Extend the boundaries of the glowing kingdom of your love, gradually including your family, your neighbors, your community, your country, all countries -- all living sentient creatures.
Interpretation
The quote encourages expanding love to encompass everyone around us, not just close relationships.
Paramahansa Yogananda's quote emphasizes the importance of broadening the circle of love beyond just oneself and immediate loved ones. By extending our love to include family, neighbors, and all living beings, we create a more compassionate and harmonious world, fostering connections that transcend boundaries and promote unity among diverse communities.
In practice
During a speech at a community gathering, to inspire collective kindness.
Man is important in one sense only. He was made in the image of God: That is his importance. He is not important for his body, ego, or personality. His constant affirmation of ego-consciousness is the source of all his problems.
When, by meditation, we withdraw restless thoughts from the lake of the mind, we behold our soul, a perfect reflection of Spirit.
It is wisest to be impartial. If you have health, but are attached to it, you will always be afraid of losing it. And if you fear that loss, but become ill, you will suffer. Why not remain forever joyful in the Self?
From joy people are born; for joy they live; in joy they melt at death. Death is an ecstasy, for it removes the burden of the body and frees the soul of all pain springing from body identification. It is the cessation of pain and sorrow.
It is better to meditate a little bit with depth than to mediate long with the mind running here and there. If you do not make an effort to control the mind it will go on doing as it pleases, no matter how long you sit to meditate.
Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.
Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers.
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything.
Romantic love is not an emotion. ... It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.
But if there's love, dear... those are the ties that bind, and you'll have a family in your heart, forever.
Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world.
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