the Divine Romance...

"In the gross, subtle and mental spheres the lover is
conscious of being separated from the beloved, but
when all these spheres are transcended, the lover is
conscious of his unity with the Beloved.

The lover
loses himself in the being of the Beloved and knows
that he is one with the Beloved.

Divine love is
entirely free from the thraldom of desires or limiting
self.

In this state of infinity the lover has no being
apart from the Beloved. He is the Beloved Himself.

"We thus have God as infinite love, first limiting
Himself in the forms of creation, and then recovering
His infinity through the different stages of creation.

All the stages of God's experience of being a finite
lover ultimately culminate in His experiencing Himself
as the sole Beloved.

The sojourn of the soul is a
thrilling divine romance in which the lover, who in
the beginning is conscious of nothing but emptiness,
frustration, superficiality and the gnawing chains of
bondage, gradually attains an increasingly fuller and
freer expression of love, and ultimately disappears
and merges in the divine Beloved to realise the unity
of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and
eternal fact of God as Infinite Love."

Meher Baba
_Discourses_
Edited by Don E. Stevens
San Francisco: _Sufism Reoriented_, vol. 3, pp.
179-180