Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 10: Longing, Love, And The Divine Romance

In this episode of Into the Mystery,

We're discussing devotion.

We're discussing the heart's longing for its beloved.

How to respond to this gravitational pull from our core.

How to fall in.

How to have a romance with our true heart's desire.

I've been thinking just about love in general lately,

And we were talking about it in Course in Miracles the other night about what stuck with me from that particular session was the idea that you can't just confine your love to one person.

You know,

You can't like target one person with your love,

And if you deny your love to the rest of creation,

Then you're denying all of it basically.

We have this romantic myth around love,

And we tend to confine our discussion of love to some very specific categories,

Which are like romantic love for your soulmate or special partner or love for a child,

Love for your brother or your very good friend.

And they're really narrowly delineated categories,

And the Greeks of course had a whole system of this.

And when you begin to awaken,

Suddenly love is everywhere.

The mind kind of goes a little crazy trying to decide what to do with all that.

And every time I read something by the Mystic Poets,

I'm just struck by the intensity of love for God that's displayed in some of their writings.

It literally hits you in the heart,

But I mean it's otherworldly.

It's something that,

Man,

I mean it just doubles me over into tears sometimes.

It's so powerful.

I'm thinking right now about narcissism as the love we have for the false self,

The love we have for the temporal,

The love we have for what is of our own making.

And in some sense,

I think we're talking about awakening as a transmutation of our love from a loving which points downward to a loving which points upward,

Or a loving that points inward to a loving that points outward.

A love that goes to God is a love that goes to all of creation.

And the very essence of our ego is to keep us within a self-contained system of love that keeps love from its broader expansion.

It's very conditional.

The passions of the ego keep love limited,

Like thinking lust,

Love is directed in essence toward the body.

Or in these passions that run the ego,

There's always a love that is misappropriated to something other than the heart,

Something other than what truly can hold and contain and glorify the love in us.

Okay,

I want to say something intensely personal just because it's coming up.

When I've been in relationship,

I found it really hard to be sexual and loving at the same time.

Like,

I found like those two things didn't go together at all.

And I don't know if that sounds really weird and twisted,

But… No.

Most people probably wouldn't understand that that's what's happening,

But I'd say that's actually the typical experience.

But I don't mean it in a… No,

I know what you mean.

I found it strange because there's this myth in our romantic narratives in Western culture that great love and great sex should automatically dovetail,

Right?

And that's not my experience at all.

Like,

I don't know,

I don't even really want to go too deeply into this,

But I just found that there was such a disconnect and it was such a disappointment to not be able to find a way to get those two aspects together.

And I don't know if it was because the kind of love I was seeking was of a higher variety that could not like dwell with the lower passions.

Like I don't think I even realized that until right now,

But there was some kind of conflict.

So there's that.

It reminds me of when I was in seventh grade,

We had this professional football player come into our school and give a speech at one of these assemblies.

And I remember it hit me so deeply because he talked about a lot of things,

But one of the things he talked about was sex.

I think he tried to approach it in a fairly open and not such a rigid way.

And he said,

Love is not having sex with someone that you want to have sex with.

Love is wiping the butt of someone who has cancer and is dying.

That was,

I think the first time in early teenage years that it struck me that there is a remarkable difference.

I don't think that they need to be separated from each other.

I don't think that's a,

And I think that's what the essence of like tantric sex is,

Is it's actually to bring the real love of God into the act.

But I think in most cases,

We don't know the difference between divine unconditional love and the passionate intensity that's involved in the sexual act.

And it's not that the passionate intensity need to be divorced from love,

But it doesn't capture the real essence of that all pervasive divine love at all.

I don't think that most individuals are ready to even consider a divine romance and it makes a conversation such as this one that is very difficult to have because the bridge that we have to create is so long and so vast and requires so many supports that it's a difficult one to connect the ordinary individual to.

I mean,

To me in one sense,

The divine romance could also take place in a much more recognizable form as a love for truth,

A desire to know it's true.

I think there's something of a divine romance just in that love and pursuit of truth,

That love and pursuit of understanding,

That love and pursuit of self-understanding.

