18 Part Series: The Nature Of Love

Introducing An 18-Part Series: The Nature Of Love

1st Insight: Love Is an Energy

Posted on 01/21/2013 by Valerie Varan

Love is an energy, an energy that pulses from Divine Life into the heart of all living things, interconnecting all that is, the spiritual with the material. In September 2010, Today.com reported the story of Kate Ogg and her newborn son, Jamie, who was brought to life through his mother’s love, after being pronounced dead by the attending physicians. Jamie was born prematurely, 27 weeks into Kate’s pregnancy. The doctors tried for 20 minutes to get him to breathe, but their efforts failed. Kate insisted on cuddling him up to her heart, wanting Jamie to know he was loved. Her husband, David, joined his body to theirs. After awhile, little Jamie began to stir. The doctors initially refused to come and see, certain he was dead, and dismissed these subtle clues of life as meaningless reflex. But Jamie opened his eyes, and began to thrive. Because conventional medicine has no conception of love as a real energy, they fail to harness its power for healing, health and wellbeing. Love as energy is in some measure enlivening, expanding and creating. It is beneficently supporting, building, nourishing, allowing and thus freeing.

2nd Insight: Love energy is a vibration, a pulse, a rhythm of energy we can sense in our innermost being.

In John 1:1 of the Bible we read, “In the beginning was the Word”. The Word signifies this original sound or vibration, this initial wave of pulse from the Heart of Divine Presence that set the physical world in spinning motion with the energy of love. This is the call to love, the one we feel in the deepest part of our heart, the one that attracts us to move closer together, and to follow its inner prompting toward family, fellowship and purposeful vocation. A beautiful description for this ineffable sound of love, was given in a widely circulated email by a seven-year-old named Bobby. “Love is what is in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.” To first sense this rhythm, we must be completely still. Only in the space of stillness can we feel love’s gentle rhythm. Only when the mind is quiet can we hear the sound of love’s vibration. To hear it, we must radically listen with all of our senses. When we do, all thoughts stop, all activity ceases. The vibration of love is what remains at the ground of our being, inviting us to hear the echo of its refrain.

3rd Insight:  Love energy carries information within its waves of vibration.

Moving seas of energy carry information in ways that are simply too mind-bogging for us to truly comprehend. Think of radio, television, wireless Internet. Such devices are able to pick up the mysterious signals in these flowing waves of energy, and convert the hidden information into images and sounds that we can more readily perceive with our senses. Love energy is the spiraling force that fuses all seas of energetic information into its collective ocean. Most scientists look only at specific forms of energy, and call the information carried by a particular sea of energy its “signal”. A growing number of scientists are beginning to see the ocean of energy as a whole. They often call it the field of “intelligent energy” because they see it brimming with all kinds of complex information they are continuing to decode. The mystics have long known about this ocean of energy. Because the information it carries in its collective vibration gifts us with insight and wisdom, they call it light, fire, pure awareness or consciousness, presence, realization, illumination, awakening, and enlightenment. Within our human body, it is our heart that most fully picks up love’s vibrational signals. It partners with the brain to step-down the signals from faster or higher waves of vibration to much slower and lower frequencies that our physical body can understand. In this way, the human heart and brain really serve us as antennae, as very important receivers and transmitters of love. Furthermore, every hair, every cell of our body is tuned to receive and share the energy of love in this way.

4th Insight: The information signals within the energy of love are picked up like light energy, by the speed of its pulse.

