At One with the Love of the Universe

We have been told there are many types of love. Perhaps not. Are there many types of love? Or are there many ways to experience the energy of Love?

When we are with a brother, sister or friend the feelings are not the same as with a lover. Love between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters feels different again. All of these differ from open-hearted abandon into the love of nature, the breathtaking exhilaration of beholding the cliffs, canyons, oceans, mighty rivers, waterfalls, desertscapes, of our planet, or of looking deeply into the stars at night. Love as compassion for the suffering is again a feeling unique to itself.

The feelings are different, but is Love different?
What is Love?

We have been trained to believe love is an emotion, a feeling state arising out of the individual. This is not my experience. Many years ago I experienced a sudden expansion of my conscious awareness. For a time I entered a state of consciousness in which I knew that Existence is all of one piece, it is a Unity, a palpable Tenderness beyond description, excluding nothing, existing beyond illusions of form and separation.

It was clear to me that the sensations of tenderness, exhilaration, joy that I was experiencing were not created in my body or in any body. Instead, I was immersed in something – the energies of Creation – Love – existing as the very stuff of the Universe. I knew then that my body, and the whole of the human body is not, never was, and never will be separate from the Source and Essence of Creation.

We cannot be separated from that which forms, sustains and nourishes our existence.

We cannot be separated from our Source, but we can believe we are separated. We can allow ourselves to live with the conviction that we are alone, isolated, insignificant, not aligned with the power of the Universe. This belief has consequences. In our culture there is an unchallenged and almost religious assumption that the energies of Creation move us, push or pull us, that if we don’t learn to push and pull these energies that we will be invalid, useless. If we look closely at this cultural myth we see that it is absurd. Science, psychology, the logic of philosophy all reveal this absurdity, yet it prevails.

This myth, this religion, breeds in succession all the miseries of the human condition. Poverty, war, disease, all result from the false belief that Creator and Creation are divided and that we must therefore protect ourselves from Life, or learn to manipulate it.

If we look again, we will see that the cure for this epidemic belief in separation and fear is in our hands. The cure begins with each one of us. We don’t have to campaign to change the world and we don’t have to leave it to the politicians to put an end to poverty, war and disease; but we do have to, gently and in right timing, ask ourselves to let go of any and all ideas that make us seem to be alone, helpless, or insignificant. If we really want to make a difference we do have to take time to discipline our minds and our bodies to recognize the energies of Creation, felt as love, in our meditations, in our spiritual practices, in our daily lives and in our relationships. Every one of us who opens his or her self to direct, felt-in-the-body acknowledgement of the Essence of all life becomes a living prayer and joins the awakening of the planet. As we open our hearts to the Truth we begin to feel more consistently the love that is the essence of Creation and we become ourselves catalysts for awakening – in our homes, at work, in our relationships and in our times of solitude. Our very bodies, our minds and the expressions of our lives communicate and share the truth. We become what we always were – the Love of the Universe, embodied.