Ascension Attitude: 'Love'

'Love'

by Almine

Emerson wrote: “Alas! I know not why… each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal.”

The reason we look back with so much regret at what we regard as our folly, is that the memory of our higher levels of consciousness lies not far submerged beneath the surface of mind. We suppress with pain the memory of the faces we once loved, and guilt taints many of the choices we have made in our lives.

We dishonor the journey of our lives, however, by not acknowledging the worth of our seeming errors as our great teachers of wisdom. Remove one failed relationship or one foolish choice, and one would also have to remove as much wisdom and insight. Nowhere does the sting of self-censure torture us more than in the memories of love lost or misplaced.

The word love is bandied about from pulpits, across restaurant tables, in flowery cards of all descriptions. The fact is that very few philosophers have shed much light on how the love we feel in romance and the love for God and Creation can be reconciled. Romantic love is either extolled in the very abundant sources of literature or the more spiritual writings dismiss it as an unworthy reflection of infinite love.

The result is that because romantic love is the most intoxicating feeling most humans will ever have (called by philosophers ‘the enchantment of human life’), the guilt is compounded by feeling that such intense love should instead have been given to God. In the lives of most, no love will ever again compare to the heady, runaway, romantic emotion of youth. Thus we find ourselves lacking in devotion and so try to love God with all the fervor we can muster, to most a nebulous and undefined concept. This often creates religious fanatics who, failing in their feelings, try to compensate through their actions.

It is the very turbulence of our romantic love that carves out of our souls the hollows that will hold a greater love. It is through our love for a lover, a father, a mother, a child that our love grows to include all people. Like the stormiest seas carving the deepest caverns in the cliffs, so too the most painful memories create our deepest capacity for love.

My mother spent her last years in an old age home in a little town 15 hours by car from where I live. I tried to have her moved to where our family could give her attention and care, but the doctors felt she might suffer a fatal heart attack from the stress of the move. The difficulty in reaching her (she later could no longer remember us when we phoned), had her die miles from her loved ones, surrounded by strangers.The pain and guilt of feeling I had failed her arose unbidden within my heart for many years. It has deepened my ability to love older people and constant silent blessings and healings flow from me when I encounter an older person and know they’re someone’s mother or father.

Thus very intense romantic love awakens within us the ability to love others more deeply, but it also awakens so much more. The depth an artist brings to art likewise stems from passion inspired by love. Eventually, not only that which we create but that which we are, gets honed and shaped into a maturity that is lacking in those who have never relinquished the love of self for love of another.

So we learn through our earthly loves how to surrender to something greater, that one day we may merge with our own higher identity. We find through love’s muse the poet within us, the spontaneity of the inner child. We remember once again what it is like to follow our hearts and abandon reason. Love mellows us and reduces our resistance to life, and as we grow older what we forfeit in intensity we gain in inclusiveness.

The qualities of inclusiveness and surrender prepare us for God-consciousness, and here we encounter the silence of the mind. The heart cannot fully love while there is an internal dialogue, though one can only know that retrospectively. As the mind silences, the heart bursts open with an all-encompassing melting tenderness for all life. Divine love has taken its place upon the throne of the heart.

Love is the core ingredient to both left-brain and right-brain ascension methods but it comes through the ascension attitudes to those who are right-brain dominant. Left-brain oriented people are just as capable of divine love but they generally use logic and reasoning to get there. They access their love within by expanding their perception. This enables them to see behind the fear and release it. When fear dissolves, love remains.