Adoration of the Lord

"Love is the key to every situation in life." Henry Thomas Hamblin

The greatest acquisition of human life is Divine love. Divine love is the love for the Lord seated in the hearts of all beings and creatures. This love is attained by the devotee in the first place only through the realization of the Lord in his own heart. The Lord is the master of the worlds. He pervades the entire universe. He is the supreme ruler of all the planes and spheres of existence. Since He is everywhere and all, to behold Him in all beings and love them all, is the true adoration of the Lord. In this vision of love, the apparent good and evil have no significance. This love is based upon equality and a consciousness of universality. Divine love is absolutely pure and crystalline. It does not see distinctions, and so has no likes and dislikes. It flows from the heart of the devotee, and floods the world embracing and absorbing all alike, just as the light from the sun shines equally on all. It sheds its sweetness on all to the same degree. The devotee who has realized this exalted love is spontaneously blissful in all his activities, since these are permeated through and through with love! The real joy of the eternal is conceived in the womb of Divine love. Divine love expresses itself in cheerfulness, contentment, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, compassion, and peace.

This love is absent in that heart in which, in the place of the supreme Lord, ego has installed himself. The ego is the cause of soul’s bondage and misery. The moment the soul realizes his supreme and divine nature by union with the Lord in his heart, he becomes the very lustrous moon emitting always soft and soothing rays of Divine love. The ego obstructs the free flow of the Divine life in the human being. So to earn the supreme blessings of this glorious love, a one-pointed devotion to and adoration of the Lord of the universe is the way, the means, and also the goal.

Adoration of the Lord signifies a loving remembrance of Him at all times, and this remembrance can be most easily effected by taking constantly the Lord’s Divine Name. (The Divine Life, pp. 138–139) Selections_from_the_Writings_of_Swami_Ramdas

"There is a River known of old

From which the prophets drew;

A living stream that ever flows

The whole creation through.

And they who find this mystic stream

Shall never thirst again;

It flows from out the throne of God

To all the sons of men."

(Henry Victor Morgan)

All the chastening’s of life are due to the fact that we are not in the Stream of Blessedness ₁. We attract them to ourselves, and bring them into our life, through not living in harmony with the Divine. We do not heed the Heavenly impulses from within which would fain guide us into paths of peace and harmony. We still listen to the voice of desire, still follow the impulses of self, still live in a state of spiritual lethargy, instead of braving the mountain passes of spiritual attainment. The inevitable result of all this is suffering. Owing, however, to the working of a beneficent law - the operation of Divine love and wisdom - the effect of our wrong thinking and acting is that what is brought to us, is not punishment, but remedial experience. Thus it is that one of the secrets of the true art of living is to meet all life 's experience with co-operation, and in a flexible and adaptable manner.

But all such suffering and experience would not be necessary if ( a) we were already perfect and all-wise, or (b) if we always followed the impulses of the Divine within us, to live our life on a higher level. We put ourselves, then, in the stream of the Divine Blessedness or Providence, partly through acknowledging that all good comes from the Spirit, from the One Central Source, and not from ourselves, or our own efforts; and partly through depending upon the Divine Source instead of upon our own efforts, wisdom, or subtlety. But, so I have found, it is necessary that this acknowledgment that all good, all wisdom, and all deliverance, etc., come from God should not remain merely an intellectual assent, or belief. It is true that we must first start with belief, but this must pass on to a state of knowing, or realization through experience. "First within, then without: first in the unseen, then in the seen. We learn the first truths about life even as children are slowly taught but the further stage is one of actual knowing through experience. It is a matter of attainment. Those who remain in a state of mere belief can never enter into freedom, or live a wider and more spacious life. But those who pass on to a state of real knowing, attain to a wider consciousness, in which they are free, to that degree, from the limitations which restrict man, and which keep him bound, a helpless victim, to the wheel of painful experience. Here, as in all spiritual truths, there is a subtle paradox. It is through choosing the difficult path that we find ourselves in a state of freedom: it is through choosing the easy path that we find life increasingly difficult. If we seek the personal happiness of the selfhood we never find it: if we follow the painful path of duty and high achievement we find rest to our soul, and joy which transcends mere happiness, even as the mountain towers above the plain. Henry Thomas Hamblin ~ DIVINE ADJUSTMENT

The voice of Wisdom that is heard in the "Silence" tells us that only as we give do we receive. That if we give of our best--our best thoughts, emotions, service, love--then the best will come back to us in the exact proportion, no more, no less. Henry Thomas Hamblin ~ DYNAMIC THOUGHT [1923]

₁ See James Allen (1864 – 1912) ~ Byways to Blessedness(1904)