Well,

Maybe we can start with the idea that what we feel as that longing,

That inexplicable something that drives us through our life,

That we translate badly into so many other things as craving for sex or power or money or whatever it happens to be,

That that is the longing for a divine romance.

To our detriment,

Culturally we have horribly misdirected and misinterpreted that in ways that don't serve to further our growth toward the divine.

Instead,

We're running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to find something that's not where we're looking for it.

That intense passion for,

We think it's an other,

But it's actually within us.

So we're,

As you said,

We're always searching outwardly when the only path is inward.

There aren't a lot of signposts pointing that way.

There's pain in that longing.

There's pain in it.

We try to satisfy that pain by giving it something to temporarily abate the ache of that longing.

Most of us,

What we've learned to do,

And this is the worldly pursuit,

Is we've learned to channel our longing into the pursuit,

As you said,

Of another,

Of a thing,

Of something which will satisfy that deep and painful craving.

What the spiritual search is,

Is essentially the turning inward to follow that craving and that pain to its source.

It's essentially the difference between the ego and the soul.

The ego misinterprets passion as something to fulfill outwardly.

And the soul is that inward longing for that romance,

For that romance with God.

We talked a little bit in the episode about relationship,

About the fairy tales and the way those misinterpret longing for God into a romantic narrative.

And common feature of those stories is that there are trials and tribulations that the hero has to overcome on the way to getting the object of his or her desire.

And I'm always thinking of the Sleeping Beauty narrative where there's this great thicket of thorns around the castle and the prince has to slash through them.

And in a sense,

You can kind of look at that from a divine perspective and think of that thicket as being the pain surrounding the longing in our hearts that we have to penetrate and go through and transmute in order to get to the source,

The center,

The pure essence of our being.

Yeah,

The thickets of our ignorance.

It was funny when I had my first awakening experience when we finally saw the road up ahead,

We ended up walking through a huge thicket of blackberry bushes.

And by huge,

I mean like 20 feet deep of it.

And I was wrapped with laughter in the metaphor I was involved with of traveling through these brambles and these thorns because it's through our ignorance that we have to traverse.

And in some sense,

That's the basic story that we have to travel through our own self-created obstacles.

You could think of every one of those thorns as an injury,

A delusion,

Something we're guilty over,

All of the wrong turns that we've made that have to be identified.

Maybe the thorn needs to be removed,

Maybe something needs to be bandaged before we're whole enough to make it through to the other side.

It's like we've spent so much of our time walking away from God and every step we've made has grown another bush of thorns and so we repent,

Which is the word which means just to turn around.

We suddenly realize that we're in need of turning around and then we travel back through the brambles back to God.

And that's why so few will take up this divine romance because to walk back through the thicket is so daunting and so painful.

To me the heroic journey is the journey back to God and it is the journey where each step along the way what we have acquired,

Whatever investment we have added to ourselves will be subtracted so that we can come back to our original nakedness,

Our original innocence in that love affair.

Back to the garden.

Yeah,

Back to the garden.

Well that's the interesting thing about the story of Adam,

Right?

Is that when God comes to him after this turning away,

He's clothed and he's ashamed and it represents this narcissistic shame that we all have deep in our core.

Most of us don't even know it,

That we have walked away from our own heart,

We've walked away from our own divine potential and there's a deep wounding that goes with that that we would rather hide,

We'd rather hide ourselves from.

What you were just saying about Adam made me think of a poet I just learned of named Akka Mahadevi,

South Indian poet.

11th century,

The story about her was that her parents were devotees of Shiva and as a young child she became convinced that Shiva was her husband or was intended to be her husband and so she lived her life from that perspective until some local king caught sight of her and decided she was so beautiful he needed to wed her.

And at first she refused but then he threatened her parents and so she acquiesced but with the understanding that he wouldn't touch her physically.

So this went on for a while and she continued her devotion but at some point the king became really frustrated and so he had her prosecuted for not fulfilling her queenly duties.

And she said,

You know,

I'm sorry but I'm married to Shiva and I refuse and do what you will with me.

And so the king said,

Well,

Your vestments belong to me,

Your jewelry belongs to me,

Etc.

