The Law Is Perfected in Love

What is it to be Comforted?

Reading and Affirmation for February

From the book The Beatitudes: Their Inner Meaning by Swami Kriyananda

Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.

The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.

In the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 1, we read:

The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

Grace means the power to rise, spiritually. Truth means the experience of divine realities, not the application in the outer world of that inner experience.

Divine love is the soul’s experience of oneness with God. Kindness is the human manifestation of that love. Grace is deeper than mere kindness.

Wisdom is a divine experience. Justice to all is a human law, though divinely inspired. It follows as a consequence of the experience of wisdom. Truth goes deeper than mere justice.

While following the law, we should strive always to trace it back to its origins in the vision of God. Therefore Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita urges the devotee not to be satisfied with spiritual precepts alone, but to go beyond them to the direct, inner experience of truth. In the eighteenth Chapter of that great Scripture he says:

Nay! but once more

Take My last word, My utmost meaning have!

Precious thou art to Me; right well beloved!

Listen! I tell thee for thy comfort this.

Give Me thy heart! adore Me! serve Me! cling

In faith and love and reverence to Me!

So shalt thou come to Me! I promise true,

For thou art sweet to Me!

And let go those –

Rites and writ duties! Fly to me alone!

Make Me thy single refuge! I will free

Thy soul from all its sins! Be of good cheer!

Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.

Whispers From Eternity

48. May the Niagara of my Joys inundate all hearts

May the Niagara Falls of my heart’s joy pour unceasingly upon all I meet. May that flooding power drown their difficulties. Let their melancholia then be calmed to contentment by moonbeams of my bliss.

Oh! I will be a tornado of laughter, lifting up and destroying superstructures of sorrow, sweeping over endless miles of suffering egos. I will churn up and blow away the troubles from all hearts!

In lightning-flashes of my mirth I will swiftly expose to view the panorama of Thy beauty, so long obscured in the nocturnal darkness of unseeing, uncaring minds.

Bless me, that by a single shaft of my light the gathering gloom of ages, nurtured in the dark corners of human minds, be put to flight. Through Thy grace, even one sudden flash of wisdom will dispel the accumulations of dark error, though it lasted countless millions of years.

Paramhansa Yogananda