Love Found -- Part Two -- Finding Presence and Daily Inspriations

For Part One, click here: Love Lost

(This is my experience, strength and hope. Please do not misunderstand the energy or passion of my words to indicate any level of authority – except perhaps about my own experiences, strength and hope.)

The Journey Begins
Imagine for a moment, that we are on exploratory expedition, with the intent being to find a strange new place called “love”. Where would we look? What would be indications that we were close – or far away -- from our destination? What resources would we use to find clues and directions? Who could we turn to for help?

We could “Goggle” the internet using the word “love”, and \we would find many, many links to sites dealing with the subject. We would find tons of information and stories about, and descriptions of “love”. And I believe we could be no where closer than we were before.

Maybe the place to do an “internet” network search is in our own hearts.

Following our Hearts
Let’s start our pursuit with the consciousness that love cannot be found by or in our brains. It can be only be experienced in an area called our “hearts”, and then shared – experientially – through the medium of words and thoughts – which must be experienced also. Using our brains to experience and pursue love is like trying to see a sunset with our ears – it is not the medium of perception that can be used on sunsets.

Where Is Love Hiding?
There are several places where love becomes hidden:
1. The Trees of Distraction: what most people, including myself, have interpreted as love is the relief we have felt when a relationship distracted us from ourselves – partially anesthetizing our senses. Relief from the conscious or unconscious pain of being human and being separated is most frequently perceived by humans as “love”. In romantic relationships, for example, opposites attract because they distract.
2. The Forest of Intimacy: when relationships have gone on long enough or gone deep enough, the inebriation caused by the initial distractions of the relationship begins to wear off, and we begin to experience increased consciousness – and historical unresolved pain and fear. At this point, our brains conclude that the closeness and connection is not real or acceptable, and initiates a relationship destruct sequence.

So if real love is not the pleasurable feeling of relief from others distracting us; and if true love improves our conscious contact with ourselves to the point that we can experience overwhelming unhealed, historical pain; and if our unconscious brains are programmed to protect us from the pain of increasing consciousness with others, where are we left in the pursuit of love.

A Different Place
My first spiritual adviser taught me relentlessly page 417 in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous as the basis for relationships, living, and love:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, thing, or situation – some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing , or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.

The writer later describes the effects of acceptance on his relationship with his wife.
His emotional illness had caused major disruption and disturbance of his perceptions and reactions – to the extent that the beautiful person he had married had become perceived as a flawed and unacceptable person. In his disturbance, he had judged, rejected, and abandoned her – he had lost his inner place of “love” for her.

As he began to heal with improving conscious Presence with his God, he was given a “new pair of glasses” – he was restored to his truer self, and in that experience he rediscovered the wonderful person he had met and loved before – and more.

In learning to live in unconditional acceptance, we begin to realize that acceptance is the truest “location” of love. And it is only possible when we are personally and consciously connected to our God’s unconditional acceptance -- love – of us. The new pair of glasses is beginning to see others – and ourselves – through Their eyes. We are all wonderful, exciting, and perfect in Their perception – and They know all our secrets – even the ones we don’t know.

A GPS Prayer

God, grant me the Presence to accept and love others without their having to change, the Presence to be changed by your acceptance and love, and the Presence to know the difference between love and distraction. Amen

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Love Lost -- Finding Presence and Daily Inspirations Part One

The paradox is that looking for love is not the way to find it. Abundant love will find us when we make the decision to attentively and unconditionally give it to all the people God has invited to share our life. Our primary purpose is to know and give love. In God's Care

As human beings we are looking for love – frequently, “in all the wrong places” – but we are still looking – because we are really so incredibly alone. The complexities and detail of modern culture with its blasting medias, ultra- virtual video and computer worlds and with its frenzied and pulsating artists of entertainment –have created alternate universes of numbing irrelevant thought—a culture no longer dependent on chemicals to be stoned out of our minds.

We are separated and alone – disconnected – and basically stripped of the emotional and spiritual securities of any real Presence that would enable us to unconditionally offer and receive loving connections to others.

So – alone, in this massive darkness – we humans tend to grope for any fleeting touch of warmth or human presence – finding that every rose of hope has thorns of disappointment and ultimate abandonment.

The obstacles, in my experience, are the absence of clear experience of what “love” is, the inability to maintain a steady and conscious spiritual Presence beyond physical form and sensation, and the confusion about what human relationships are really about.

Our culture seems to use the term “love” with unconscious ease – as if everyone knows and has agreed on what it means. As I have listened to my own inner voices, and the inner voices of others, I have heard the word mean everything from “I like you” to “I need you” to “I will like you if you will give me what I need”. It seems to be used like a magic word that should somehow immediately create closeness where none to little actually exists.

It is seemingly a word of attempted mastery over the stifling darkness of separation, and over the emotional starvation for human and spiritual Presence. For me, without my God’s higher Presence, human presence has been only a mental fantasy, a legend or a fairy tale. But what exactly does “loving Presence” mean? Where and how does it exist? How do we find the invisible in the blinding glare of what is visible?

Love seems to be an attempted mastery over increasing human consciousness – the feverish awareness of past and pending abandonments by others, our selves – and seemingly by God. We “fall in love” as a moth is drawn to a flame – we are starving for intimacy and become filled with the euphoria of distraction – and are finally burned by loss of the beloved delusion.

