September 20, 2005 at 11:29:25 p.m.
Love is the most mysterious and powerful force on earth. Mysterious because it defies any singular description. Powerful because it can manifest in the creative energy that ultimately produces a new life or it can reach an emotional frenzy so consuming that its outcome results in the taking of a life.
Love cannot be found. We are born with love. It is as inherent in us as our own spirit but like the elusive self reality of the spirit which we often choose to ignore, we hide our love from the world and from ourselves. We seek love more than any other thing in the world and yet we are outrageously selfish about the amount of love we are willing to expend in our own life. We horde love and then demand more. We talk freely bout sex and reticently about love. We claim love of parents and children as a duty and love of mate as a conquest. We play-act at love especially love of our fellow humans, throwing money upon an alter when what is really needed is our compassionate touch and a willingness to give of ourselves.
We complain of losing a love while refusing to realize that we never really gave of our own love so that while we claim loss the reality is that we still hold all the original love we were born with and that what we really lost was someone whom we outgrew or who outgrew us. We make great oratory about love but we are embarrassed when we have to display it openly in public.
We look wistfully back upon our childhood and realize that one of the beautiful parts of that time was our uninhibited display of love and affection. We loved our pet, we loved our toys, we loved certain food and we loved our friends. And then, after recognizing this, we push the ghost of that child further down inside its dark cellar within and promise ourselves that we will never be that outgoing and trusting again.
All our individual ills and all the ills of humanity stem from the lack of love. Every religion on earth preaches love as its basic concept and yet every follower of every religion is willing to do battle unto death, killing if necessary to uphold that precept. That is not love.
Why is love so hard to express? Is it because we know, deep down, that it is the greatest power on earth and that we are afraid of that power? Is it because in order to use it we must drop all facades and show ourselves as trusting, uninhibited children of a loving Universe. Or is it because we know that love seeks no power over the mundane; wants no ego aggrandizement;turns from hatred and bears no arms in anger; accepts all things as equal; and is never short of tolerance. And that to accept those things, to accept love, we must change. We must leave the human jungle and the false protection of the pack and become something different. And we don’t want to be different. Difference, we say, leads only to separation and loneliness. So we remain the same and claim a false security in brotherhood, trying desperately to protect ourselves from the chill winds of experience while ignoring the warmth that the fire of love would give us would we but let it radiate outward.
Somewhere along this road of life and at some time, it would be wise for each of us to stop and go off alone so that we may give up believing in the power of the coin of the realm and weapons of defense and put our dependence on love to sustain us. Not love from others, but our own love to our self. If we can do that, then in that time and that place we will find the reality of this great Universal power that was granted to us from the beginning and lives with us still, and from that moment all things will be changed….. FOREVER!! – GT