We can measure love like we do a beam of light, in terms of speed, brightness, breadth, clarity or purity. A beacon of love radiates signals of information, like the concentric rings around a drop of rain that falls upon the quiet waters of a lake at dawn. The signals go out infinitely into the world in an endless array of form or constellation of its light. We tend to pick up or detect only the signals that most closely match or resonate with the speed of our own love energy’s vibrations. The waves of love can be faster or slower in the speed they outwardly travel in all directions. We call the faster waves, the higher frequency waves, subtle energy because it is invisible to most of us, but can be detected by those of us who have more sensitively attuned equipment or antennae. These faster waves are called the brighter and clearer pulses of purer love, and they carry us far beyond the confines of time and space. The torsion fields, those created by the spinning motion of a particle, are of these subtle energy waves. They have been shown to explain ESP, telepathy, pre-cognition, and even distant healing and prayer. For most of us, it takes meditative practice for us to pick up the vibration of love energy at these higher speeds. The pulse of love in the visible, more material and electromagnetic realms of our existence is a comparatively slower speed of vibration. Its signal is diminished each time it is stepped down to a lower and lower speed. By the time it reaches us, its clarity is relatively poor. We normally pick up only the most visible physical information, chemical signals from pheromones or hormones like oxytocin, emotions like sexual excitement and well-being, and behaviors like eye contact, attractiveness, flirtation, and sexual intimacy, as well as respect, kindness, friendship and creative collaboration.

5th Insight: The openness and clarity in which we receive these messages of love energy, determines their purity or brightness within us.

The more open we are to embodying pure untainted love energy, the clearer we are in our understanding and wisdom of love. It is similar to the clarity of reception we can get on a television. The more receptive and powerful is our equipment, the clearer the signal we get, and the more vivid of a picture we see. Generally, human love is a dim reflection of the intense light of pure divine love energy. Human love tends to be murky with fear. It tends to be conditional and selfish, muddied with the clay of physical life and its material desires and distractions. Every time we desire something for ourselves in order to rise above our brother, we have dimmed the energy of love and reduced it to an almost unrecognizable dimension. When we get lost in our self-absorption, we have obscured and clouded almost completely the higher aspects of love’s radiance. In contrast, pure love energy is unwavering and unconditional. It is clearly and freely shared with all, without any reservation, expectation or demand. Its brightness and clarity expand those in its wake with its undivided and unfiltered wisdom.

6th Insight: The information from pure love energy is received simultaneously through all of our senses as a felt interconnected loving presence and exhilarated multidimensional awareness that we call “experience”.

The universe is one idea broken down into many. That idea is love. Love is not reducible to one thing because it encompasses all things. For our human understanding, love can be described linearly as a spectrum of energy, and multidimensionally as a sphere of energetic presence or awareness, one that unifies all layers of life vertically beyond time and horizontally across space. Love is represented esoterically by the sign of the cross, the intersection of Spirit (the “vertical” layers) and matter (“horizontal” space). We are like fish in the ocean who see our world in terms of food, predators, protective reefs, and social families, yet who are blind and ignorant of the very watery substance that gives us life and plays invisible host to our every need. Love energy rains upon us, as if each drip were a different arrangement and rhythm of informational energy. This is the multidimensional nature and activity of love that most simply to us feels like “experience”, the scintillating sense of interconnected presence and mindful awareness for which we long. As we soak in love energy and let it pour through us, we feel connected and abundant even while sitting alone in a room. The more we cut ourselves off from the activity of loving, the increasingly loveless, lonely, needy, and disconnected we feel. For every physical sense, there is a corresponding dimension or aspect of love, just like there is in the nonphysical realms beyond our comprehension. In one dimension, we delight in love’s array of color and form that we call beauty. In another, we are lifted up by its harmonic sound that we call music. Altogether, they point the way toward truth. Each dimension or layer of love is some aspect of what we call consciousness. In us humans, this spectrum of intelligent energy spans from the lower instinctual intelligence of our cells, to our emotional and social intelligence, through our analytical and abstract thought, to the intuitional or direct knowing realms that we eventually reach through higher love and its spiritual overtones. The felt presence of love is paradoxically subtle, yet overriding. Overriding, because we are comprised of its very substance. Subtle, because it is hidden underneath the dark cloth of our dense physical exterior. Love energy is what we are when we look within. Its higher or more subtle vibrational dimensions we experience as the subjective sense of self, which includes both mind and spirit. Its dark lower reflections are our more objective bodily form, the latter constructed out of the blueprint of the former. Between the two is emotion, an experience co-created by the physical and mental activities of our inherently loving nature. When the mind is still with openness, we realize ourselves to be essentially pure loving presence. We feel whole, alive, deeply bonded with all that is. It is love energy flowing freely through every aspect of ourselves that completes us. No other human can ever actually do that for us. When we internalize love energy and move it through us a little bit, we feel peace. When we do it a little more, we feel satisfaction and contentment. When we do it a lot and quite frequently, we feel happy. When we learn to transcend the lower and embrace the higher reflections of love, we can experience the joy and even bliss that pure love brings.