And when consciousness blinks briefly into existence on the screens of our minds, we shut it down with the most convenient and available distractions we can find. And we are powerless to stop – the genetic programming of our primitive, reptilian brain is simply doing its unconscious best to protect us from harm and pain. We do not have a conscious choice.

Disconnected from the “loving” and caring Presence of our God, we are damned to incredible separation and loneliness – wandering the darkness and silence of human existence – attempting to hope for and experience a “love” that does not ultimately destroy and maim our human hearts – even more.

See Part Two.

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Love and Grief -- Touching Hearts

What most of us want is to be heard – to communicate.

Dory Previn

The greatest gift we can give a person is rapt attention.

Unknown

Why?
Recently I have been asking my God and my selves why I want to write, express, and communicate. As I have listened, what I have heard is that I want to reach out and touch others with my experience, strength, and hope – because in those moments, I feel most clearly the loving life changing touch of my very Present God. To have Presence that transforms my life with new and loving energies, I must give Presence to others. I want “to be heard”.

The Golden “Principle”
Consider the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Religion has made this statement into a moral mandate about how we should not mistreat others. I experience that the Golden Rule is actually a loving suggestion related to improving our conscious contact with God and ourselves by “loving others” – unconditionally. It gives us a principle of intimacy with others that benefits us, not a warning that we will be punished if we are bad.

The Apostle John wrote, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

“Understanding” Inspirational Life Quotes
Before I discuss this quote, I want to reference something that is important to me about how I “understand” Biblical inspirational life quotes. I will be writing more about this later.

Having studied the Bible and religion academically and intellectually since I was a child, I have experienced how worthless and even harmful this specific method of understanding scriptures can be. So I had to be given another way to experience spiritually related words, and their energy and life meanings. The way that I have been given is what I presently call “experiential intimacy”. This involves having a personal and interactive relationship with my God, where I come to “know” by being with Them, and by listening to their words and responses. So when I share my perceptions of scriptures or other inspirational life quotes, I am sharing my personal experience with my God – He and She -- , and I am sharing what I “hear” them saying as I listen and speak to Them.

The Love Principle
Let’s look at this Biblical quote again: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

First, I am aware that religion makes “love” a rule and not a spiritual life principle. Love cannot be legislated. If it is not there, it is not there. And we are only using warm fuzzy masks to cover up the separation and loneliness we are experiencing with others and ourselves. We can only give what we have.

Next, what in the world is “love”? It is a term that we humans use frequently arbitrarily as if everyone knows and agrees on what it means. Not really true.

I have experienced that my God’s love is Their unconditional and unending caring for me – without rules, conditions, judgments or any form of separation by Them. I experience that they see me as being perfect and wonderful – you, too – and They are only concerned about our inability to see ourselves as they do. And, by the way, they know everything – there are no secrets with Them – and They still see us as perfect and wonderful.

Love as Action – Touching Hearts
Another part of “love” from my experience with Them is that it involves action – being actively Present. They are emotionally attentive, courteous, thoughtful, encouraging, playful, humorous – and very honest and direct. They actively “touch” my heart and I can feel Their unconditional warmth and Presence.

“Let us love one another” – as our God does – for love is our God’s gift of intimate Presence to us. When we give our presence to others – when we touch others -- we experience a higher Presence of our God than we are capable of by ourselves.

Gifts of Loving
Every one who gives unconditional Presence is given two gifts:
1. First, we are “born” of God. I experience this as a rebirthing transformation of my being. In the warm and unconditional loving womb of their Presence, I began to be reborn out of my human, shame based, conditional genetic makeup. I began to become transformed into the loving truth of Their being. And as I “touch” and love others, I become increasingly reborn into Their loving “image” – I begin to take on their spiritual genetic makeup. They are spiritually, in fact, my real Parents.
2. Second, we come to “know” God. Mankind, religion, and the human brain makes this word mean, “we come to understand God intellectually, with our brains.” For me, “knowing” is an intimate experience of growing conscious closeness and interaction. My experience is that the “kingdom of God is within us” – within the sacred intimacy that They offer and that is infinitely possible for us.

When we do not lovingly “touch” others with our spiritual presence, we become disconnected from God, from ourselves, and from other human beings – not because our God is punishing us, but because our humanness has separated us.

The essence of my God is “love” – total, unconditional, caring, “touching” and interactive Presence. That is who They are. That is who we really are. Life more abundant is the active sharing of that “love” with others – which reconnects us to our God and ourselves.

Love – Grief and Loss
Because grief and loss is something that I help many people with, I like to reference this topic in each of my articles. What actually creates “loss” is a loss of presence – loving connection with others. It can occur with death, where we experience a loss of conscious contact with the person who is deceased. And it occurs every time someone was unable to “love” us – and whenever we were unable to love them. In my experience, there is a collective effect of losses over time, and there are violent and sudden losses of presence, for example, divorce and physical abuse. The most effective way I have found to grieve and “digest” loss is by finding others who want and can accept my “love” , and give them my presence and attention on a steady and regular basis – while receiving the same from available others and my God.

Love and Finding Daily Inspirations
Another important topic related to each article is “finding daily inspirations”. In order to available for, and in order to maintain spiritual awakenings, we must have steady, dependable, and effective sources of our God’s Presence. Otherwise, we go as far as our spiritual resources, and have to stop. Or we find ourselves losing what we have gained. I encourage you to find your own spiritual words, persons, and groups that give you optimum connection to your God – daily inspirations – and live with them rather than just visit.

To be continued…..

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