And she said fine.

She took off all of her clothes,

Dropped all of her jewelry to the ground and walked away and lived the rest of her life naked wandering as a sadhu.

She had really long hair so that kind of took care of those matters but even if it's apocryphal I thought that was a really lovely demonstration of the way in which one's devotion to the Divine can be so pure that it makes everything in physical existence completely irrelevant.

Daishi It speaks so much to what we take as our Master and what we truly value and the inclination of so much of us is to value what is valueless and to place that preciousness as our highest value,

Our highest aim,

To regard it as our Master,

It's the common destination of everyone.

We will stumble in darkness until we realize what it is we're really after and when we realize what it is we're really after we will treat it as our highest value.

Shri Mataji Let's talk about devotion a little bit.

There are four paths of yoga that one can take and bhakti being a devotional yogi is one of them.

And most people when they hear the word devotion they think of ceremonies,

Rituals,

Maybe prostrations or other demonstrations and yet we can be devotional without having to do anything at all.

I mean you can be devotional purely in your approach and your way of seeing reality or seeing through reality,

Seeing through the maya to see the divinity behind it which is something you can practice constantly without having to,

You know,

Moving your body in some way or burning incense or putting flowers on an altar.

You can be devotional with another person.

You can be devotional to yourself as an example of God,

You know,

As a vessel for God.

Daishi There's trouble in that one but yes you're right.

Shri Mataji Yeah you're right,

That is troublesome.

Daishi Like Rumi says in one of his poems he says something that it's not God that is elevated in acts of praise and worship,

It's the worshipper.

There is in the devotee the exaltation.

Shri Mataji So I mean we're actually kind of talking about,

I mean just bear with me on this,

We're actually kind of talking about having to have a separation if you're going to be devotional that way.

Daishi Yeah.

There has to be one who's devoted and one to whom they're devoted but the beauty of devotional practice is that it is intended to erase the separation.

But if I'm devoted to God or Christ or if I'm devoted to guru or teacher or my spiritual advisor whomever we might choose to aim our devotion toward it is to eliminate whatever seems to be the difference,

Whatever seems to be separating.

To me devotion,

The energy of devotion is the energy of merging.

Shri Mataji So the truest,

Purest,

Most vital devotional act would be the embodiment of the divine,

To be flowing as the divine without the ego in the way,

Without any concept of one as a separate entity.

It involves establishing oneself in a state of divine flow that is unquestioned,

That is fully accepted and embraced and loved even as it is not seen as anything special.

It just becomes a way of being.

Daishi I hear you describing faith and faith has nothing to do with logic and reason at all and devotion is faith.

But not faith as in belief,

Faith as in a heartfelt knowing and a heartfelt dedication to,

A heartfelt direction.

Shri Mataji I think it's hard to talk about devotion just because my mind is still baffled by some old ideas at hold about what it means to be devotional.

I mean we talked about earlier when we were talking about God in episode 2 how each of us had had periods of atheism in our early lives and I can feel the residue of that orientation in a sort of nagging feeling that to be devotional is to be sort of a rube,

To be sort of duped by something invisible and that makes me sad because I know that not to be true now.

But it still kind of sits back there in the back of my brain.

Daishi Well this is what comes from the worship of the mind.

This is the very essence of the Luciferian intellect is this notion that faith and love without a reason and logic and science to explain it is to be naive and that intellect within us will convince us away from that faith again and again.

And yet it is when we taste it,

It's where we prosper,

It's where we flourish.

And so we each want it and yet the intellect won't allow.

The intellect,

It summons our obedience to its own dead framework of logic and reason.

Shri Mataji Oh I love that dead framework.

It is,

It is.

It's a sterile artificial construct that attempts to make sense of something that yeah.

Daishi And it argues to the heart saying,

What are you a fool?

There is no such thing as God.

There is no such thing as,

You know,

And it gives,

It provides every reason possible to eliminate any kind of devotion as pure superstition and idiocy.

And we see that dominating our societies.

We see it dominating our universities where devotion is treated as superstition and it's treated as foolishness.

