LOVE - THE HOLY PERCEPTION

Dear Spiritual Partner,  Humbleness, clarity, forgiveness and love are the characteristics of an authentically empowered personality.  In the last three Soul Connections we discussed humbleness, clarity, and forgiveness.  Now we come to the big one, the one that includes all the others, the one without which the others cannot be experienced - Love.  Humbleness, clarity, and forgiveness are stepping stones to Love.  You can step up them into Love, choice by choice, and you can step down them from love into concrete and practical ways to bring Love into your life and the world. The four are interconnected.  The pursuit of any leads to all.  Experiencing Love can happen by grace, but bringing Love into your life permanently requires commitment to grow spiritually; courage to feel your emotions, observe your thoughts, and recognize your intentions;  compassion for yourself and others; and making all your interactions conscious and loving.  It requires recognizing, experiencing, and changing the painful parts of your personality that do not love and do not want to love, such as the parts that are constricted in fear, consumed with anger, and wasting in self-loathing.  In other words, experiencing Love requires becoming aware enough in your life to  choose the most positive action each moment, and then choosing it This is also the process of creating authentic power. Love,       Love is so big, so inclusive, so encompassing that no definition can contain it.  Love is not only the love with a little "L", such as the love of a parent for a child or a child for a parent.  It is not the only the love of illusory fantasy, such as romantic love or love for a great heroine or hero.  It is not only the Universal love, sometimes called Agape.  It is larger even than that.  When the great Sequoia, aging for centuries, finally falls, thundering downward until it comes to rest in the embrace of the Earth, that is love, also.  The incoming and outgoing tides caress sand and rocks ceaselessly, relentlessly.  That is love, too.  When the cannons roar, bodies explode, and limbs scatter across grassy fields or littered streets made morbid with blood, can that be love?  Can the cruelty of the bully, the deceitfulness of the coward, the majesty of the courageous, and the humbleness of the wise be love as well?  How can we dare speak of them in the same sentence, especially when "love" is part of the sentence?  Love is a perception, but it is a holy perception, a sacred perception, a perception that excludes nothing and includes everything.  It is the love of the bee for the flower, the mountain for the valley and the valley for the mountain.  It is the love of the bird for the air and the air for the bird.  It is the boiling, roiling, tumultuous collision of emotions within us, between us, and among us.  It is the song of the wind and the whistle of an incoming artillery round.  It is the stars and the soil, the light and the dark, it is the antelope eating the grass and the lion devouring the antelope.  It is the dance of life and death, inseparably united within the illusion of time and space, matter and duality. The fire destroys the forest and new life rises.  The corpse goes into the ground, the waves, or the fire, but the soul remains.  All this, also, is love.  Victory and defeat, success  and failure, insight and confusion are love.  Nothing we see or cannot see, long for or push away, celebrate or regret is not love.  Everything and its opposite is love.  When you see this, you step into love.  Your life - all of your experiences - becomes an uninterrupted flow of opportunities to expand into love instead of contract into fear. You see the power of your choices and the extent of your responsibility for what they create.   You see that when you create with brutality, the experience of brutality comes to you or another of your soul's personalities.  You see that when you create with love, the experience of love comes to you or another of your soul's personalities.  Eventually, you learn to create with love no matter what circumstances you are in.  You see your circumstances differently, too.  You see that all of them beckon you to Love, to fall into Love, to allow Love. When you cannot feel the call, when you fight the fall, when you refuse to allow, you are experiencing fear.  The experience of fear, also, is an experience of Love.  Eventually you will come to realize that Love is all there is.  Why not open to Love now?  Why not begin the process now?  Why not step into your life consciously and responsibly?  There is no other way to Love.