LOVE
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
The Song of Songs
“To love is to know Me, My innermost nature, the truth that I am.”
The Bhagavad Gita
All human love is godly love, be it under veils, Beloved, be it tinted by fears, blame, limit, carnality, any interim belief. God is living Its precious life, As us. God loves, and pours Itself through, As us. We live to give and receive love.
Hands holding even as they are held.
We have so many pairings, a married couple, student and teacher, siblings, best friends, parent and child, even the two sides of a body, the world is We, where God meets Itself, each junction fertile and producing ripples that spread forever.
Awoke with total unremembering of the world, couldn’t recall how to think in words, or who, what, or where I was. A facet of the Beyond Form. Then I sensed my ties to my Beloved. My mother? My daughter? My help meet. All wordlessly. This brought me right back.
888
Through loving God we learn to love ourselves, and so, to love our neighbor as ourselves.
The loving embrace, like the Everlasting Arms, maintains and sustains and makes it all better, resting complete.
Simple things are complete things.
So simple, unhampered, wholehearted, giving Love pours forth from us only after we open the gate, explicitly or intuitively, to let God enter our awareness and unify our sense of life.
Since every level of loving that we express is really this divine Activity, we don’t feel guilt for falling short. We turn again to our meditative practice, which ever receives the Creative Impulse that cares for us always and does it all.
Unconditional Love
Just as God loves unconditionally, so when the divinity within our relationships is poured forth, we too love unconditionally, without ulterior motive, faithfully.
We live on this plane to bring through all-enfolding love. The Other says, can you adore me no matter what the appearance? Then in this world our love breeds concern and fear for the Other, despair of reaching that Other and anger at the withholding. Until through meditation our heart swings wide to include faith, forged in our experience of God in action, faith in the perfect peace of all---a peace which sandwiches us between our primal phase as loving No Thingness “before this world,” and renewal in our many mansions.
Aum, the Sanskrit male/female seed-syllable, also means “Yes”. The indwelling spirit is called in Hebrew Shekinah, “who makes yes.”
888
Relationship in Oneness
At some point on the path we cleave to the Self in aloneness, not even relying on teacher or spouse.
Paradoxically, how can one person among us be independent? As Consciousness is the entity, we are united with anything or anyone we are experiencing. Our beloved Others are necessary even for this intense aloneness (Middle English, all oneness). As we enter into mystical marriage with God, we find all our unions coming through this Center. These types of the Other are for increase of joy, as we help each other magnify and sanctify the invisible Infinite. My Beloved is mine and I am his.
888
Sex can operate together with love, not separately or at cross-purposes. The gap disappears when we reach spiritual Consciousness, sometimes before. The romantic, chivalrous impulse is a precursor of this. We touch the spiritual level, whenever we love our neighbor as our self in any mode. So the simplest feeling of falling in love is an outbreak of God issuing forth, leading us deeper into sacred connections.
Don’t leave me, my body in earth!
Help me, my love, my completion!
In the myth, Psyche, our soul, can only touch Eros the life force in the dark of night, beyond seeing, with love alone. She uses an examining candle and Eros vanishes. Then she adventures throughout the land, to find him anew and embrace in the day. So with us, in this invention of a real life in solid matter, we implant, embody and embrace in the day our celestial marriage with God.
We each secretly feel ourselves as so delicate and needy. When the Beloved Other seems to close us out in even the subtlest way, we react with fear, with hurt, with a covering of anger and aggression. No wonder the world fills itself with so much strife. When we expect everything only from the inward Presence, Self-sufficiently, and open to the Other with complete confidence, acceptance and friendship, then miraculously the Beloved person too can unfold and softly outspread with adoring feelings. Only such a perfect love casteth out fear.
As we home in on our Beloved, we leave our isolated, ghostly old traps and become more truly present in all our ways.
888
Let’s do things as an amateur---for love---anything we brush up against during the day is “assigned” to us.
We may do what we love for a living, while not loving what we’re doing all the time, since any major area of life is going to present more challenge than eating peach cobbler. Yet we all have the chance to express our Love through our livelihood.
Our prayer ranks as our hardest work and easiest too, always effervescing, evanescing into ecstasy.
888
Loving Meditation
Another level in meditation, as well as action: When we realize our spiritual nature, we give godly love easily without pretense to as many as would receive it, and as easily to those who don’t seem to. For our contemplative inquiry: “God is love.”
Loving Meditation: From impersonalizing, to compassion, to joyous love, as we obtain our priceless divine Contact. We love ourself, our friend or enemy, the Self of our Self.
Many different patterns are all simultaneously emerging. Every person, every problem, comes to us to be blessed. They all need our avenue of love, our teacher, our parent, our child, our neighbor, our client, our co-worker. They need our ever-faithful Love.
Enlightened love is godly---giving, giving, giving, with no desire for recompense from our appearance level, a silent outpouring.
Giving alms, giving all in secret. Beloved, if our kindness steals God’s thunder, praying to be seen of men, then those we want to help are rebuffed. We don’t want to rob them. Such profits are losses. Thou shalt not steal---from thy Self! When our love is this pure giving, it will be received.
From earth, Consciousness is raised into bread, which eaten is raised to human, the eaten man raised to sacredness.
To love is to be eaten. Surrender to communion.
God is silently, anonymously ever giving Itself inexhaustibly, ever renewing Itself at the fount of infinite fluidity, and is all there is to give or receive, all there can be to desire.
888
We Embrace the World
We may be searching for divine love, when we find that God’s love is already here in our life, seen first in that love our own Beloved showers on us, teaching us everything about that sweetness, that always being with us unto the end of the world, that total understanding approval and commiseration that is the love of God Itself.
