Throughout the unfolding of my path, it became more and more obvious that love was the only option left. This occurred as disappointment continually showed me how no one else but me could ever meet me where I need to be met.
Once my needs became my hole to fill, I was freed from believing others were acting from any other motivation than the nature of their journey. This produced an inherent level of respect for each and every being, no matter how differently their actions were from mine. The love I required was no longer anyone else’s problem to resolve; as a result, the notion of problem began dissolving from view. I was no longer seeing burden, conflict, pressure, or stress, but a world of innocent hearts hiding from their own love by trying to get it from another. This began my more intimate journey of freedom that took me deeper than any insight I had ever learned. I had been liberated by love, and through the wisdom of our final golden rule, so shall you be.
This Golden Rule is just as important as the first one. It’s the cornerstone of the modern-day spiritual journey. The very awakener of heart-centered consciousness. The tenth Golden Rule says, “Love is your liberator.”
Notice how it says love is your liberator and not other people are your liberators. When love is your liberator, it is only the love that you cultivate within your own heart that sets you free from any pain created by the conduct of others.
As the world continues to heal and evolve, it’s so easy to focus on the injustice of everything, until you remember from a vibrational standpoint—love is what makes things right. When love is your liberator, it is a powerful, bold, and courageous shift to building an intimate relationship with your feelings. If I do not like the way life feels, let me love that part of myself. If I wish things were different, let me love the one who wishes for that. Let me not be a character waiting to be loved, but realize that I am love, materialized into physical form.
Any feeling of discord, anger, sadness, betrayal, heartbreak, hurt, abuse, abandonment—anything that dares to arise could only be begging for communion with the truth, beauty, and presence of your unconditional love. Feel into your heart, your body, what’s begging for attention. Is it a memory? Is it a thought? Is it a fear? Is it a worry that time is running out?
In Golden Rule #10, we come upon a very important fork in the road, one that determines how much longer we spend in ego or how much time we spend communing as the soul. The question is: Do I continue playing out the character who’s been hurt, or do I love the hurt within me as the love that liberates all?
Love begins with honesty. When you are loving, you are honest about your pain. Honesty brings attention to the parts that beg to remember its eternal wholeness. Like a processional line of emotions standing single file, they’re waiting to be embraced by the light of their Source. That Source is none other than you. One by one, anger, sadness, jealousy, betrayal—all in line to be accepted, respected, honored, and admired—just as they are. Anger will never stop being angry. Hurt will never stop hurting. It’s just waiting to be loved. We’re not here to change the viewpoint of our experiences; we’re here to love the experiences arising within us—even when the next one in line to be loved is the feeling of dislike. We are here to be the love that we are, and it starts with being honest with ourselves.
The soul knows that just by admitting how it feels, it’s loosening the tension and allowing love to have an easier time healing each emotion. The ego is in a state of negotiation, trying to figure out why it feels this way and trying to negotiate into a different experience. In essence, the soul openly states what the ego debates. The ego asks, “Why do I feel so sad?” And the soul says, “Sadness is here to be loved.”
Because we are one, all of what represents itself as your hurtful past is equally connected to the world’s history of pain. Therefore, what is arising inside of your body, mind, and heart are all the patterns that love is liberating for humanity. Just as there is one eternal breath, and we are all the experience of how differently that one breath is being breathed, so every single thing you are doing for yourself is also what you’re doing for the world. Through the art of letting go, you are liberated out of the pitfalls of victimhood, out of the agony of ego, and into the maturity of a fully integrated soul. When love is your liberator, as letting go occurs, you have become one less person who needs to be saved or rescued. This reveals one of the most important attributes of the soul: the power of unconditional love.
Based on the wisdom of Golden Rule #8, you don’t have to like how anyone acts in order to see that love is what they need. Even if you’re not in a position to offer the love that someone else needs, simply call upon the Universe that is always ready to work through you. Simply say, “I know this person needs love more than anything, but I’m unable to provide that. Universe, please send them the love I cannot give them.” This is how the honesty of your personal experience allows you to be catalysts of healing in the lives of others without giving away your power or believing the fate of every person rests on your shoulders.
EXERCISE: Our Spiritual Pledge
As children, we stood up before class to do the Pledge of Allegiance. When was the last time you did that? When we place our hand on our heart, it is like taking a spiritual pledge.
