Unconditional love is the force which binds us all together. It is not practiced by only those enlightened beings for whom life has become another toy. It is practiced by all those who, with hearts open, and with rampant disregard for the consequences, freely give of themselves. The act of loving is not a difficult one, it is the act of forgetting to question that love that tends to cause our challenges.
When we begin our loving, we do so in an open heart space, a place where there are no boundaries and no limits to the possibilities. This is the actuality of the universe. But then, as time goes on, we lose the clarity of that vision. We surrender to fear and the limitations of the possibilities for our happiness. The fiction of “happily ever after” being related to staying the same and staying together comes up to bite us. Rather than allowing love to evolve and change organically, we seek to control it. Rather than cultivating the mystery, we seek to define it. When we get our brains involved in the loving, we put our limitations upon its limitlessness. The key to making love stay is not to question it or to hold it tightly, it is to release it and allow it to be whatever it can be.
We make these choices in our lives daily, about what we believe we are capable of and what is possible. Ignoring totally, the fact that our perceptions change constantly and that what we believe to be commonplace today, was unimaginable yesterday. Perhaps all of what is possible is unimaginable. Perhaps our brains are not prepared to encompass the awesomeness of all potentialities. Perhaps the best we can do is to open up to that truth and potential, to allow that flow to sweep through our lives and take us with it. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to ride the current.
That current will take us to the places of Kings and priests. That current will bring us to the edge of insanity and over the falls into obscurity. That current is all that is, ever was, and ever will be. The only thing we must do is to ride it effectively. And try not to drown in the possibilities.
The key to doing this effectively, as any sailor will tell you, is to have a sturdy vessel in which to travel and to read the current as you go. The sturdiness of your vessel is directly related to your understanding of yourself. How deeply it drags in the water is determined by the weight and quantity of baggage that you stow aboard. The more issues of yours that you can shed, the smoother and sleeker that vessel becomes, and the more adept at plying the waters. The more you clear away the baggage of your issues, the higher the vessel rides in the water, and the more clearly you can see the horizon, the shores to either side and the snags in the current. When you can see what is coming, you can prepare for it better. Sometimes, you can even avoid it altogether.
Knowing that the current through which you flow is unconditional love, you know that even the snags are borne of this stuff. You know that the limits you perceive are illusions, lessons designed to help you see past your own reality into a world where everything is possible. Love allows. It encourages. It accepts. All that can be, already is. All that is left is to choose your course.
In what way will you live your life? Will you choose to be open to the possibilities or will you deny the magic of love in favor of the security of logic? Logic holds security in that what you see is what you get. It is the nature of logic to limit possibilities, to hold back change in an effort to exert control over the mystery. It is the nature of mystery to outwit logic. Faith can create from nothingness. The faith need not be to a specific god or goddess, or even to a paradigm. Faith is complete unto itself in the acts of belief and acceptance. The same is true for Love. If you believe in Love and accept its influence into your life, then it will return to you tenfold.
This rule is true when applied outward, but is also critical to be applied inward. The love of another is one with which we are at least anecdotally familiar. The love of oneself seems to imply a psycho-babble related drivel that our skeptical minds have written off. And yet, this is the hidden secret that allows us to be abundant. Without a firm belief in and love of ourselves, we will bring about the lack and fear that comes when we turn our backs to love. Many believe that truly good people will live in an abundance of friends and love but a dearth of finances because money is inherently logic-based and not subject to the rules of love. Not true. Money is part and parcel of the love-based system as is all of creation. When you apply love to yourself and your own internal life, the abundance of the universe comes to you. This comes in the form of friends, lovers, beauty, joy, and, yes, wealth. Why should money be any different than any other form of energy? Love is acceptance, and allowing of joyful energy to flow through your life.
Now, let’s talk about fear. Fear is that which limits Love. It brings with it assumptions of lack and poverty of spirit. When you move in Love, all must make way before you. When you move in Fear, all energy stops around you and you stagnate in the eddies of the current.
When I was to be married, I was incredibly in love with my future husband. We shared a bond that transcended time and space and was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It was so new and so wonderful and so different from what I knew that I was desperately afraid of losing it since I wasn’t certain how I had found it in the first place. I imagined terrible things happening to take it away from me, horrible diseases, tragic deaths of one or both of us, etc. I became obsessed with the loss of the love. In doing so, I clamped down on it, desperately trying to hold onto it with all my might. Within a few months, I had managed to destroy it. I had held on so tight, became so desperate in my need for it, that I sucked it dry of all the considerable life force it had contained. I never did find it again with him. It seems that even the shell was gone and could not be resurrected.
I am, once again, presented with the opportunity to love. The choice point for what I want in my life. I have changed, grown, acquired new faith in the universe and in Love itself. I will choose to love again, but not in the same way as before. I will choose not to define it, not to control it, not to understand it. I am content to sit in the mystery, to engage it in all its aspects. To explore rather than map the territory. I know and accept that the geography will constantly change, I embrace with joy the eternal unfolding of that landscape. I know that my vessel is strong enough to withstand the snags along the way and I have lightened the load sufficiently to allow for forward vision. I trust that My Love has done the same. I also trust that Love, in its infinite lust for life and engagement in the divine, will not steer me wrong. I assume nothing, not permanence nor impermanence, not happiness nor sorrow, not triumph nor regret. I accept all that Love has to offer and give all I have in return. If I neither suck all the life out of it nor allow it to suck the life out of me, what remains is a constant stream of life force nourishing, growing and changing. Ever constant and ever fluctuating.
I choose this path both for my love life and for my life of love. I will engage the world with an open heart, not looking for what it can provide me, but for where I can bring out the inherent joy and love in all that surrounds me. I made a vow a few years ago to embrace life, to live it to the fullest, to truly engage all that happened around me. I believe I have now found the key to doing that consistently. And the answer lies in Love.
* This is part of an ongoing series of posts detailing what happened on a spiritual pilgrimage that I took in 2002. To start from the beginning, go to July 2, 2013. To see the entire spiritual journey as it gets published, click on the category “You Want Me To Do WHAT?!!?” to see all of the posts.
