What is Love if not the allowing of things to be just as they are?
Seeing others as ourselves in full and open nakedness
We loved with a love that was more than love— Allan Edgar Poe(Annabel Lee)
I am the Love with which I am loved — Rupert Spira
Insights about the boundless Love that we are hits me from time to time. But so also do the thoughts of doubt. The thoughts would flood in: what do you mean we are Love? Can you not see the world? Is the love you reference, the one that sages and mystics talk about not really an emotion? How can you love all things when there’s so much suffering and dirt? What about shitty people? What about the smell of rotten eggs?
One big hit of insight I experienced was when I participated in a weekend retreat with my Meditation Chapel(Morning Contemplation) group last August. I wasn’t new to the individuals who came on this retreat. The first people I would interact with every morning for almost an hour were these amazing people. But in a retreat setting, we were no longer behind Zoom but in person. Being physically present, I started noticing the subtle quirks, personalities, and even irritations that arose in certain discussions. I became aware of my own tendencies to gravitate toward certain people and saw similar movements in others. But it was on our last evening together that something powerful happened: an intense wave of love swept over me. It was an insight of love unlike any I'd known—not the love I feel for friends, a partner, or family. It was an all-encompassing love, a feeling of total completeness that embraced and wrapped both myself and everyone in the group. This was a new flavor of love, one that defied explanation, yet felt wholly undeniable.
We recited poems, sang songs, hymns and shared in the Eucharist. Songs and hymns rose softly, sometimes faltering, sometimes bright and full, each note was an offering. We shared in the Eucharist, breaking bread together with reverence and laughter alike. In the off-key pitches, in the hesitant pauses and the stuttered lines, in the accidental repetition of words, there was a breathtaking kind of perfection. Each breath, every movement, the warmth of a giggle and the soft release of a sigh—all of it was cherished, belonging completely in that room. My tears, they poured out just so they could be a part of the celebration. This was love, a love I had heard described but rarely felt so vividly. Yet it was not a feeling. It was a knowing! It was a knowing that love is Completeness. In that room, we were complete irrespective of our differences in belief, race, styles of dressing, food preferences or opinions about anything etc. This room, for me was a microcosm of the larger world. It was a reminder to love the world just as it is.
In his Garrison retreat of 20181, Rupert Spira would address someone’s question about the meaning of love with this response, “love is just another word for consciousness which is the reality of everything that the stuff out of which everything is made. If we approach reality through the process of thinking, we tend to call reality consciousness. If we approach reality through feeling, we call that reality love. If we approach that same reality through perception, then we call it beauty. Truth, beauty and love— three different words for the same reality. We are always experiencing reality, there’s nothing else that we are experiencing except reality, obviously.”
Theoretically this made sense to me. But experientially, there was something lacking. Now, it is easier to see true love more clearly when we walk our way backwards through our experience of self and the world around us. If we perceive ourselves as separate, then love takes sides. It masks as loving those who we can take from(whether it’s safety, satisfaction, comfort etc), yet its ugly head creates the other side of this duality: hatred(masked as intolerance or indifference) towards others. Breaking the barriers of this duality can only truly be done when we recognize we are all made from the same stuff, as Rupert Spira would put it. When we see that no one makes themselves. No one choses their shape, opinion, aversions, sound of laughter etc.