7th Insight: We can measure the love energy within us by the effect it has upon us and others.

In love, we beam. Literally. The purer the love energy is within us, the brighter our smile, the more vibrant our mood, the more attractive we appear, and the greater appeal we have as a friend. As love pours through us, we embody its attributes of wisdom. We are gentle and patient with those who struggle because we understand what it is like, having been there time and again. Because we are strong, we can forgive those who have hurt us, allowing us all to move forward. We are compassionate with those who ask for mercy, and wisely allow for opportunities to right the wrongs committed. We are kind for no reason, caring about others because we know how to love unconditionally. Love radiates friendliness from the inside out and magnetizes others to its source. When we engage with others as if they were a friend, people generally treat us as a friend. Our acts of helpfulness lead others to go out of their way to help us in return. In pure loving relationship, none of us feels needy, so there is no cause for worry or self-striving. We generously give of our energy, our time, and our abundance. Others no longer find reasons to fear or be selfish around us. Love fosters cooperation and synchronous activity among its participants. The spiral is the pictograph often used to denote this state of loving, coherent, systemic energy. And, it is no coincidence that electrons, atoms, tornadoes, hurricanes, planets, even galaxies, move in this tightly organized spinning pattern.

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Scientists can measure our love energy in any given moment by the way it impacts our heart and brain activity and triggers chemical messengers to flood our entire body with information. They can even track the waves of our heart in a state of love, and see that they become less chaotic and more organized and “coherent”. (As an introduction, visit HeartMath’s website http://www.heartmath.com/about/institute-of-heartmath.html.)

Scientists find that the closer or clearer our loving connection, the more instantaneously and more easily our brains seem to communicate with one another. They can even measure the way our loved one’s brain lights up when we think of them in loving ways, despite being countries apart. Even beyond time and space, and after death of the physical body, love endures and penetrates our consciousness. Before she died, my grandmother suffered a severe stroke. She could not speak, but my mom said you could tell by her frustration that she knew what she wanted to say, though the words would only come out as garbled sound. I found out because she came to me in my dreams, and told me she planned to die that month. We chatted like old times, giggled and gossiped about silly things, and hugged long our goodbye. I had never before dreamed about Gram, but when I awoke I knew it was real. She had come to me in the only way her consciousness could reach out, and we had a chance to be together even though in the everyday world she was in Florida and I in Colorado. In another experience, love reunited me with a grandfather that I didn’t even know about in this life. Though various mediums had told me that I had a grandfather who watched over me, I had no idea who that might be since I never really knew my current life grandfathers. Then one day in meditation, I re-experienced a past life. Within my vision, I looked down and saw that I had the bare feet of a young native maiden. Breathlessly running and straining to see up at a distance, I soon caught glimpse of some elders ahead lined up in a row. “Grandfather, Grandfather!” I yelled with exuberant joy. There he stood among the others, a rugged statue of a man, gallantly dressed in tan leather and regal headdress. “I’ve missed you so!” My present day body broke out into tears. His gentle beingness engulfed me fully, and I sobbed with a mixture of physical relief at seeing him again, of painful grief from having been out of touch for so long, and the pure joy of his wise presence. I immediately realized that this was the grandfather who had been seen as my guardian, who had been nudging me toward Lakota wisdom and other ancient spiritual teachings, and whom I deeply loved.

