When your heart melts for someone, then the qualities of that person enter your heart and affect the quality of your own mind. We see that all the time. The people that we associate with, we adopt even on a superficial level, we start talking like the people that we spend time with. We use the same phrases and develop the same physical mannerisms. We are not conscious of it, but it happens. Then on a deeper level, we actually begin adopting the qualities of the people to whom we are attached. So this is a very deep and powerful form of meditation that every person does for much of the day, because we are all attached to something or someone, and we are always thinking about whoever we are attached to.
So looking at these two types of meditation, one is actually natural. Affectional meditation is heart-centered, not brain-centered. You do not love someone from your brain; your heart melts for them. So affectional meditation is very natural. We do it all the time. And intellectual meditation actually goes against the flow of the mind because what we are trying to do is have the mind stop. That is what we really want,
“Just stop! You are thinking too much! You are thinking about all the things I do not want to think about. Stop!”
I am just generalizing about intellectual meditation. Through these various techniques that is what we are trying to do - stop the mind. But affectional meditation achieves the same result more naturally by thinking deeply about something. Not thinking about nothing, but engrossing your mind in loving remembrance of God. It actually quiets the mind. It quiets it of material thoughts, but you are still having devotional thoughts or Divine thoughts. Material thoughts agitate the mind, but devotional thoughts, any thought we have about our relationship with God, because it is a deep truth, calms the mind at its deepest level.
So affectionately and deeply remembering our relationship with God is called bhakti (Divine loving devotion) in Sanskrit (ancient sacred language of India). It is actually a path to God. So simple, right? How do you reach God? You deeply and affectionately remember God. That is the path. That is it. Nothing more. That is called the path of bhakti, which in English we could say Divine love devotion. And when you are sitting and meditating, we call it Divine love meditation.
So what are you doing? You are meditating on your relationship with God. That is it. So how do you do that? You can think of it in terms of your relationships in the world. What kinds of relationships do we have? Brother to brother, brother to sister, son to father, son to mother, daughter to father, daughter to mother, best friends, mother to child, mother to son, mother to daughter, father to daughter, father to son, beloved to beloved. We have all of these different relationships in the world, and our heart likes all of these relationships. None of us wants just one of these relationships. We like all of them.
We like having a loving mother. We like having a loving father. I am speaking ideally. Maybe you do not have that relationship, perhaps that particular place is not filled. Ideally, we would love to have that, and friendship, and beloved-to-beloved affection, and child-to-parent affection. We like all of those relationships. They are all dear to our hearts, and we have all of those relationships with God already.
