Around the world love is held to be in the highest esteem, as a pinnacle of human experience. Love is sung about in songs, written about in poetry. It is exalted in great literature. It is bandied about in normal conversation. People claim they are in love, that love is the ultimate, that all you need in the world is love and everything will work out just fine. But very few people understand what love really is. And very few people have experienced love at a deeper level—beyond fascination, beyond infatuation and attachment. Few people have experienced the real power and current of love.
In addition, many people associate certain kinds of behaviors, beliefs and attitudes with love—gentleness, passivity are associated with love. Peace and harmony are associated with love.But really what is this deeper love, not a love that is simply a fixation, an infatuation or an attachment, but a deeper kind of love that is redemptive, that emanates from a deeper place within the individual.
And beyond this, what is God’s love, the love of God? Is this merely an infatuation, a fixation or an attachment? Most people will say no, but they are unclear what the love of God really means and how this love is expressed and how it can be translated into the world effectively. [“God” in this context has nothing to do with a religious external notion of God, no external “authority” or “Deity”, but an internal realization of the Divine.]
So today we will speak on Love, the greater love that lives within each individual and the greater love of God, that is the sum of all love in the Universe, and is the source of all real love everywhere—in this world and in the Greater Community of worlds.
It is necessary here to begin by saying what love is not. Love is not fascination. Love is not fixation. Love is not attachment. Love is not romance where you are infatuated or taken with someone else’s appearance or some aspect of their personality. It is not idolatry, where you idolize someone, you worship someone, even a Deity, even a Messenger, even God. But these do not represent a real relationship, a working relationship, a relationship of united wills.
Love is not a behavior, an attitude, a mannerism. It is not etiquette. It is not convention. Love may express itself in many different ways—softly or forcibly. Love can appear meek. Love can appear strong. Love can challenge you. Love can criticize you. Love can expose your illusions, your fantasies and your self-deception. Love is not what people really mean when they talk about love, in nearly all circumstances.
Love is a deeper power that moves people to do things that are different from their ideas, their beliefs and their sense of obligation. Love is something beyond the love you hear about in conversations. In fact, it is better to demonstrate love than to talk about it, for real love is demonstrated. It is what moves people to change their lives, to refocus their priorities, to associate with something deeper and more profound within themselves. It is something that has the power to override human ambition, human selfishness, human grievance and all partisan beliefs and attitudes, religious ideology.
For love is not bound by these things. It is only restrained, held back or hidden by these things. But love moves on its own accord, being associated with the deeper Knowledge that God has placed within each person. For you see, you were born with two minds—a mind to think with and a mind to know. The mind that you think with is a product of all of your social conditioning. It is a product of being in the world. It is an accumulation of ideas, associations and patterns of thinking that you have been learning since the day you were born. Much of this is useful, and some of it is hazardous and dangerous to you. Certainly, you have had to learn how to survive in the world—how to survive physically, how to survive socially, how to participate within a family environment, within a culture or perhaps within a religious framework. You have had to learn how to communicate your ideas and feelings. You have had to learn what society has told you you have to learn. As we have said, some of this is useful and important and some of this is hazardous and not in your best interests.
But you were born with a deeper mind, the mind of Knowledge [Gnosis, nothing to do with intellectual “knowledge”]. This mind does not think like your intellect thinks. It sees and it knows. It is not what people think of when they talk about the subconscious mind. That is more associated with your worldly mind, or intellect. This deeper mind is not subject to conditioning in the world. It is not patterned or conditioned by the world. It is not threatened or intimidated by the world. This deeper mind is called Knowledge because it is related to the experience of direct knowing, the experience of affinity, the experience of true recognition and the experience of true relationship.
Real love emanates from Knowledge. It in essence is the expression of Knowledge. When Knowledge moves you to do something—perhaps something you were never planning to do, something you do not understand, something that flies in the face of your plans and goals and ambitions. This expresses love because you are expressing the will of God, which is the love of God. For God’s love is not separate from God’s will. God does not think like your intellect thinks—happy one day, sad the next, happy with this, angry with that, cruel and punishing over those who make mistakes or who live in error. This is not God! This is the human mind projecting a human mind onto God and projecting onto God human feelings and grievances. It is all a projection of the human mind. But God is beyond all this. And the love and the will of God is beyond all this.