And so we are gradually starving the love out of our very existence and further and further falling into this adoration of intellect.

Shri Mataji I think it's not just intellect either,

Although that's obviously a large part of it.

I remember as a kid growing up in this working-class Catholic neighborhood and one of the families,

They had I think five kids in the family and two or three of the boys had been altar boys and were going to go to seminary to become priests.

And to the rest of us that was a baffling thing.

And people would say,

Oh well,

They've got the calling.

And I remember having conversations with my 10 and 12-year-old friends like,

Why would you do that?

It kind of didn't make any sense like going into the military made no sense.

Why would you go and devote your life to something like that when there are all these fun things you could be doing and you could have boyfriends and girlfriends and you could buy things and you can maybe get rich and go to Hollywood.

There are all of these worldly things beckoning at us,

I guess from the entertainment complex.

That and in a working-class neighborhood,

I don't know if this gets talked about a lot,

But our parents aspired to something wealthier.

Like we kind of looked at rich people as being magical in some way or fate had smiled on them in some way.

The aspiration was always to something very worldly.

David Tingling Security,

Sex,

And power.

Yeah,

Exactly.

So then for my friends and his brothers to be like,

Oh yeah,

We're going to be priests.

You're never going to get married?

What?

You're never going to have all these other things?

It was totally baffling.

And it wasn't that we considered it a foolish thing.

We just didn't,

We couldn't understand what the draw was because our longing,

Which all of us felt I'm sure,

But our longing had already been assigned some goals that we were to pursue.

I mean,

It was just automatically kind of by osmosis we had absorbed these things.

Well,

And it's true of course that not everybody is designed to be a priest or a shaman.

Right,

But it wasn't the sort of thing that our egos could look at and feel satisfied by or admire in any way.

Well,

There's nothing in it for the ego at all.

There's nothing in it for the ego.

Just as there's nothing in it for the ego in this divine romance.

There's nothing in it in the ego for our disciplines and our taking our spiritual life seriously.

There's nothing in it for the ego.

It's not to gratify the ego in any of its drives for security,

Pleasure and power.

It literally does evoke the question in the intellect,

Well,

What the hell for?

What the hell for?

Why would you want to do that?

The intellect can't conceive of a motivation outside of those egoic motivations.

Then you devote however many decades for most of us to pursuing those things and then find out that they're utterly unsatisfying.

Or maybe they're satisfying for a very short period of time,

But then there's always that longing is still there and that longing is still looking for its ultimate partner in the divine who is nowhere to be found in the places that we're looking.

And so a lot of us turn to despair,

Depression,

Addiction,

Serial relationships,

I mean you name it,

Trying to understand that space.

And I have such compassion for that because not only have I gone through some of those things,

But I know many people who have.

And when you get to the point where you realize that the ego can release those things,

It is such a blessed relief.

I mean that is a lot of stuff to carry,

You know,

Those expectations,

Those demands.

The ego is a very demanding master.

And even if you give it what it wants,

You're not going to give it to the ego in the right way,

You know,

Or often enough or high enough or better than someone else enough.

Well,

We'll never finally be satisfied with anything but what our heart truly longs for and that's written into the very fabric of existence.

That's why every desire or every accomplishment of desire ends in pain.

It's why nothing that we ever achieve or accomplish ever satisfies us completely.

It's written into the very fabric of existence that nothing will satisfy the longing of our heart but it's beloved.

You know,

The story of the prodigal son where the son makes the journey away from God only to realize that every pursuit is futile.

I realized in my very first awakening experience,

Which was just a glimpse,

You know,

I mean it was just the beginning of a journey and I realized that the unbelievable bliss of love that I knew in that moment,

It was so clear to me why I had never been satisfied by anything else.

Because until that discovery,

I held hope that there was hope in a relationship or hope in an experience or hope in some kind of development of myself in some way and it was clear in that experience that nothing could satisfy that hunger but itself.

Often when I work with folks,

I often encourage them to follow their longing inward to its source.

You know,

I often tell individuals that what you long for is inside the longing because we're so accustomed to using that longing to then move out thinking that we're after something,

Someone as we've said.

