The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
The little girl watched the woman in church with the new baby. They were right next to her. The baby snuggled in a soft white blanket, dressed up in a beautiful long white gown that was all lace and ribbons. The lady cradled her little one in her arms, beaming down with a beautiful smile, cooing quietly. Her glossy black hair fell a cross the snowy blanket, touching the baby’s cheek lightly. After a while the baby began to fuss and squirm. “Shhhh,” the woman crooned, rocking the babe carefully. Her eyes were so gentle. “Shhhh.” Her voice was soft and soothing. Rock, rock. “Shhhhh, shh, shh …“
As the baby quieted, the little girl felt a deep longing. “I want that,” she said to herself. “I want someone to hold me just like that.”
She sat very still for a long time, pretending she was the baby. It felt so safe and warm there, next to the pretty lady.
People often feel unconditional love toward a newborn child. The child’s nearness to the realm from which it so recently came may help evoke this pure expression from us. I recognized that feeling as a small child and longed for it. Most of us long for it still. We are taught to value and strive for unconditional love, but we are taught that it is an unattainable ideal. It is attainable. As an internalized quality, it is the foundation for abundance in every arena of our life. When our primary experience is that greater Love, it does not confuse, wound, or elude us. It stabilizes and heals, filling our deepest longings as nothing else can.
What is it? Why would I want it? What would my relationships — with myself and others — look like if they were unconditionally loving? What kind of commitment would it take? These are some of the questions that have expanded my understanding of love.
Big Love, unconditional Love, Divine Love, greater Love, Spiritual Love, Christlike Love, infinite Love. There are many terms for Love, but when we dwell in an ego-, security-, and fear-based existence, it is difficult to understand such Love. The love that we typically experience is romantic love, familial love, or carnal love. Romantic love is in the domain of the physical. It is the seductress and seducer. Combining the experience of Spirit with seduction does not diminish it, but heightens it. Confining Love to romance, or sex, is limiting.
Sexual love is not really love at all. Rather, it is woven into and closely related to love — not separate, though we realize that it can be. Sexual expression is the energy of the seed; it is not the flower. It is the impulse and energy of germination, not the flowering. Sexual and romantic love are confused with Love because, at their essence, they contain an expression of joy, an exultation of life. Divine Love certainly does not exclude sexual or romantic expression, though we sometimes fear that it does.
Without a greater understanding, without knowing that Love is about the expansion of the very universe, whether individual or cosmic — without this knowing, love can become polluted as expressed through the security-seeking context of body and ego. We can choose our experience, whether the limited body-based or the greater Love. Each context serves different purposes and life lessons, but infinite Love moves us beyond the boundary of the purely physical and adds divine potential to it.
Coming to distinguish within ourselves the romantic form of love and the sexual expression of love, we can then further identify familial love, and we can identify love that is based on love of humankind. From there we can go on to identify Love as an energy that does not have a specific object or behavior pattern nor does it have a specific mood or outlet but is more like stillness — a place of sitting, a place to reside; a place of having one’s beingness. Practicing unconditional love elevates the quality of the feeling. Going into silence to experience Divine Love can cause profound moments of overflowing communion. In it is the peace, certainty, and power that allow an individual to access it as an antidote to their fear. We can be the Love in the world in the same way and through the same process that we can be peace.
One of the reasons we have difficulty shifting to the context of this greater Love is our clinging so tightly to what we believe will keep us safe — to our beliefs about how it should be in our life, in others’ lives, in the world at large. Very often, we have rigid strictures built into a formula for sanity — for what we believe to be our sanity — and we fear to relinquish, even for a moment, the way that we have it structured. How we do fear for our sanity. Even the promise that beyond those restrictions is a life-giving essence, a celebratory presence, an exuberant, exultant intelligence — even that promise is typically not enough to let us relinquish our rigidity.
Socrates declared that his so-called wisdom merely showed him how little he knew. In fact, the adage, “The older I get, the less I know about how things really are” is spoken as wisdom. It refers to the beginning point where we finally come to a place within where we know nothing. We do not know how a relationship is supposed to be. We do not know what a family is supposed to look like. We do not know what a life is supposed to be built on, what we are supposed to strive for, what we are supposed to achieve. We do not know good and evil, right and wrong. We do not know. We relinquish. We surrender, and in this surrender we become, in that moment, a force of nature like the rain on the sandstone canyon walls or the inexorable shifting movement of the expansion and contraction of the earth’s crust.
And then, for a long moment, we allow ourselves to be that. Just for a moment. And perhaps another moment. For in that moment, there wells up within our being a sense of the order that is cosmic, the knowing of our place in that order and clarity about its place in our individual life. And then grace begins to flow out and inform all the things we no longer know. It informs our relationships, our work, our purpose, our knowledge of good and evil. From that moment, we sense the order that is filled to bursting with Love’s energy, the energy to express the Divine.
The falcon, in its fierceness, does not fear for its retirement; it does not fear for the wound it may sustain when hunting its food, nor does it judge the life that it has taken to feed its young. It is exuberantly, exultantly itself; as is the ocean rising and falling on the shore. The ocean does not judge whether its tide brings gentle waves of life to the seashore or comes crashing in as stormy destruction. It is, it simply is. It does not judge. It celebrates its essence and, in its essence, gives itself up to the infinitely organized expression of the Divine. That is Love.
To love is to unreservedly seize Life, and not to do so is to choose death. The ego, thinking itself separate, has whispered to us of death, and prompts us to try to possess life, and love. It insists that we hover over our children, exact promises from our lovers, cling to our small morsels. The soul smiles and urges greater courage. It knows Love and Life are free and omnipresent.
