LOVE IS LIVING FEELING

 
This Truth belongs to us, and He has come to lead the way; and He gives you a symbol, a damaan. Take that damaan seriously. That's the hem of his sadra, the seamless garment that the Avatar wears. That damaan is very important. Without it, you'll never find the way to Truth. If you hold onto it firmly, and grasp it with all your might, continuously — not continually, but continuously — without letting it go, it will then be your fortress of protection and strength.

Even while you're asleep, don't let it go. When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you should be certain that you've got hold of is the damaan of Meher Baba. Grab that before you go out into the world — it'll give you a feeling of indomitability that nothing else will give. Holding on to this damaan will not release you from vicissitudes or hardships or misfortunes — you'll be inundated with even more of them — but that damaan that you're grasping hold of is the Love, the Completeness of Meher Baba.

You look to it the first thing in the morning and see that you're holding on to it with all your might when you go to bed again at night. It's going to be the only thing in life that you really rely upon while you're setting out on the path in the direction that will take you onto the Divine Path....

Don't think that because you talk about Meher Baba, you're on the Spiritual Path. Don't believe that if you give up certain things, you're on the Spiritual Path. You're not on the Spiritual Path until you've cast out from your heart the impressions of greed, anger, and lust. Now lust does not have the connotation that most people think of it as having. Don't conjure up in the mind some kind of gruesome activity connected with the word.

Meher Baba says that lust is simply anything from which you derive a feeling of satisfaction. That's lust. If you get a feeling of satisfaction form food, you have a lust. If you have a feeling of satisfaction from sex, lust is present. When you get a feeling of satisfaction from enjoying a sense of power in your business, in a corporation or a state, you are a lustful person. There's nothing wrong in that, if you want to remain in the tentacles of maya, if all you want to be is a physical-plane creature on the same level as an animal, enjoying these impressions, if you want to stay on this side of the wall of Truth.

But, if you want to enjoy and take possession of Love with a capital "L", Peace with a capital "P", and Patience and Beauty and Harmony, and the Bliss and the Knowledge and the Infinite Power which is identified with Truth, you've got to give up these satisfactions and adopt those qualities synonymous with Love.

In Love you must sacrifice; in Love you must bear pain; in Love you must deny yourself. You must see to it that others are happy at the expense of your happiness. In Love you must bear the pain and the anguish of unfulfillment until it carries you into the realm of fulfillment. This Love must not be directed to another person. Instead it must be directed to Almighty God, and today, He is in the person of Meher Baba. Why? Because Meher Baba is the only incarnation of Love that we have in the world today. He is Love, and only because He is Love can we receive Love form the Source that He is. This Love is a real generation of Feeling, with a capital "F". It's a living Feeling. It's there — but you must want it, you must feel desperately the need for having it, because you're not going to find Love in this world. Maya can imitate it — oh, it's a master imitator — but it can never give you Love.

The imitation that may can pour upon you will be in the form of affection, gregariousness with others, a feeling of animal warmth. Ah, but it isn't that deep down Feeling which really moves the guts of you, and when it moves you it makes you close those lips of yours — seals them and sticks them, as Baba says. And when it really takes hold of you and you develop a longing for more and more, you're going to burn inside. It's going to scorch you.

When you hear of a mast — masts are God-absorbed, God-mad, God-intoxicated souls who are living in India, Pakistan, and a few in Syria — whenever you hear of one of these masts who hurls himself to the ground and rolls back and forth, he's burning with this Love. This agony of pain is so tremendous that the only way he can assuage it is by coming intimately into contact with something elemental like earth. He rolls in the dust to try to put out this fire, this agony for union with the Beloved, with a capital "B". It's a Real Thing. This experience masts go through is R E A L. And then, in the midst of it, there suddenly comes a coolness to assuage the agony.