We all have a basic need to be loved. If we don’t get it, we feel sad and hurt. To love and to receive love is the food for our body that helps us grow well in a wholesome manner.

But what is more important is to transcend form personal love to spiritual love. From spiritual point of view, love is defined as self-expansion.

Divine love (Bhakti) expands and enlarges itself. There is no selfish expectation here.

It is perhaps beyond our understanding but within our experience. It is beyond our material self but within the reach of the self that is divine, and we all are part of that divine.

This love for the divine fills our inner being to the extent that we become consciously one with the universe, with the Divine, which is Truth, Light, Peace and Bliss.

The Guru Granth Sahib says that only with the grace of the supreme God can we be blessed with pure love and devotion.

Devotion or Bhakti is intensity in love and this devotion is also a blessing to the few who believe, have faith and realise that all that is, is Him. He is the one who floods this world with the nectar of pure divine love. Bhakti is a sacred, higher emotion with sublime sentiments that unites the devotee with the Lord.

Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore too had expressed similar sentiments. God loves us out of His infinite bounty, and His heart's door is always open. Swami Sivananda says: “Bhakti softens the heart and removes jealousy, hatred, lust, anger, egoism, pride and arrogance. It infuses joy, divine ecstasy, bliss, peace and knowledge."

Once you become a part of God, grief and sorrow, pleasure and pain stop bothering you. The union with the Almighty is the ultimate law of being. The highest truth is Absoluteness and the soul rises above through different states of consciousness until it attains Absolute Perfection when it becomes identical with God.

And this is the culmination of all aspiration and love.