LESSON 127. There is no love but God’s.
“Love is one. It has no separate parts and no degrees; no kinds nor levels, no divergencies and no distinctions. It is like itself, unchanged throughout. It never alters with a person or a circumstance.”
As the words of today’s lesson make clear, love is not an emotion. Love is rather the equivalent of the truth—the spaciousness that allows all that is. “Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one …” Love is that which we all are – “there can never be a difference in what you really are and what love is.” It feels to me that, that which I am is absolute potentiality—the absolute freedom of unlimitedness. When you give love—when you genuinely give love—aren’t you giving unlimited freedom?
This law of unlimited freedom is that within which we live. As NTI Luke 11 says:
“Your Father is the extension of Love. And His Love has been poured out upon you. It is His only gift. Anything that is not of the gift of our Father is of nothing, and so it is meaningless and it has no value. Lay that aside, and accept the gift given to you by our Father.”
Love does not seek for recompense. Love gives and gives only. Love never takes. Does awareness take? Does spaciousness take? Does truth hold back, reserve for later? Love is giving, is extending, is all embracing. It has been said that there is no boundary in consciousness. This is true of love. There is no point to which love will not extend.
All well and good you might say, but how is this helpful? Where is the practice pointer? It is actually in the lesson itself. The lesson tells us: “Love’s meaning is obscure to anyone who thinks that love can change. He does not see that changing love must be impossible. And thus he thinks that he can love at times, and hate at other times. He also thinks that love can be bestowed on one, and yet remain itself although it is withheld from others.”
So, the challenge is to let go our notion of love as an emotion–which is often co-dependance, nervous preoccupation, or even fear–and seek to be the expansiveness of absolute allowance. This is the practice that we are learning with the Loving All Method. This perfect allowance is our practice. This perfect allowance is the extension of our being. My recommendation is that we practice this perfect allowance with those for whom we feel a deep emotional bond. It will be here that it will be easiest to see the difference between the extension of actual love and the other needs and desires that have masqueraded as love.
Recently, Regina interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Martin for our Guest Satsang series. Dr. Martin spoke of those who went beyond the unitive state of awakening to another state in which they did not seem to feel the emotion of love. This concerned some members of Awakening Together. Some members said all they want is love and they aren’t interested in enlightenment if love is absent from enlightenment.
As Regina has noted, this begs the question, “What is love?” and “Do the enlightened know love or leave it behind?” Regina and I both recently looked at the question, “What is Love?” If you’re interested, the link below will take you to the audios of our contemplation of the question:
https://awakening-together.org/dev2/what-is-love-do-the-enlightened-know-love-or-leave-it-behind/
