The Path to Love
About This Book
The Path to Love is Deepak Chopra's exploration of love as a spiritual practice — the recognition that love in its fullest sense is not primarily a human emotion that comes and goes depending on circumstances but the fundamental nature of consciousness itself, the quality that becomes most fully available as the individual self aligns more completely with its divine source. Chopra draws on the Sufi poetry of Rumi (whose ecstatic celebration of divine love provides the book's primary metaphor and much of its most vivid language) and on the Vedantic understanding of love as the nature of Brahman to build a vision of love that encompasses the personal (romantic partnership, family, friendship) and the universal (the love that is the ground of all existence) in a single continuous spectrum.
The book is structured around the spiritual stages of love — from the initial awakening of love in the individual (often through the shock of falling in love with another person) through the development of love's deeper capacities (forgiveness, compassion, trust, devotion) to the mystical dimension in which the boundary between human love and divine love becomes transparent. Chopra argues that each stage of personal relationship can serve as a vehicle for the development of these deeper capacities if approached with spiritual awareness — and that the difficulties and losses that inevitably arise in loving relationships are not obstacles to love but among its most powerful teachers.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the spectrum of love Chopra maps: from infatuation and romantic attraction through the more complex forms of committed love (which require forgiveness, acceptance, and the willingness to be known) to the mystical dimension of divine love — and how each stage builds on the previous one in the development of love as a spiritual capacity
• Grasp the Sufi dimension: how Rumi's ecstatic poetry about the soul's longing for the Beloved provides a metaphor for the soul's relationship to the divine that illuminates both human love (understood as a reflection of divine love) and the specific qualities — yearning, surrender, ecstatic dissolution — that characterise the mystical love path
• Recognise the teaching on forgiveness as the essential gateway: why Chopra identifies forgiveness as the capacity without which love cannot deepen beyond a certain point, what makes genuine forgiveness difficult (the ego's investment in the story of injury), and what specifically changes in one's experience when forgiveness becomes genuine rather than merely performed
• Learn the practices Chopra recommends for each stage of love's development: the specific meditations, reflections, and relational practices that develop the capacity for deeper love — with particular attention to the practices for opening the heart through difficulty and loss
• Appreciate the integration of human and divine: how The Path to Love presents a vision in which there is no fundamental opposition between human love (with all its vulnerability and impermanence) and divine love (which is eternal and unconditional) — and why this integration makes both more real rather than diminishing either
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