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"It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all." --Emmett Fox
No matter how many times I am reminded through verse or consequences I still manage to forget the eternal truths that could free me in a moment. I guess that's why I still teach with such passion - I need to learn and remember!
One of the most freeing truth teachings is this: Acceptance always precedes love. While the experience of unbounded love may be the Holy Grail of spiritual attainment, acceptance is the narrow way to get there. Acceptance is the only condition for pure love, for without acceptance love cannot arise or take hold - it remains conditional and therefore, unattainable.
Because we don't understand this dynamic between acceptance and love, we go to great lengths chasing after love in all its iterations and interpretations and forms. We seek love as if it's a foreign object to import. We look to others who seem to hold the key to the love we're after. Of course we have good reason to think that way, since we were raised with some version of conditional love, where we learned that our behavior seemed to evoke the positive regard of parents or significant others. Out of this convoluted logic, we developed conditioned understanding of love so that how we felt about ourselves stemmed from how others treated us. We came to believe that other people hold the key to our love experience. From a psychological point of view this is valid yet from a spiritual perspective it is completely false.
Love is innate to us; it's part of us. From the Judao Christian perspective we are made in the image of Divine Love; an aspect of our true nature in the Buddhist tradition. Love is an inherent quality of our very Being. While it may be obscured by conditioning, and lie dormant within us, it is within us nonetheless, and can be awakened through awareness and intention.
Activating love is always a function of opening the heart. "Duh," you may say! But am I the only one who steels himself against life and other people when it's love I'm after? When life presents difficulties whether in the form of circumstances or people how readily do you embrace and accept (the indication of an open heart)? I would have to mark "rarely" on this survey question. The knee jerk reaction to difficulties coming at us is to see them as evidence that something or somebody is against us - the perfect set up to become victim, react, contract and close down. A perfect set up for greater suffering.
But there is a way out of this pattern and it only asks that we become conscious of the moments when we are closing our heart and simply suggest the alternative. "Stay open, heart" means stay present, be with what is here, even though it may be uncomfortable. When we are fully present, and open hearted we have so much more capacity to handle life, and not coincidentally, become the outlet for the love that is within us, to wash over us, and heal us of the illusion that love could ever be apart from us.
No matter how many times I am reminded through verse or consequences I still manage to forget the eternal truths that could free me in a moment. I guess that's why I still teach with such passion - I need to learn and remember!
One of the most freeing truth teachings is this: Acceptance always precedes love. While the experience of unbounded love may be the Holy Grail of spiritual attainment, acceptance is the narrow way to get there. Acceptance is the only condition for pure love, for without acceptance love cannot arise or take hold - it remains conditional and therefore, unattainable.
Because we don't understand this dynamic between acceptance and love, we go to great lengths chasing after love in all its iterations and interpretations and forms. We seek love as if it's a foreign object to import. We look to others who seem to hold the key to the love we're after. Of course we have good reason to think that way, since we were raised with some version of conditional love, where we learned that our behavior seemed to evoke the positive regard of parents or significant others. Out of this convoluted logic, we developed conditioned understanding of love so that how we felt about ourselves stemmed from how others treated us. We came to believe that other people hold the key to our love experience. From a psychological point of view this is valid yet from a spiritual perspective it is completely false.
Love is innate to us; it's part of us. From the Judao Christian perspective we are made in the image of Divine Love; an aspect of our true nature in the Buddhist tradition. Love is an inherent quality of our very Being. While it may be obscured by conditioning, and lie dormant within us, it is within us nonetheless, and can be awakened through awareness and intention.
Activating love is always a function of opening the heart. "Duh," you may say! But am I the only one who steels himself against life and other people when it's love I'm after? When life presents difficulties whether in the form of circumstances or people how readily do you embrace and accept (the indication of an open heart)? I would have to mark "rarely" on this survey question. The knee jerk reaction to difficulties coming at us is to see them as evidence that something or somebody is against us - the perfect set up to become victim, react, contract and close down. A perfect set up for greater suffering.
But there is a way out of this pattern and it only asks that we become conscious of the moments when we are closing our heart and simply suggest the alternative. "Stay open, heart" means stay present, be with what is here, even though it may be uncomfortable. When we are fully present, and open hearted we have so much more capacity to handle life, and not coincidentally, become the outlet for the love that is within us, to wash over us, and heal us of the illusion that love could ever be apart from us.
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