On infinite love – from Kashul Mahjub

Found these moving lines from Kashful Mahjub courtesy the seeker. Kashful Mahjub is one of the early treatises on Sufism and has shown light to many Sufis world-wide. On love, writes the grand Sufi Usman Hajweri or Data Saheb (commonly known in Lahore and elsewhere):

“The love for God is the name of an urge in the heart of the true believer in the form of respect and esteem for God, and the desire to gain His nearness, vision and union, so much so that he gets restless for the Divine Beloved, is always absorbed in his remembrance, severs all connections with the world, clears his mind of all the desires other than God and gets totally attached to Him. But man’s love for God is not of the same type as his love for human beings, because in the latter case the lover wants to win over and possess the object of his love, while in the former case, he wants to surrender himself to his Beloved and loses his existence in God to finally subsist by Him. …..

The lovers are of two kinds. Those who love God because of His bounties and gifts, and those who love the Beloved for Himself and regard His bounties and gifts as veils. …..

…But what love is, in reality, cannot be described by the word “love”, for love is a feeling and feelings cannot be expressed by words. Love cannot be attained even if the whole world tries for it, nor can it be repelled even if the whole world tries for it. This is because love is a Divine Gift and cannot be achieved by effort. Man is finite but love is infinite, and the finite has no control over the infinite.”

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