In embracing the wisdom of the 10 Golden Rules, your spiritual pledge is:
“In this moment, I am pledging my allegiance to myself, to always be my ally, to never be an enemy, and to always be on my side. In order to be on my side, I cannot be against anyone, because the energy it takes to be against someone is time away from being there for me.”
This is our spiritual pledge of allegiance to ourselves, to be one with our Source, and dedicated to living in service to the world we are healing together as one. Your past could have hurt you, it could have taken many things from you, but it can’t take you away from yourself.
Through the beauty of a spiritual pledge of allegiance, you take the next step into unconditional love by asking your heart the question: What is it you need from me in order to be whole?
Maybe the words are “I’m sorry,” or “I love you,” or “I see you.”
Maybe what your heart needs is “I like you. I see you. You’re okay. I love you just as you are. I like the person you’ve become. I’m proud to be you.”
Feel that last statement for a moment: I’m proud to be you. Those are the words that it took me almost 40 years to say with 100 percent conviction to myself: “Matt Kahn, I’m proud to be you.” I’ve come so far in my journey; if there’s an opportunity to incarnate again, I’m definitely coming back as me. That’s how much fun I’m having now. It’s the palpable guaranteed result of being liberated by love. It is both my living testimony and my invitation to you. Your willingness is life’s only requirement.
When love is your liberator, you are allowing, on a subconscious level, for love to become more familiar and less foreign. This is a concept highlighted in my first book, Whatever Arises, Love That.
As I state in that book, there’s a filing system in the subconscious mind, where there are categories of things that are familiar, based on the past, and foreign, based on how infrequently they’ve been experienced.
If you are someone who has not experienced unconditional love on a frequent basis, your subconscious mind puts it under the foreign category. This makes the ability to receive love seem daunting, overwhelming, and scary, even if there is a desire to be loved in your conscious mind. Thankfully, the solution is simple. The more familiar you become with unconditional love, the safer you are to receive it, whether coming directly from Source or the heart of another person.
Let’s move unconditional love out of the foreign category of the subconscious mind to make love a more familiar experience for you to receive. Just place your hand on our heart, and with the utmost authenticity, repeat after me:
If it feels weird, forced, or foreign, remember, it’s just because unconditional love may not be something you have a point of reference for. You may have experienced love from others, but we are here to allow loving ourselves to be a more familiar experience. The more we introduce unconditional love to ourselves, the more trusting of life we become.
Try repeating this mantra for two minutes, slowly and openly:
I love you.
It may not have been easy for other people to love you, but it doesn’t have to be hard for you to love yourself.
I love you.
The mind may say, okay, I get it, I love you, what’s next?
I love you.
In order for love to be your liberator, you need to make time to love. Giving yourself exactly what you need. Sometimes, what you need is time to be more attentive with your feelings. Instead of trying to figure out what you feel and how to get beyond it, you need to just listen and be there with yourself—one breath at a time. Sometimes you may have been too entrenched in a spiritual journey and have gone from one self-help process to the next. In that case, the most loving thing is to give yourself a break from your own micromanagement. Sometimes, the love that you need is giving yourself a creative outlet to express your feelings, desires, and pain in creative, artistic ways. Sometimes, the love that you require is to be the kind of loving parent that you may not have had.
There are infinite ways to love yourself. All of which are important moments to be the constant reminder that no matter how life plays out, you are always on your side.
In this moment, what is the very thing that you’re willing to do differently to bring more love to your life? Is it taking the time to say to yourself the words that other people don’t often say? Is it taking the time to point out the things you’re doing right and not look at all the things you think you’re doing wrong? Is it not making yourself such a spiritual project?
What are you willing to do differently right now to become more of love in form? Just for yourself. What are you willing to do differently, and how are you willing to choose differently, in order to become more of the love that you are? What needs to change in order for you to say yes to the liberation of letting go? What do you need to do in order, in this moment, to once and for all deem yourself worthy of love?
In love, there are three simple invitations. As you open to receive the three invitations, only more love will be given.
Invitation #1: Come as you are.
Invitation #2: Be as you wish.
Invitation #3: Feel it now.
Heaven has invited you to an important meeting. It says come as you are. Not once you’re perfect, not when you have been stirred to your preferred and desired consistency; come as you are.