But to turn in and look to the source of the longing from where it's coming from,

To see where it's arising from,

To follow it like a fragrance back to the flower.

And often exploring into that longing,

What resides in there when you make contact with it is much of the same,

I mean everything that you would be looking for say in a relationship or the security of your home,

All of those things are inside the longing.

There's this sense of heat and nourishment and holding.

All of it,

All the attributes of God,

Power,

Beauty,

Safety,

Love,

Joy,

Strength,

All of the attributes,

Everything we could possibly want can be found in following that longing back to its source.

Let's talk about one thing really quick that's related to longing.

And it's my favorite question,

It's the question I ask all of my friends virtually on a regular basis and it is the most simple question which is,

What do you want?

Because our longing can be found by identifying what we want and following what we want to its source and what we don't often realize is that the entire course of our life is directed by what we want and yet we remain often quite unaware of what we want,

What it is we actually want.

And often we find ourselves pursuing things we don't want.

And so I think that one of the most valuable questions that we can ask ourselves on a regular basis,

Not intellectually and obsessively but like in the heart and in the core is,

What do I really want?

What am I really after?

What is it that I really want my life to be defined by?

It's a hard question to answer.

At first because we're told what we're supposed to want for most of our lives,

Or at least early lives,

Childhood.

And depending on your upbringing,

I mean some people's parents will tell them exactly what's expected of them.

I have a friend who's now retired who had been a very successful doctor and one day at dinner he said,

You know,

I never wanted to be a doctor.

And I said,

Really?

Well,

Why not?

And he said,

Well,

It was just,

You know,

It was what my dad told me I needed to be.

And so I did what he said.

He goes,

But I never,

It wasn't my calling.

And I don't remember if he had some other thing that he wished he had done.

It was a while ago but.

.

.

Of course he did.

Of course he did.

Yeah,

I mean,

But I mean,

Whether he named it or not.

Right.

But that's a whole lifetime.

It's 40,

50 years of work that went into something that he wasn't all that thrilled with.

And it probably,

And he's a wonderful person,

So I'm sure he did a marvelous job and expressed himself as best he could.

But something in his heart was unsatisfied.

It brings us to another piece of this,

Which is that this longing for God is not just some purely devotional worshipful act.

It's also within this willingness to follow the impulse of life within us,

To follow not necessarily our dreams,

But what sings to us,

What sings within us and to let it lead our life.

So then we have to talk about surrender because surrendering to what you,

I mean,

If you don't even know what you want and if you're questioning that in yourself.

I mean,

You ask me this question probably half a dozen times and every time I usually go,

Why are you asking me that again?

I'm just going to start wearing a t-shirt so I don't have to ask it.

Yes,

That's an excellent idea.

I mean,

People are just looking at it all the time,

Seeing that question all the time.

But when you're,

Well,

At least speaking from my own experience,

When I'm really honest with myself about what do I want,

I honestly don't know.

I don't.

Yes you do.

These days I used to think— Yes you do.

You know exactly what you want.

Everybody knows exactly what they want.

I want to be useful.

I want,

No I don't,

I mean in specifics,

In terms of where should I be,

What should I do.

No,

No,

No.

Specifics don't matter.

We're looking for the core.

There's one obvious desire that every human being has.

The desire to be happy.

Oh,

Of course.

Well,

I thought that went without saying.

Well it does go without saying,

But we're saying it anyway.

Because that desire for happiness is the very core of our longing and it's also the very core of every mistake we make in thinking where it can be found.

We know exactly what we want.

Everything that every human being does all the time is aimed at accomplishing happiness.

Even the most terrible acts,

Even the most delusional acts are aimed at some quest to accomplish happiness.

That's our deepest,

It's the most familiar longing that we all know.

See,

It's so obvious that my brain wants to come up with something else that's a little bit more sophisticated than that.

There isn't anything more sophisticated.

There's something more intellectually complex,

But there's nothing more sophisticated.

I don't even know if happy is the right word,

But I do want to be joyful.

Satisfied.

I want to be expansive.

Filled.

Satisfied.

Yeah,

At peace.

I think even more than quote unquote happiness,

I want peace.

