Though love is light it becomes darkness when its law is not understood. Just as water, which cleans all things, becomes mud when mixed with earth, so love, when not understood rightly and when directed wrongly, becomes a curse instead of bliss.
There are five chief sins against love, which turn nectar into poison.
1) when the lover deprives the beloved of freedom and happiness against her desire, because of his love.
2) when the lover gives way to a spirit of rivalry and jealousy or bitterness in love.
3) if the lover doubts, distrusts, and suspects the one whom he loves.
4) if he shrinks from enduring all the sorrows, pains, troubles, difficulties, and sufferings that come in the path of love.
5) And finally, when the lover pursues his own will instead of complete resignation to the beloved's wish.
These are the natural failings of a loving heart, as maladies are natural to the physical body. As lack of health makes life miserable, so lack of love makes the heart wretched. Only the lover who avoids these faults benefits by love, and arrives safely at his destination.
Love must be absolutely free from selfishness, otherwise it does not produce proper illumination. If the fire has no flame it cannot give light, and smoke comes out of it, which is troublesome. Such is selfish love.
Love lies in service. Only that which is done, not for fame or name, nor for the appreciation or thanks of those for whom it is done, is love's service.
The lover shows kindness and beneficence to the beloved. He does whatever he can for the beloved in the way of help, service, sacrifice, kindness, or rescue, and hides it from the world and even from the beloved. If the beloved does anything for him he exaggerates it, idealizes it, makes it into a mountain from a molehill. He takes poison from the hands of the beloved as sugar, and love's pain in the wound of his heart is his only joy. By magnifying and idealizing whatever the beloved does for him and by diminishing and forgetting whatever he himself does for the beloved, he first develops his own gratitude, which creates all goodness in his life.
Patience, sacrifice, resignation, strength, and steadfastness are needed in love, and ultimately nothing but hope, until one is united with the beloved. Sacrifice is needed in love to give all there is, wealth, possessions, body, heart, and soul. There remains no 'I', only 'you', until the 'you' becomes the 'I'. Where there is love there is patience, where there is no patience there is no love. The lover takes hope the only thing that keeps the flame of life alight. Hope to the lover is the rope of safety in the sea.
The effect of love is pain. The love that has no pain is no love. The lover who has not gone through the agonies of love is not a lover, he claims love falsely. 'What love is it that gives no pain? Even if one were crazy in love it is nothing.' The pain of love is the lover's pleasure, his very life. The lack of pain is his death.
Everybody can speak of love and claim to love, but to stand the test of love and to bear the pain in love is the achievement of some rare hero. The mere sight of love's pain makes the coward run away from it. No soul would have taken this poison if it had not the taste of nectar.
He who loves because he cannot help it is the slave of love, but he who loves because it is his only joy is the king of love. He who, for the sake of love, loves someone who falls short of his ideal is the ruler of love. And he who can seal his heart full of love in spite of all attraction on the part of the beloved is the conqueror of love.
The heart is not living until it has experienced pain. Man has not lived if he has lived and worked with his body and mind without heart. The soul is all light, but all darkness is caused by the death of the heart. Pain makes it alive. The same heart that was once full of bitterness, when purified by love becomes the source of all goodness. All deeds of kindness spring from it.
Rumi describes six signs of the lover: deep sigh, mild expression, moist eyes, eating little, speaking little, sleeping little, which all show the sign of pain in love. Hafiz says, 'All bliss in my life has been the outcome of unceasing tears and continual sighs through the heart of night.'
The pain of love becomes in time the life of the lover. The soreness of the wound of his heart affords him a joy that nothing else can give. The heart aflame becomes the torch on the path of the lover, which lightens his way that leads him to his destination. The pleasures of life are blinding, it is love alone that clears the rust from the heart, the mirror of the soul.
When love is for the human being it is primitive and incomplete, and yet it is needed to begin with. He can never say, 'I love God,' who has no love for his fellow man. But when love attains its culmination in God, it reaches its perfection.
Love creates love in man and even more with God. It is the nature of love. If you love God, God sends His love evermore upon you. If you seek Him by night, He will follow you by day. Wherever you are, in your affairs, in your business transactions, the help, the protection and the presence of the Divine will follow you.
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