The chant—“Where is there Love?”— from Paramahansa Yogananda’s Cosmic Chants reveals a great truth about the human soul: only the Divine can satisfy the soul’s desire for love.
In this world, Mother,
No one can love me.
In this world they do not know how to love me.
Where is there pure loving love?
Where is there truly loving me?
There my soul longs to be.
Human love can fill the heart and mind, but because each human being is essentially a soul who possesses a body and mind, only the creator of that soul can ultimately fulfill it and make it feel loved.
No Real Love in This World
The chanter is addressing God as “Divine Mother.” The chant opens with the truth, “In this world, Mother, / No one can love me. / In this world they do not know how to love me.” This simple statement of fact is both cause for alarm but ultimately cause for joy, after the dilemma is settled. The sadness of not being loved cannot be rendered into joy on the worldly plane, because human beings simply do not know how to love one another, as the chant proclaims.
They should not blame one another for this inherent failure; they all possess this same lack. Yet people daily do blame others for the feeling of loss or lack of love. But just knowing and truly understanding that “they do not know how to love me” should suggest to the mind that if fellow human beings do not know how to love one another, and yet human beings crave love, there must be an answer to this riddle.
Satisfaction of Other Desires
Other human cravings can be satisfied: Human bodies require nutrition to satisfy hunger, but they do know how to satisfy that hunger; they eat food. They require liquid to satisfy thirst, and there is water to slake the thirst. They get tired and sleepy, and they can rest and go to sleep to satisfy those human conditions.
They have a need to feel appreciated for their talent or accomplishments; thus, there are opportunities for work and other activities through which they can exert their energies for recognition. They have the need to stay dry and warm/cool; thus, they build homes and with heating and cooling systems. They desire companionship, so they marry or form some other domestic arrangement to assure a caring relationship.
But True, Pure Love Remains Elusive
But ultimately, when they crave love, true pure love, they cannot find it in this world. Even the happiest marriage/partnership leaves the partners with the intuition that the partner cannot fulfill the soul’s wish for perfect love; each partner knows that one day the other will die, and where will they love be then?
And as is widely known, many marriages/partnerships end long before either has died—consider the divorce rate today, which reports nearly half of all marriage ending in divorce. Yet on each of those wedding days, all the loving partners vowed virtually eternal love to each other—or at least until death in this lifetime.
Where is Love That is True, Eternal, and Pure?
The chant answers those existential questions after asking them: “Where is there pure loving love? / Where is there truly loving me?”
The questions not only inquire, but they also declare: I want pure love that loves me! I want true love that loves me! Not love that is declared one day is gone the next. Not love that claims to be love and behaves as if it were hate or even indifference. Not love that is only lust masquerading as love. I want love to be love, pure, true, eternal, ever blissful, ever joyful unending genuine love.
That is the human condition. The chanter, with melancholy permeating the realization that true, pure, loving love is not to be found in this world, is not at all melancholy, because the chanter is addressing the Beloved, the Divine Mother, God, Who can and does and will love the chanter eternally and that is where “[her] soul longs to be”—where all souls long to be eternally—with the Divine, in Love, forever.
Sources:
- Paramahansa Yogananda, “Where is there Love?,” Cosmic Chants, Self-Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, 1974, print, page 10.
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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