In my world,

Peace is synonymous with happiness.

Because peace is the end of searching.

But when we bring this back to,

Well,

Okay,

Being in the world,

Not of it,

We still are required to do things.

And a lot of people,

Myself included,

Will automatically,

If you ask me what I want,

That will translate into what do you want for a career,

What's going to make you happy.

So instead of going to the feeling,

I'm going to the providers of it.

But even that can be very useful to inquire.

What will that give me if I get the partner?

If I get the cool experience?

If I get the new house?

What will that give me?

I found that there's so little that I do want anymore.

What I am seeking now is more a feeling of being useful or allowing God to use me for whatever purpose.

Hopefully not a painful,

Horrible one,

But— That's like the state that the orthodox folks speak of as apatia,

Like apathy,

This state of divine indifference where we are no longer guided by our own self-interest or self-desires,

But instead we're available to be a vessel for God.

Exactly.

Because I can already see,

Even the things that I legitimately enjoy do not have the same sort of tingle of satisfaction to them that they once did in the absence of ego.

There was always—like when I used to drink wine,

I drank a certain very expensive or well-thought-of wine,

There was that sort of jazziness that made me feel sophisticated.

My ego thinks,

Well,

I know these things and that makes this doubly enjoyable and somebody wouldn't even know what they're tasting.

It didn't matter what it was.

My taste was a part of my self-image that was very satisfying.

The thing itself was one thing,

But my whole story around it,

The way that these things were perceived by my ego contained some added happiness.

With that mostly irrelevant anymore,

Yeah,

Like my coffee,

But it doesn't have to be the best coffee.

It's just coffee.

It's not that these things are empty,

But there's no compulsion related to using them to enhance my sense of self anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah,

And finally,

When every passion of the ego is,

There isn't anything left of that style of life,

Nor do we even want.

Yeah,

Exactly.

And what would thrill me in place of that would be to be able to flow with Divine Love wherever it sends me.

And you know,

In my sense of this,

There's almost a tangible propulsion behind it that is love,

Clearly.

And I can imagine no greater satisfaction than having that fill me and direct me and be me so that I can surrender,

So that I can release my thinking about it,

So that I can simply be in the world as whatever I am without the endless analysis,

Without comparing,

Without feeling guilt over past transgressions,

Without having unmet cravings.

Just that simple peace in movement.

And this is why the purification of the soul is needed,

And so that these limited parts of ourselves no longer dominate our consciousness,

And that we can be exclusively moved by love.

Yeah,

Exclusively moved by love.

I love that.

We won't be satisfied until that is so.

It's like we won't be satisfied until we are entirely possessed by true unconditional love.

And until that point,

Which all of us are aspiring to in one form or another,

There will always remain a hint of dissatisfaction.

We've circled back to where we started,

Sort of where the idea that it has to be all love.

It can't be love for this,

But not for that.

Love for that person,

But not to that person over there.

It's got to be a love that infuses your very being and extends to everything that you see,

That you're part of.

Yeah.

Well,

It's like,

As the Bible says,

That we're made in the image and likeness of God,

If that's true,

Which it is.

And God's nature is love.

To be made in the image and likeness of love means that where there is fear,

Where there is attack,

Where there is hate,

That image is not represented in its true form.

It's not present.

And so,

I wouldn't even say it's our work.

It's our surrender to that all-embracing love that completes us.

And we don't have to say that.

I mean,

I think there's such a tendency talking about this,

That someone could think of that love as like baking brownies for everybody or hugging everybody.

It doesn't mean that.

It means seeing God,

Seeing good in everything we encounter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that reminds me of what we talked about recently,

Which was that love is an act of seeing.

Love is a way of seeing through delusion,

Seeing through error,

Seeing through what's not true to the truth.

And by that very act of seeing through,

That piercing vision,

That piercing sight into the heart of another or a situation,

You sanctify it.

Yes.

You redeem it.

Yes,

You sanctify and you redeem it.

And in and of itself,

That's the reward we seek.

Yes.

Because what you give to the other,

You give to yourself as well.

Yes.

