For Meher Baba, love is not primarily an emotion or sentiment. 

Love must become conscious. – Meher Baba

Real Love is directed toward the Divine and gradually dissolves the sense of separation.

One of his central teachings is that God is Love, and that we begin to approach this Love by learning to love others, not merely those who are easy for us to love.

He says:“Start by learning to love God by beginning to love those whom you cannot.”And he connects this directly with forgetting oneself. As we remember others with kindness and generosity, the preoccupation with “me” diminishes. 

The Avatar Meher Baba Trust’s collection, Meher Baba on Love, is particularly relevant on the subject of love. Baba speaks of loving “with a clear conscience,” sincerely, while remembering that God is in everyone and everything. 

So, in Baba’s sense, conscious love requires:

• Sincerity — not pretending to love.

• Awareness — noticing what is actually happening in oneself.

• Self-forgetting — less concern with what I get, what I feel, what I want.

• Service — love expressed through action.

• Forgiveness — releasing the inner separation created by judgment.

• Seeing the One in the many — remembering that the other is not fundamentally separate from oneself.

• No expectation of reward — loving because Love itself is the goal.

Meher Baba puts the principle very strongly: the only real love is love for the infinite, which creates an intense longing to know and unite with God.