopkeeping. So long as there is in us any idea of deriving this or that favour from God in return for our respect and allegiance to Him, there can be no true love growing in our hearts. Those who worship God because they wish Him to bestow favours on them are sure not to worship Him if those favours are not forthcoming. The bhakta loves the Lord because He is lovable; there is no other motive originating or directing this divine emotion of the true devotee.
We have heard it said that a great king once went into a forest and there met a sage. He talked with the sage a little and was very much pleased with his purity and wisdom. The king then wanted the sage to oblige him by receiving a present from him. The sage refused to do so, saying: “The fruits of the forest are enough food for me; the pure streams of water flowing down from the mountains give enough of drink for me; the bark of the trees supplies me with enough of covering; and a cave in the mountains forms my home. Why should I take any present from you or from anybody?” The king said, “Just to benefit me, sir, please take something from my hands and please come with me to the city and to my palace.” After much persuasion the sage at last consented to do as the king desired, and went with him to his palace. Before offering the gift to the sage the king prayed to God repeatedly: “Lord, give me more children. Lord, give me more wealth. Lord, give me more territory. Lord, keep my body in better health”—and so on. Before the king finished saying his prayers the sage got up and quietly walked out of the room. On seeing this the king became perplexed and began to follow him, crying aloud: “Sir, you are going away! You have not received my gifts.” The sage turned round and said to him: “I do not beg of beggars. You are yourself nothing but a beggar; and how can you give me anything? I am no fool to think of taking anything from a beggar like you. Go away. Do not follow me.”
In this story is well brought out the distinction between mere beggars and the real lovers of God. Begging is not the language of love. To worship God even for the sake of salvation or any other reward is equally degenerate. Love knows no reward. Love is always for love’s sake. The bhakta loves because he cannot help loving. When you see some beautiful scenery and fall in love with it, you do not demand anything in the way of a favour from the scenery; nor does the scenery demand anything from you. Yet the vision of it brings you to a blissful state of mind: it tones down all the friction in your soul; it makes you calm, almost raises you, for the time being, beyond your mortal nature, and places you in a condition approaching divine ecstasy. This nature of real love is the first angle of our triangle. Ask not anything in return for your love; let your position be always that of the giver. Give your love unto God, but do not ask anything in return from Him.
The second angle of the triangle of love is that love knows no fear. Those who love God through fear are the lowest of devotees—not fully developed men. They worship God from fear of punishment. To them He is a great Being with a whip in one hand and a sceptre in the other. They are afraid that if they do not obey Him they will be whipped. It is a degradation to worship God through fear of punishment; such worship is, if worship at all, the crudest form of worship through love. So long as there is any fear in the heart, how can there be love also? Love conquers all fear naturally. Think of a young mother in the street, and a dog barking at her; she is frightened and flies into the nearest house. But suppose the next day she is in the street with her child, and a lion springs upon the child. Where will she be now? Of course, in the very mouth of the lion, protecting her child. Love conquers all fear. Fear comes from the selfish idea of cutting oneself off from the universe. The smaller and the more selfish I make myself, the greater is my fear. If a man thinks he is a mere nothing, fear will surely come upon him. And the less you think of yourself as an insignificant person, the less fear will there be for you. So long as there is the least spark of fear in you there can be no love. Love and fear are incompatible; God is never to be feared by those who love Him. The commandment, “Do not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” the true lover of God laughs at. How can there be any blasphemy in the religion of love? The more you take the name of the Lord, the better for you, in whatever way you may do it. You are only repeating His name because you love Him.
The third angle of the triangle of love is that love knows no rival, for in it is always embodied the lover’s highest ideal. True love never comes until the object of our love becomes to us our highest ideal. It may be that in many cases human love is misdirected and misplaced; but to the person who loves, the thing he loves is always his highest ideal. One man may see his ideal in the vilest of beings, and another in the highest of beings; nevertheless in every case it is the ideal alone that is truly and intensely loved. The highest ideal of every man is called God. Ignorant or wise, saint or sinner, man or woman, educated or uneducated, cultivated or uncultivated—to every human being the highest ideal is God. The synthesis of all the highest ideals of beauty, of sublimity, and of power gives us the completest conception of the loving and lovable God. These ideals exist naturally, in some shape or other, in every mind; they form part and parcel of all our minds. All the active manifestations of human nature are struggles of those ideals to become realized in practical life. All the various movements that we see around us in society are caused by the various ideals, in various souls, trying to come out and become concretized; what is inside presses on to come outside. This perennially dominant influence of the ideal is the one force, the one motive power, that may be seen to be constantly working in the midst of mankind.
It may be after hundreds of births, after struggling through thousands of years, that a man finds it is vain to try to make the inner ideal completely mould external conditions and square well with them. After realizing this he no longer tries to project his own ideal on the outside world, but worships the ideal itself as ideal, from the highest standpoint of love. This ideally perfect ideal embraces all lower ideals. Everyone admits the truth of the saying that a lover sees Helen’s beauty on an Ethiop’s brow. The man who is standing aside as a looker-on sees that love is here misplaced; but the lover sees his Helen all the same, and does not see the Ethiop at all. Helen or Ethiop, the objects of our love are really the centres round which our ideals become crystallized. What is it that the world commonly worships? Certainly not the all-embracing, ideally perfect ideal of the supreme devotee and lover. That ideal which men and women commonly worship is what is in themselves; every person projects his or her own ideal on the outside world and kneels before it. That is why we find that men who are cruel and bloodthirsty conceive of a bloodthirsty God, because they can love only their own highest ideal. That is why good men have a very high ideal of God, and why their ideal is indeed so very different from that of others.