We may yearn for this experience, we may deeply desire unconditional Love to be the defining element in our lives, but how do we achieve it? What would it look like if we had unconditional relationships?
Rather than being surrounded by relationships in which the primary context is insecurity, fear, and need, we can have intimates whose love is unconditional and associated with the consciousness of their soul’s expression. The unconditionally loving relationships in my life are not free of fears or misunderstanding. In fact, precisely because they are filled with openness and a passionate zest for life and Spirit, they challenge old ways of relating, and many uncomfortable feelings may rise within us. But a hallmark of the relationships is a fearlessness even in scary places.
These friendships are typified by self-responsibility and commitment to growth, authenticity, and grace. They are playful, healing, deeply satisfying, and phenomenally creative, and they are infused by our pioneering spirit and with ceremony. All of these are the qualities that uplift our expression of love. Making them our undeviating goal, becoming them, draws into our lives others who share them.
Pause for a moment and think of the most difficult person in your life, past or present. Feel them very clearly, until you recognize their “tone.” Experience the emotions that linger around you. Remember the person fully: close your eyes and see them clearly, standing or sitting in their surroundings. Now step into their body. Feel their life, their longing. Feel their stress. How does their body feel; where is it tense or hurting? Experience their breath. From inside them, know why they are the way they are. Find their hope, their vulnerability. Sit quietly in their life. Commune with their soul. Know that instead of resisting, judging, or hating them, you can, if you choose, love them unconditionally. Explore this option, seeing how it feels to you. Hold them in the same understanding in which the Divine Source holds them. Let that understanding permeate you, and them. In it, feel your own safety and strength. When you are ready, bless them and wish them well on their journey. Repeating this exercise from time to time, you will find that the fear you hold about them will dissipate.
Fear is a frequency; it can and has been measured. I met a scientist in Los Angeles who studies frequency and waveform. He told me that the frequency of fear happens to correspond to the musical note G in the Western scale. It would seem that tone is the prime note, or wave, that the human group is singing: we sing the song of fear. We fear that we are alone, fear we will destroy ourselves, fear there is not enough, fear for our life, fear.
Love is the antidote to fear. It is the exact opposite of fear, the opposite pole. And fear dwells within the Ocean of Love. Seeing the Love, knowing we dwell in it, being the Love, the fear dissolves into the ocean. When Love is engaged, fear cannot exist because Love — as the purest energy that exists — is the energy that allows a sprout to become a great oak. Here is our safety and security. Here is the safe haven, here the means to create heaven on earth, to transform.
Understood and purely experienced, Love’s vastly elevated wave will transform the song of humanity, for it is the essence of the space that fills us and surrounds us. It holds our atoms and the planets in their unique orbits. It is the blackness of the cosmos and the cohesive thread of all life therein. This Love is ours. It does not need to be searched for, worked at, won, or held on to. It is in us, around us. It simply is.
It is common among us at this time to grow in Love as we grow in knowledge of persons. This is good, but the knowledge is not necessary. Love is not based on knowledge, though this is one way to come to know it.
Love is not really an emotion, though it is often experienced through the emotions. Emotion is like touch and smell, a sense through which we interpret our world. So Love is sensed through emotion, and this is a purposeful phase, a way to begin to know Love, to notice it and become familiar with it. But it can also be sensed and expressed by other means, by the physical body, through the chakras, through the individual and group light fields. Love can also be experienced through the Soul as a divine communion.
Love Is. It has its own is-ness. Love is God. It is and moves through all things. It surrounds us. To be in Love is to be in the body of the Creator. Love is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. It connects, binds, integrates, nourishes all that is. It is omnipresent.
Love expresses through us. As we increase in our capacity to receive and express Love, we become capable of being fuller expressions of a higher and more complete spectrum, increasing the breadth of the frequency we are in interplay with. The divine Source then has its expression, through us, into the world of form, changing, vivifying, uplifting all that it comes into contact with.
When one is in Love, one is in God. One knows then that one is God, one with God; at one. Atonement. Human beings are uniquely evolved to be conscious receptors and transmitters of this pure Love. To become this unconditional Love in physical form in our world is to fulfill the highest purpose of human life.
Love, in this elevated way of thinking and accessing, is the most profoundly balancing energy in the universe. It is the cohesive factor that allows everything, all of life, to be held together. It is the potent creative force sensed in our more common love. It is latent in most of our expression, but it is there to be elevated and become a transformative force unlike any other, as the platform on which our dream can take place.
Being an expression of this immensely loving force does not mean we become weak, nor does it mean we never experience “nonloving” emotions. Think of those most often associated with this Love. Christ was passionate, active, powerful, angry, and impatient. The stories of most “saints” also show the gutsiness, sharpness, and decisiveness of fully embodied Love. There is great strength and power in this refined expression. The nature of Love is to both defend assertively and embrace completely. Think of the hands of Siva, one thrusting out to destroy, the other outstretched in loving welcome — they are representative of the epic force implicit in Love. It moves through the body and changes the molecular, cellular, and genetic structures when wholly and completely engaged as a pure energy. This Love creates a light of such brilliance and profound magnetism, that one who is able to access it is granted, in that moment, access to all riches, all accomplishment, all knowledge without any vestiges of fear.
Love is the essence of the mysterious “empty” space, the prana, plenum, life force, the breath of life of our universe. It is the source of healing and miracles. Christ, Buddha, and many others have shown us it can be achieved in human form. They taught that it is fully available, not out of our grasp. When science develops technology to measure the highest frequencies of Love, as well as the frequencies of “empty” space, it will discover what the sages have declared throughout time: they are the same; it is all Love.