How to love God

These thoughts came up out of discussions on the sufi studies list


Steven Covey said love is a doing word. What he meant is that love finds expression in deeds. So your remaining attentive of the moment is a manifestation of your love of God since it is what scriptures and those enlightened beings tell us is what is required of us.

For me, it makes no sense to say you love God and then go against God's wishes, of course then you want to know, What are God's wishes for me?

Depending on what one's convictions are, religious duties would be part of doing God's wish. but having said that, there are very many levels of doing God's wish and on the lowest level I think people approach God as someone in authority to pander up to in order to get what they want.
This always conjures up the memory of my doing my hajj way back in '86. I had so much difficulty doing tawaf and saiei because of some self centered groups who literally elbowed everybody left and right , shoved and pushed so they could please God...

Now I am going on to why people perform religious duties: Presumably it is out of love for God but we find out that love can be pandering up to authority , or fear of authority , like when you are aftaid God would throw you into hellfire or make you fall and break your head and this fear keeps you doing what you think is God's will.


We move up another level and that is when you are blessed with the sensations of an awakened heart. At this level , you kind of have something of a link with God, just like when you are in love with someone and are sensitive to the nuances of their approval and disapproval and at this point you just don t want to do anything that makes the beloved distance themselves from you , and in this case you can feel it in your self when God communicates from within you.

At this level you keep trying and trying to understand the communication and keep trying to do what is oomunicated to you and more and more you do things out of an inner Yaqin rather than " I think this should be it" But it is at this point too that ego gets in
the way and some people start to think they are holy ..... or something like that....