But when you think about what God really is, well, God of the Greater Community, God of all intelligent life in the Universe, certainly a God of the Universe, of the Greater Community, cannot be conditioned by human beliefs, human attitudes, human emotions, human social conventions and all of the petty things that keep humanity in a primitive and undeveloped state.
Only here can you experience God and experience your relationship with God, and ultimately, if you are successful in following the power and presence of Knowledge within yourself, you will discover God’s will for you in this life, in this world, at this time.
You can speculate, you can theorize, you can establish elaborate systems of thought, elaborate mental constructions, but if you cannot experience the movement of Knowledge in your life, the wisdom of Knowledge in your life, which is giving you counsel all along—counsel which you cannot hear, counsel which you do not respond to because your attention is fixated on the surface, on your intellect and on your perception of the world. If you cannot feel this deeper movement, well, God is foreign to you. God is an idea which you can either accept or set aside.
God has placed an expression of God’s will and love within you, deep within you, deep beneath the intellect, a will and love you cannot control, you cannot dominate, you cannot use it to gain wealth, power or influence. You can only submit to it. You can only follow it and learn from it and carry out what it gives you to do to re-establish your life, to rebuild your mind, to rebuild your health, to refocus your life, to re-establish a greater set of priorities for yourself and with them a greater opportunity for relationship with others.
It is this greater love that is so far beyond and distinct from the love you hear about in conversation. People say, “I love this. I love him. I love her. I love this food. I love this place. I love your dress. I love nature. I love the woods. I love the ocean.”
Real love is something beyond all this. The real love that moves you to give your life, that refocuses your life, that tells you that you are in error, that confronts you with the fact that your life has been misspent and you are trying to take it in a direction that is not its true direction, this is love!
The love that keeps orienting you towards your greater purpose for coming into the world regardless of your plans and goals, the love that does not change, the love that does not adapt to your wishes, this is the love!
At times, it is confronting and challenging, and you feel that it is just too much. And at times, it is comforting and reassuring, and you welcome it and are so glad it exists, that it is true.
This is the Great Love—the love of God and the love of God that has been placed in you, in Knowledge within you, in the deeper mind within you. This deeper mind is here on a mission. It is here on a purpose, for you have come into the world on a mission, for a purpose, to do specific things with specific people. And Knowledge within you is trying to take you there, aim you in the right direction so you can make your rendezvous with these certain individuals and to find the circumstances and the environment where your greater purpose can emerge, can be activated. While people are making elaborate plans and are reinforcing what they are doing and what they believe, Knowledge within them is trying to take them somewhere.
Therefore, never think that people are always in the right place, doing what they should be doing. It is not true. It is just an excuse. It’s kind of a way that people say to make things okay, to make things all right, when in fact, their life is miscast. They are not where they need to be. They are functioning at a level that does not represent their greater purpose for coming here, or they are circumscribe by poverty or political oppression, or they are locked in place and cannot find another way.
But God’s love is still resident within them. It will never give up. It is not like your intellect, with its shifting desires, and its changing beliefs and its confusion, in its radical ideas, its fundamentalism. The only thing really fundamental within you is Knowledge because it is the only thing that is permanent within you. And this Knowledge is not circumscribed by religious ideology or by nationalistic passion. It cannot be used as a weapon. It cannot be used to oppress others. It cannot be used to divide and conquer. Knowledge can only be followed. The mind must serve Spirit. It is not the other way around.
People want God to do things for them, as if God is their servant. People want God to protect them from danger or catastrophe. They want God to deliver what they want for themselves, as if God is kind of a, it is like a servant. This is where the mind wants Spirit to serve the mind. The intellect wants God to serve and reinforce the intellect. This is completely backwards. This is upside down. For in truth, your body is meant to serve the mind, and your mind is meant to serve Spirit, or Knowledge. And Knowledge is here to serve God. That is the true hierarchy of your Being. That is the only arrangement where your integrity can be experienced and established, where you can find union within yourself.