And for those who listen to this,

This is the worthwhile experiment,

Is try out.

Can you repeat how you said that?

You redeem it.

How did you say it?

At our work,

That love is an act of seeing through the delusion,

Through the errors,

Into the pure divine heart of another.

And it is by virtue of seeing it that you sanctify and redeem it.

Yes.

And if we understand,

You see,

Because in that moment of sanctifying another through our love,

We recognize that we are wholly made of that love and there's nothing more fulfilling than that.

Yes.

And that act of connection is made.

Because as we've mentioned before,

When divine love sees itself in another,

That love sees back to it.

Yes.

Whether the recipient realizes this or not,

There is a connection made and that's how we extend out infinitely.

This is why Jesus can say,

Where two or more are gathered,

There I am.

Because in the presence of one who looks on another with love,

The holy is there.

It is sanctified.

That's the absolutely perfect word for this,

Is there's a sanctity that happens.

That's beautiful.

It is,

Isn't it?

Yes.

It's really beautiful.

Hallelujah.

That's what I want.

Next time you ask me what I want,

That's what I'm going to say.

There you go.

Well,

That's the answer right there.

That is the answer.

Because I find often that when I talk with people,

They may say,

I want to feel loved or I want to be recognized or I want someone to love me,

But it's always trumped.

There's always a deeper desire within them to actually love rather than be loved.

It is the deeper impulse.

I love when Rumi says,

If you want to be held,

Open your arms.

Whatever it is that we're seeking has to become what we do,

What we give.

That's the prescription.

Try giving what you're seeking.

To withhold love is to suffer.

We don't realize that we think of suffering as something that comes at us from the outside,

Something that is the result of conditions around us or psychological conditions.

To withhold love is to suffer.

Whatever we withhold our love from remains in darkness and that withholding itself is suffering.

It's pain.

It's disconnect.

In fact,

It's why hate for another or dislike for another feels so bad because deep down the deeper drive is to love.

When we withhold that love,

It's painful.

Same thing for our self or our emotional states.

Whatever we withhold our love from,

We suffer.

I don't remember where I got this,

But that you can make a practice of extending your love to anything.

It doesn't have to be a person necessarily,

But an animal or something in your presence.

You can begin to visualize the love getting larger and larger until it contains the universe.

I think that's true.

Any love given exalts us.

Any love given sanctifies,

As you put it so nicely.

I think the hardest thing to love is other human beings most of the time,

Or certain human beings at least.

I'm having a hard time loving what's going on in the US right now.

I've been practicing that,

Just extending love to the country,

To the people who are making huge mistakes in my opinion,

And trying to hold that in this sort of imaginary bubble of love for whatever it's worth.

But boy,

It's hard.

Yeah.

There's a lot of delusion everywhere.

Not hard because I don't have the love for them,

But hard because it feels hopeless.

It feels like it's too much.

Even though I know God can hold all of it,

And does,

And is,

My brain still has a certain amount of difficulty reconciling,

I guess.

Well that's the difficulty here,

Is that love doesn't come from a single entity to another entity.

It comes from that knowing that you described where God holds it all.

Part of what makes love difficult is that we think we know how things should be,

Rather than.

.

.

That is a really good point.

If you look at ideological possession,

It is the very essence of,

I know how things should be,

And it's the very thing that leads to all manner of war and destruction.

There's a poem by,

I think it's Saint Thomas Aquinas.

I said to God,

Let me love you,

And you replied,

Which part?

All of you,

All of you,

I said.

Dear,

God spoke,

You are as a mouse wanting to impregnate a tiger who is not even in heat.

It is a feat way beyond your courage and strength.

You would run from me if I removed my mask.

I said to God again,

Beloved,

I need to love you,

Every aspect,

Every pore.

And this time,

God said,

There is a hideous blemish on my body,

Though it is such an infinitesimal part of my being.

Could you kiss that if it were revealed?

I will try,

Lord,

I will try.

And then God said,

That blemish is all the hatred and cruelty in this world.

Ah,

Yes.

Yep,

Yep.

Well said,

Thomas.

Well that is our task then,

To love regardless.

To love even the most unlovable of things.