Then we find holy connections in all sorts of joining, weaving between my head and my body, me and everyone we meet, between all peoples, people and nature, this world and the Beyond---all ringing variations on one single theme.
We embrace the world in love, from its pure all-mothering core to its suffering and desperately reaching surfaces. We love with every variety of love: the love of a happy good baby, the love of a purring cat on our lap, the love of a romantic lover, the love of a mom or dad, the love of disciple and guru, the love of a staunch comrade adventuring, the compassionate love of the bodhisattva or messiah.
The divine Other and I live in a sacred relationship of giving and receiving love. Every Other person, animal, plant, natural or crafted object, is my Self, and I love my neighbor as my Self. Every part of my Self, every nook of my body or thought of mind, is a divine Other that I love and honor with total tenderness.
Every event is a lesson, Self-education. Every lesson, even a hard lesson, is a lesson in love, hard candy. An ever greater love is the search engine driving us to embody all the growing principles of Truth. Beauty is love, abundance is love, pleasure and joy are love, fearlessness is love, freedom and trust and unboundedness are love.
888
Only love is real. The present reality within our life.
The spiritual universe doesn’t flit around ephemerally or unsubstantially. It’s constituted of the strongest substance that engulfs our senses. The Substance of this universe is Love, Consciousness, enrobing identity. All of this Love inhabits every bit of empty space. Every stone, every grassy stalk, every ant, every dust mote loves and is loved.
The Living God of Love
He feels unbearably loved. The terrific Love of God, absolute, the Love which is a unified substance and the only thing there is---we bring this experience to the fore, in teaching, in meditation, and in living practice. Love felt, and shining forth in expression. This dissolves our dream of selves conflicting, deprived and no good, and reveals the spiritual uni-verse. God Itself is seeking and finding the greater love.
888
Valentines. On the surface, we look like a coupla individuals. Underneath, we’re the one life emanating from the centerpoint.
In love, each of us meets the Other, the divine encounter for which this phenomenal world exists. Our love unites yin and yang and ends our sense of separation, a figure of both the birth and closure of our cosmic journey.
In such a relationship we have equality, one of us doesn’t love more than the other, we simply love each other.
Dropping tight responsibility for response ability, dropping our superiority for love. Saying Yes, springing up independent, companionate, flames that last.
I alone am a complete and sufficient universe, as a couple and family we complete a universe on other levels, and the world fills with many universes. Each of us surrenders further to the whole, and so God shares ever Greater Love.
888
Perfect love casteth out fear. Magical thinking: We’re angry with a close person and want them to go away; then they die, and we’re afraid we’ve caused it. Only the experience of divine Love within us surmounts our anguished karmic ambiguity. Then I love completely, confidently, in unity, and I will always be together with my divine beloved Other.
So as healing practitioners, in recognition we always love the Reality of the Other---helper and helped developed from the One, like Baron von Munchausen in Operation Bootstrap.
If I love you sacredly, then I know, despite any appearance or change, Beloved, you live forever.
888
Wholehearted
“Love thine enemy” is a pun on “Love thy neighbor,” in Hebrew. When we stop holding the Other in judgment as a bad man or as a good man either, then we love our neighbor with all our heart, with both sides.
Examples of Specific Loving
Compassion for the suffering Christ. That person is me.
We know that the other’s misstep is really our own to be retried.
We impersonalize.
We appreciate that the opposition of the other is complementary, and contains a blessing.
We ferret out the principles warming under the blankets.
We see that we all act perfectly within the terms of our conditioning.
If we act with good humanhood alone, we run into quandaries and fail---we don’t despise ourselves, we lift this up.
There’s nothing I need from you or can lose to you, but together We make the world go round.
We realize that by grace we climb a ladder of rungs to the divine realm, until Grace soaring fills our wings.
We ascend the mountain from every approach: non-judgment.
We realize One Consciousness, One Self. I Am, We Are.
Meeting God within. We witness God revealed.
888
Our Love for God Is God’s Love for Us
God’s love for us recirculates as the love we give to God.
We recall: Our gratitude towards God happens in a place beyond “I” and “Thou,” a place of bringing together in Oneness, of one Consciousness, and yet we feel gratitude.
The love and gratitude and connection felt between us spiritual travellers is the same.
Letting in God’s love which disregards my terrible faults as nothing to It, we then grant the same to everybody in disgrace, every error uncovered, and we praise our supreme sacrifice in entering this wondrous serpentine world.
Love only Me, desire only the communion that becomes everyone’s chosen kingly Reyality. Realize our divine Self and have no reaction to claims of a power or presence apart or a part.
The love within me, saying “You, You,” with infinite tenderness as it looks out on all. “My own” love within me is not “mine,” it is very God.
Love is fathering us and mothering us anew, right now.
888
Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
God is party to every partnering.
We’ve learned: We evolve this universe to love and be loved. Holy No Thingness forms opposites from the round balance of zero. We complementary lovers begin expressing ourselves As the free play of opposites. We seem to just circle, but we subtly spiral out and progress.
Inner meditation too opens out, as our spiritual life in action.
Expanding upon the Other Principle of healing in our family, where this transmutation of our lives parallels the transfiguring of all humanity:
The Loving Principle: Entering spiritual Consciousness within, and living out the fruitage of Sacred Relationship in Oneness, and the renewal or End or unveiled Now for which this human world works, all turn out to be the same thing.
And what we know of present miracles and of renewal: Our deeds spreading about from our centering, dwelling all together now in delight, every single soul lifted in conscious holy interweaving, life more abundant, greater love, Really Being with You.
