Saltwater of eternal love
Love is like the salt in this glass of water.
Take this salt, my friend, and stir it into the glass of water.
Now, drink from it. Is it salty?
Drink from the centre of the glass. Is it salty? From the bottom—is it still salty? Tell me, where exactly is the salt hiding in this water?
You cannot see it, but it permeates the whole water.
So Love is like that: hidden, yet ever-present within the whole cosmos.
Love is that which makes us alive. It binds us to each other. We cannot see love; it is invisible but sustains our very breath.
To know this love, we must embrace our neighbour as ourselves. To love them despite their faults. To forgive them in the midst of pain. To do these is to touch the Infinite Love within us both.
To live in this Love, we must abandon our hatred. So pray not for wealth, glory, honours, or pleasures. Pray instead that our lives may be worthy to be a note on the sheet music of Love.
For to be strummed once by the Musician is worth a thousand lifetimes. Nay, worth all of existence.
Yet, look at us. Destroying our surroundings, killing a life for profit, and starving a child to control ancient lands.
We think a note scratched on the ground will be played by the Musician. Oh, how foolish!
Do we not see that we are only harming ourselves? That our neighbour is not a stranger but a mirror? That we are the innocent children we kill in the womb for convenience? That we are the rivers we pollute for profit? That we are the children starving for food behind the wall?
Awake, my friend. And abandon this false division! Join instead in the chorus and become whole.
Tell me, can you separate the salt from the water without killing one of them?
“Of course, I can,” you say. “I’ll dry out the water in the sun to get the salt.”
But now you’ve killed the one to get the other.
Where there is division, there is death. Where there is wholeness, there is life.
What is wholeness if not continually seeking after Love? So let your soul become whole and fill it with Love.
As Chaitanya, the great Indian mystic, wrote:
I pray not for wealth, I pray not for honours, I pray not for pleasures, or even the joys of poetry. I only pray that during all my life I may have love: that I may have pure love to love Thee.1
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Siksastakam, 4.