Ultimately here, everything serves God because if the body serves the mind, and the mind serves the Spirit, and the Spirit serves God, well, everything serves God. But to gain this integrity, to gain this inner harmony, this union of all aspects of yourself, requires a great preparation—a preparation you cannot invent for yourself, a preparation that is not some kind of eclectic approach where you take what you like from this tradition and what you like from that and you kind of patch it all together, based upon your preferences. This is merely using the Spirit to substantiate the mind. It is incorrect from beginning to end.
Knowledge will take you somewhere you could not take yourself. Knowledge will take you beyond your fears and your preferences because all preferences are based on fear—the fear of not having, the fear of being wrong, the fear of losing, the fear of death.
What is love? Love is the movement of Knowledge. Or said in other words, love is the will of God expressing itself through you. Here love is associated with inspiration, where the mind is infused with Spirit, where the mind yields to Spirit, where the mind is directed by Spirit. Sometimes this happens spontaneously. Sometimes this happens at a time when you are extremely disappointed, and you hear something within yourself that provides hope when you feel hopeless.
But to gain access to Knowledge, to take the steps to Knowledge, requires a very focused approach.
Your life is lost. You don’t know who you are or what you are doing and you finally come to a point of disappointment where you realize that this is actually your condition and has been your condition all along. You may wish that God would give you a new job, a new relationship, a nicer body, or God would rid you of your difficulties. That is what people want God to do for them. God sends them what can redeem them, not what they want. What they want will only perpetuate their condition, their disassociation, will only prevent them from gaining the opportunity to gain access to Knowledge.
It is only when you realize that getting more of what you want will not make a difference that you will turn to Knowledge. It is only when your plans for personal fulfillment are shown to be weak and fallible and unfulfilling that you will turn to Knowledge. Here profound disappointment is extremely important and holds a great opportunity for you. But extreme disappointment is what everyone wants to avoid, so they keep trying to plan and scheme and focus their life to get what they want. Their predicament is only deepened. Knowledge is speaking to them all along, but they cannot hear. They are not open to that. They want what they want. They are driven by fear and preference. And so love is unknown to them.
God’s love is the movement of Knowledge within you, for this movement is moving you in a direction of your redemption and your fulfillment in the world. To find this redemption and fulfillment, you must be freed from those relationships and those obligations that are keeping you locked in your life. Redemption is not something you just simply add on to your life, it is just another thing you are managing in your life. It is not simply an addition. It is your life. Everything that Knowledge moves you to do, whether it be urging you to avoid something or urging you towards something is all aimed towards your redemption. And your redemption means that you have connected your thinking mind with Knowledge, That is redemption. That is the beginning of real promise for you. What redeems you is taking the steps to Knowledge, connecting mind with Spirit, your thinking mind with the real power of Knowledge within you—not your beliefs about Spirit or spirituality or religion, but with the reality.
Many people cannot differentiate between their beliefs and reality. They think their beliefs are reality. “What I believe is what is real,” they say. “What I believe is the truth,” they say. “What I believe is God’s will,” they say. And yet the more adamant they are, the more it demonstrates that they are not yet connected to Knowledge. They have not yet been redeemed.
The intellect must yield to what God has placed within you. What God has placed within you is the will and plan of God for your life, which is connected to the will and plan of God for all life—within this world, beyond this world, throughout the Greater Community of worlds in the Universe in which you live. So big! When you see how big it is, you realize that your thoughts are never going to contain it or define it. But Knowledge within you is completely uniform. It is in complete harmony with Knowledge within everyone else. And that is why it is the great peacemaker in the world. Any real peace that has been fostered and established has come from Knowledge. Otherwise, peace agreements are economical or political arrangements to restrain war and conflict. No peace has really been established. Peace is the result of people recognizing and connecting with each other, not simply trading over a boundary, not simply looking at each other from a distance, but learning to recognize and to communicate and related to each other.
