Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: "Bad to Good to Love," Feb 3, 2026, live Baba Zoom скачать в хорошем качестве

Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: "Bad to Good to Love," Feb 3, 2026, live Baba Zoom

Dear folks of Baba, In our early years with Baba, many of us were surprised that the mandali did not give “good” the prominent place in life that we did. Rather than being the ultimate quality we need to cultivate, it is something in the end we need to rise above, for most of us mistakenly conflated good with love, often with binding consequences. Good is a learned or cultivated behavior that becomes a part of our conditioning (our sanskaras), whereas love springs spontaneously from within, from the innermost dimension, the soul. Victor Hugo, the French novelist, said it very insightfully, “Virtue, as in the case of vice, is a calculated action, but love is not calculated. It wells up in the heart and expresses itself spontaneously.” In my early years with Baba, Eruch once said to me seemingly out of the blue, “Jeff, the accumulation of virtue is not the goal.” It can take years to discern the difference between good (or virtue) and love. Baba has said, “Feelings and emotions are the creation of mind and energy. Love is the creation of the soul.” Feelings and emotions (the heart) are great vehicles for love, but also for the ego! For this reason, you don’t want to give the heart a blank check! Because both good and love make their appearance in the heart, it is easy to equate the two. As I gathered from the mandali, it requires keen inner awareness to see that love expresses itself through the heart, whereas good comes from the heart. Love, because it comes from Baba, is “impression-less” as Darwin and Eruch used to say, and has its origin in the soul, from beyond the world of time and space. Although good is learned and originates in our conditioning (our sanskaras), this is not to say that good is bad! Baba has said that in general we go “from bad to good to God [Love].” Yet good, in its highest expression, is transactional; it still seeks to get something however infinitely subtle that might be. Love gives itself away spontaneously and is not seeking some hidden result for the self. Good has a limited fund of energy to draw from, and when overdone can lead to burnout. Love has an unlimited source of energy because it springs from the soul. The kind of love Baba is inviting us to explore and experience has a different, more exquisitely refined vibration. Eruch, in his seemingly casual remark, was actually hinting that the highest virtue or good that we are capable of is still within the realm of duality and is at best a reflection of the highest Love, not its source. This is similar to the moon, which is not the source of its own light. That is, the good or virtuous sanskaras in us, at their highest levels, only reflect Divine Love and its qualities, but they don’t have the spontaneous beauty of these qualities, and there is invariably the sense of the “I”. Good or virtue involves the effort of willpower, motive and deliberation, whereas love is effortlessly expressed, spacious and liberating. Baba once said to Bhau, “In a virtuous life, evil is suppressed and good surfaces; but the evil is still there. The bad sanskaras remain and have to be worked out, if not in this life, then in the next or the one after. In the spiritual life, both good and bad sanskaras express themselves, and both get nullified. A spiritual life leads one toward naturalness, whereas a virtuous life, in the guise of humility, inflates the ego and perpetuates it!” To discern the difference between the highest good or virtue in us on the one hand and the divine qualities of Love on the other is like distinguishing between crystal and pure diamond; we have to become expert jewelers. Over time, I feel Baba awakens this discernment in us when it is helpful to our spiritual unfoldment. The divine qualities (or divinely human qualities) are like the refracted rays of the Sun of Baba, and they originate directly from Him. The more we are drawn to the divine qualities (as well as to Baba’s immediate divine presence itself) and away from the good and virtuous sanskaras, the more our consciousness moves toward merging with the Divine, our Beloved Baba. As the mandali have said, at first this merging is fleeting, but eventually after many years, through longing and Baba’s grace, we will spend more and more time moving toward the Soul, toward Baba and Oneness, until, as one of His mandali, Dr. Harry Kenmore, once said, we become “His residence”, where He lives permanently. Eruch, in hearing this from the doctor, confirmed the supreme importance of our becoming His residence, a home for His Love. In His love, Jeff