The Taste That Tastes You. Love as Presence, Practice, and Return

You are sugar, but you imagine yourself separate from sugar, to taste sugar and know your own sweetness.

– Swami Sarvapriyananda

The highest taste acquirable is that of prema, pure love. Anyone who has tasted it would attest to there being nothing sweeter. The best part is that this love costs nothing and you needn’t go anywhere to find it. In truth, you cannot escape it. It is a unifying force. A field that permeates everything, everywhere, at all times. We are always in love, and it is always in us. But, like a fish unaware of the water in which it exists, many of us go through life oblivious to that life-sustaining energy in which we are all immersed. Attunement to this all-pervading frequency is requisite to the endeavor of conscious-centered living. Love is that consciousness, the one that is the source of all, the Self. 

The Self has been described as sat chit ananda – existence, consciousness, and bliss. It is the nondual reality underlying all experience, expression, and expansion taking place in the infiniverse. You see, with inherent Self-knowledge, the joy of prema is known; this is the cause of eternal bliss. But at the same time, how thoroughly can anything truly be known without juxtaposition to another? One cannot kiss oneself on the lips, nor can one gaze directly into one’s own eyes. For this reason, the One expands Itself into innumerable forms, expressing Itself in infinite fashions, in order to experience Itself from different perspectives. As individuals, our mission is one of remembrance, and thus our execution of the existential processes is in reverse; we express ourselves based on our given experiences in an effort to expand, ultimately back into singularity.

Just as the experience of dark gives meaning to light, and vice versa, the dance between knowledge and ignorance defines the experience of our illusory, material world, or maya. We are, by nature, “sweet” (divine, loving, perfect, or joyful). However, we pretend to be human, flawed, or separated from that goodness to experience the journey of “tasting” or realizing our own nature. Like actors playing roles, we hide our own essence to make the experience of life more compelling. The “sweetness” is only fully appreciated after navigating the illusion of not having it.

Just as actors utilize dual consciousness to identify with myriad relative realities while maintaining a throughline of personal identity, every jivatma (individual spirit-soul) navigates reality by the truth of acintya-bhedabheda-tattva, simultaneous oneness and difference. As part and parcel of Source, the soul is equal in quality to It—both are eternal, conscious, and blissful. However, they are not equal in quantity; the Self is infinite, while the individual soul is an infinitesimally small, fragmental part. With recognition of these truths, love becomes the practical means of remembrance.

Let us look first towards loving one’s own self. For if we have not cultivated self-love, how could we expect to love adequately anyone else? In panning out from one’s immediate condition, viewing one’s circumstances from the top down as opposed to bottom up, our scope is widened enough to include ample grace for our own apparent shortcomings. We can perceive how we have been operating unconsciously, perpetuating behaviors that are against our own highest good. We can see how we have been acting in misalignment with our own dharma or intrinsic nature. Where in our lives have we been existing without internalizing love? Where have we been lacking in respect, honesty, trust, and appreciation for ourselves? Upon contemplation and subsequent revelation, we may apply some measure of compassion. We then rise to the platform of embodied presence, as channels for streams of love.

Self-love ingrained, we are primed to allow the current of love to flow to those around us. It is meant to circulate throughout the collective body of human society, throughout the planetary body comprising all life on earth, and throughout the cosmos to the far-reaching limbs of our extraterrestrial family. We know that clots in the circuits of any given body are an impediment to integrative well-being. In regard to interpersonal relationships, love is most basically the practice of seeing Divinity, a source-spark, within others. To be actively in love with another is to consciously create a construct of connections charged with good faith and goodwill. This metaphysical container, enveloping all involved in a particular context, acts as a sort of tesseract that allows us to step into the world of another. It is composed of higher vibrations, such as forgiveness, understanding, and reverence. We look for what we have to offer to help another prosper. The opposite would be to look for what we can take from others to prop ourselves up. Practice of the latter is unsustainable and leads to the eventual downfall of one who engages in it. Such malpractice propagates fear, hate, and indifference. This willful violation against nature, against love, is sin, in its original sense of misalignment/separation. Our highest expression is to co-create heavenly conditions, not hellish ones.

When observing love through the lens of lineage, it feels like pride. We recognize a part of ourselves when you look to our progenitors. What we are acknowledging is actually the parts of Self that we share in common. Though a Source-spark within them may not be the exact same found within oneself, we find that they can be quite similar. And when we look to our progeny, we may marvel at how they take qualities we ourselves possess and express them in their own unique ways. Love in lineage is a process of admiration, individuation, and appreciation as it relates to our respective contributions in solving the puzzle of Self-realization by repeated self-actualization over generations. Our siblings and cousins encourage and steady us on our course. Each member in a given family mirrors to one another the ineffable nature of the divine through love. Even in apparent love deprivation or neglect, there is something to be gleaned in the knowledge of love, and the most hard-earned lessons are sometimes the most valuable. All in all, everyone returns to the platform of presence, the source, to be in unity and harmony, together.

TAKE ACTION: If you feel called to explore love not as a concept but as embodied remembrance, deepen your journey with Papa-yoni Das through spiritual guidance, teachings, and esoteric study.