Love is like the air you breathe. You take it for granted. You never think about it. But you need it every moment. Love is the (air?). Can you experience it? Knowledge is within you. It is quiet. It is also giving you counsel. Can you feel it? Can you hear it? Are you willing to go to it with your hands open, without demands, without beliefs, just go to it? “I go to God.” You go to God. ” What is God’s will for me? What must I do in this situation? Should I be with this person? Yes or no? Should I go to this place? Yes or no? Should I engage in this activity? Yes or No?”
Love is the movement of Knowledge within you. Knowledge is the greater intelligence that God has placed within you, to guide, to protect and to lead you to the discovery of your greater purpose in this world at this time. Everything else that calls itself love is just a parade. It has no devotion in it. It has no wisdom in it. It is without substance. Life will not support it. That is why people fall in love, begin a relationship, and then find out in the relationship if they can even be in the relationship, which often they cannot. So where is the love? What is the love here? Just an initial fascination? An attachment to something you think is going to save you or make you what you want to be?
People grow old. They lose their beauty. They lose their charm. Life confronts you with difficulties and requirements. You must produce. You must work. You must deal with adversity. What happened to the love back there at the beginning that was so ecstatic and wonderful? Then what people think was love becomes kind of a survival arrangement or convenience.
There is a greater love. There is the Great Love, the love that God has placed within you, within every person, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be expressed and experienced. This love does not have only one appearance. It is not associated with a certain kind of behavior or etiquette. It is not a social convention. This love will pull you away from danger. This love will challenge your thinking and your attitudes. This love will show you that your life is going nowhere. This love will move you to go one way when you want to go another. This love will restrain you. This love will redirect you. This is a Great Love. This is the real thing! Even if you are all alone in life, if you can feel the movement of Knowledge, you will feel the love of God. You will not understand it. You will not be sure where it is taking you. You will not be sure what it means. But if you can follow it, you will experience it. And step by step, increment by increment, it will move your life into a different position and open a greater opportunity for you.
Some people think that redemption is just assuming a belief system: “I am redeemed because I now believe!” But this is not redemption. Belief is weak and fallible. It has to constantly be reinforced. It does not have the power of Knowledge. It is a human invention! You will have to have faith in Knowledge within yourself, but even here you realize that Knowledge is greater than your understanding. And where Knowledge is taking you is beyond your current awareness.
If you can follow, you can find. If you can find, you can fulfill. If you can fulfill, you can express.
This is the Great Love. And the need for this Great Love is immense. Look in the world around you. So many people. So much difficulty. So much danger, with greater danger threatening on the horizon. Where is the Great Love? In your life, with all of your busy-ness and activities, your preoccupations and concerns, your grievances, your fixations, where is the Great Love? The Great Love that stirs you and moves you and connects you? This is what you must receive, is the love of God, which is the movement of Knowledge. This is how God will redeem you. You have been trying to redeem yourself, but this is how God will redeem you.
You take everything you are doing in life, and you ask yourself, “Fundamentally, is this what I really need to be doing?” Every relationship, “Is this relationship helping me? Is it important for me now?” Everything! And you will have a deeper sense of it coming from Knowledge, way deep inside of you. Perhaps it will be a feeling. Perhaps it will be an image. Perhaps the answer will come a week from now. You have to keep asking and listening. You are asking for the Great Love to redeem you, to reunite you, and to put you in a position where your greater gifts can be realized and given to the world. And this requires that you be in certain circumstances, associated with certain people, in certain environments. If you are not in the right environment with the right people, well, the discovery will not take place. Where you are physically is very important in this regard. Who you are with is very important in this regard.
If your realization is going to happen in a particular city regarding certain people there and you are not in that city, well, how will the discovery take place? Even if you are in the right place, how are you going to find the right people? You can’t figure this out. This is too big for the intellect. Only Knowledge can take you there. Knowledge can bring two people from opposite ends of the world together for a greater purpose. That is the power of the Great Love. And the Great Love is what the world needs now.
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