Every month, I’d spend an evening at a neighbor’s house, sipping wine—or tea, as we did last night—and musing over life’s many layers. Our conversations drifted easily, touching on the latest happenings in the community, her children, my social life, reflections on the metaphysical. This time, though, perhaps spurred by the upcoming elections, our talk veered into politics. A pang of disappointment arose in me when she suddenly shared her political views and her frustration with certain aspects of the government. Her words seemed steeped in fear, its mongering and colored by what I would call conspiracy theory. A previous me might have let this moment drive a wedge between us, viewing it as the start of a silent divide. Instead, there was deep deep love. The love that saw these viewpoints as just opinions that rise and crash in consciousness, the way mine rise and never return. And I saw them without attachment, the way I now watch my own ideas rise, crash, and dissolve. Oh, I could see her fears, I could honor them with all my heart. I could see the earlier formation of my own fears that took the shape of disappointment. I could honor mine — the product of societal conditioning. My trying to change her opinion out of a sense of control would certainly not have yielded any results. What if my own opinions were, in fact, wrong? My certainty just as certain as hers. In this time where we interprete the political stakes as high, I would also ask friends of mine to vote. Shocked that a few of my friends have decided not to vote, I would initially watch the contraction within me, the urge to make sure they understood why it was important to choose sides. Yet, another version of me wanting to control. No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in expressing my views. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in showing or sharing preference. It is when we want to force change that we start to see what resistance is made of. And love is not made perfect in this. Love is only seen in allowing things to be as they are without controlling. Is this not what it means to allow things to be just as they are? A note by Justyna Cyrankiewicz writes, “The act of surrendering to the truth that we contain the same parts as those who frighten or frustrate us is an act of courageous willingness to see things as they are. Which, of course, can only begin within”.
In a YouTube video2 on navigating cancer from an idealist perspective, the philosopher and scientist, Bernardo Kastrup talked about his own idea of dealing with cancer but from a place of allowing reality to be just as it is. He says, “if you believe that you can control your cancer by not having it or by getting rid of it or because you think you are responsible, that's the way to create a situation in which life will crush you. If you don't contain it, it will kill the both of you but I will never adopt the inner narrative in my own mind that waging war against it is the key. Instead I would regard it with compassion like a prodigal son that lost its way from me, perhaps because of my own fault and I would try to look upon it with compassion while undergoing treatments that are trying to contain it because you know it's either one of us who dies or both of us so I rather one of us”.
I would adopt this attitude towards even the things we sometimes tag as unwanted—those rough edges and loose ends of life that seem to resist harmony: the stress and tension woven into a difficult job, the relentless mess of an overflowing wardrobe, the ceaseless and chaotic churn of global politics. Even the maddeningly circular debates over climate change, the balding of my scalp and the quiet and steady waning of my once-abundant energies. How, oh, how can I let them simply be, releasing the impulse to fix, to resist?
It’s a question that lingers, tender and insistent: How can we soften into life as it is, meeting each seeming imperfection without the desire to escape or control it? To witness the world’s chaos, our issues, our own aging bodies without protest, allowing all things to remain just as they are? This practice, it seems, isn’t about passivity but about opening the heart wide enough to embrace what is—to let the difficult, the imperfect, the transient enter and leave as freely as waves along the shore.
Oh, this allowing things to be just as they are does not deny action. No, instead, it allows action— right action(laced with wisdom) to guide us. In its wake, in its ever giving gifting, it opens our eyes to the vast mysteries we could never have understood from our identification with control and all our mental gymnastics. It exposes us to ourselves. It allows us to see others in their full and open nakedness because we have seen ourselves in our own nakedness. Suddenly there’s no need to scramble in the Garden3 for leaves to cover up our shame. There is no shame in this love. There was never any shame. No wonder the writer of the book, Isaiah4 sings about this Mystery, “he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”
I am reminded of and I share this from 2017’s daily meditations of the Center for Actions & Contemplations5:
Whatever your personal calling or your delivery system for the world, it must proceed from a foundational “yes” to life. Your necessary “no” to injustice and all forms of un-love will actually become even clearer and more urgent in the silence, but now your work has a chance of being God’s pure healing instead of impure anger and agenda. You can feel the difference in people who are working for causes; so many works of social justice have been undone by people who do all the fighting from their small or angry selves
If your prayer goes deep, your whole view of the world will change from fear and reaction to deep and positive connection—because you don’t live inside a fragile and encapsulated self anymore. In meditation, you are moving from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being driven by negative motivations to being drawn from a positive source within.
Exercise
I leave you with this exercise/thought for today:
How can I surrender to what’s present here, whether in thoughts, fears, wanting to change life for better outcomes etc.
What holds me back from seeing there is perfection somewhere in my situation?
How can I truly let go, trusting in something that’s bigger than my concept of what should be?
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What is love— Rupert Spira
Bernardo Kastrup: Navigating cancer from an idealist perspective
Genesis 3:21
Isaiah 61:10