As you arrive at heaven’s doorway what’s the right way to act here? It’s called be as you wish. Be as you wish, your choice. Be as you wish and feel it now. It, I-T. I-T stands for infinite truth. Feel infinite truth now, because the truth is that love is your liberator. It is what you are, as you become conscious of yourself as Universe in human form.
Come as you are, be as you wish, feel it now.
Love is another name for God, Source, or the Universe. It is the infinite name of truth. Of all the names it goes by, my favorite name of truth—is you.
You are the love that liberates all.
Isn’t it amazing when something so powerful erupts, it’s like the world stops spinning? Everything just drops away. That’s what happens when truth arrives, the moment you remember exactly who you are.
It is clearer to say you are more than meets the eye than to suggest any illusion in existence. While you may have spent the majority of your life defending the character of a person, it doesn’t mean you or anyone else has been tricked. When identifying with your personality, it is like knowing yourself as the center of a rainbow, unaware of all the many vivid layers around you. As you awaken in consciousness, your perception expands to know yourself not just as a person, but an entire Universe of infinite possibility. Life is not an illusion, because the word illusion infers something appearing to be the way it’s not. If David Copperfield snaps his fingers and makes an elephant disappear, the illusion is that it looks to be nowhere in sight, despite the black curtain you can’t see. Everything that looks the way it is exists exactly the way it appears—there’s just always more to the story. When the light of awakening truly dawns, you are likely to discover the truth of existence living in form, expressing its perfection however you seem to be.
Since the word illusion means “something that is not”—because everything is an expression of truth, there is no such thing as an illusion. If illusion is something that is not, how are you going to find it? Anything found could only be what is, and to renounce anything that is could only be a clever form of denial. It’s far more accurate to say everything is an expression of truth, and because everything is bound to change, such a truth only expands to be more vast, revealing, and inclusive. All that you believed in childhood may not be what you believe as an adult, but it wasn’t wrong for you to believe all that you did before. Smaller truths are innocent building blocks creating foundations for bigger truths to be built. To say anything is an illusion is merely the ego’s regret for having to crawl in order to walk.
The majority of the time a spiritual path leans hard in the direction of viewing life as an illusion, it is often as a way of bypassing the hardships of life and unresolved density of the emotional body. Because each awakening spirit must integrate into the physical body, the human experience is not something to get away from. No matter the strategy employed, anything rejected in the beginning of a spiritual journey must be faced and embraced in the end. This is why I teach in the most loving way. Because I know each and every thing you attempt to outrun will only be waiting for you at a later date.
The truth of life is that all is one. This doesn’t make the perceived separateness of individual experience illusory in any way, since it is only the truth residing in form. If only the truth resides in form, then it is only the truth of all that chooses to be in form. If only the truth has chosen to be in form, then no illusion exists, with no one being tricked by anything in view.
Just because truths can only become greater expressions of truth doesn’t mean any initial layer of truth was wrong or illusory to believe. You are far more than meets the eye, but you’ll never truly get a felt sense of your ever-expanding trajectory trying to embrace a spiritual reality while renouncing the personal realm. Since the truth of life is always rooted in love, the nature of clarity is an all-inclusive truth uniting all individual expressions as equal aspects of Source. Each of us, no matter who we are or what we imagine we’re not, are unique gems in the crown of heaven’s kingdom. There’s no reason to suggest any of the crown jewels are fake just to point toward or emphasize the reality of heaven’s glory.
There is nothing illusory about you, your experiences, or the journey you’re on. It took the utmost courage to come here and see each lifetime through, all within a vacuum of experiences, where only the reality of unconditional love can ever be revealed.
If illusion is anything, it is a word. So to say, life is an illusion, it’s actually an incorrect statement. Life is a word suggesting whatever depth of a meaning such a word represents to you. Illusion is also a word. Suggesting life and illusion are both words is absolutely true, but to say life is an illusion remains a statement of belief and not a timeless fact. Life is not an illusion. Life is the word of divinity that comes to life in an intersection of time and space. To say it’s an illusion denies the purpose of your existence. Without an illusion to find, everything could only be an existential miracle taking shape before you. With no illusion to blame for your life, there is only the magic of this very moment, an open-ended spectrum of inconceivable possibility that invites you across the threshold of limitation the moment you let go.