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In the field of medicine, those at the horizon of exploration realize that love heals. We might say that love energy is the only thing that really does.

Doctors are able to measure love’s effects by noticing the impact it has on our body and its healing network. They tell us that loving imagery and self talk causes our immune system to work better, our wounds to heal faster, and our physical energies to cohere and organize in ways that optimize health overall.

In contrast, anxiety, stress, depression, grief, and anger are examples of fearful emotions that block love, triggering our immune system and other bodily functions to be suppressed. For example, researchers Rein, Atkinson and McCraty have found that just a five-minute period of frustration or anger inhibits S-IgA (salivary immunoglobulin A antibodies) levels significantly, and lasts to some degree one to five hours later. As opposed to a five-minute period of care and compassion, which can raise S-IgA as much as 240%. Can you even begin to imagine how much your fear is blocking love energy from your poor exhausted and scattered energy body? In his book Peace, Love and Healing, Bernie Siegel, MD shared his insights about the role of love energy in coordinating the healing processes in the body.

“…the evidence is strong that there is some supervising intelligence within that presides over such changes. It tells the blood where to flow, directs the lymphocytes and phagocytes and gives whatever directions are necessary to get the job done. We were built for survival, if we will just give and receive love messages.”

Siegel’s experience has evidently convinced him of the significant role that love plays in the healing process, in recovering from illness even such as cancer. It seems that pain and disease remind us that we have disconnected from love. But when we realign with loving relationship (within ourselves and with others), healing can begin. I know a man from Japan who was sent home to die of the cancer that the hospital could not successfully treat with conventional means. Instead of giving up, he had the realization that his cancer was made by his body so it could be healed by his body. Having heard of the healing power of love, he decided to love his cancer cells like they were his own children. The way he tells it, he arose each dawn, played beautiful music on his cello to welcome the sun, meditated on being the instrument of pure love, and directed this loving power to each of his cells. That was many years ago. Today he is not only still alive, but vital and positively beaming with love. A client of mine knows she healed herself of breast cancer. She told me how she used loving positive imagery as part of her treatment plan. One day, in the middle of her imagery, she had a moment of realization where she knew she was healed. The next trip to the doctor confirmed her intuition. There are innumerable stories of love energy healing all kinds of supposedly incurable diseases and conditions, even through distant energy healing and prayer. And the fields of energy medicine and quantum physics have teamed up to document the stories and conduct research to explain the physics behind such extraordinary events. One of my favorite of these books is LIFE FORCE, The Scientific Basis: Breakthrough Physics of Energy Medicine, Healing, Chi and Quantum Consciousness by Claude Swanson, PhD, an MIT physicist. My mom experienced this type of “miracle” for herself recently, though she isn’t the kind to typically think of love as a real energy that can heal. She had been in the hospital for four days, stuck in atrial fibrillation. Nothing the doctors did for her had worked. Into her room came a nurse who had been next door working with a different patient, when he recognized mom’s name on the door from a philanthropy in town, and stopped to say hello. They had chatted awhile when mom mentioned her daughter Valerie’s belief in the healing power of love and energy medicine. I’m sure she used the word “weird” in her description of me! Anyway, he responded that his nursing supervisor practices a form of energy medicine, and just when he reached up to my mom’s heart to show her what his supervisor does (he had not been formally trained), a medical team came racing into her room with all kinds of equipment. As it turned out, as soon as he had put his hand to her heart, evidently with great loving compassion but without any expectation or attachment to outcome, she went out of afib. She was sent home and called me right away to tell me what happened, clearly still trying to make sense of it all, yet certain she had experienced God’s miracle for her.

∞

As it also turns out, those who believe that talking, singing and loving their plants makes them grow faster are right. Our love energy flows out from us and into our plants, causing them to be stronger, more vital. They bloom more abundantly. Even when a leaf has been picked and otherwise is sure to die imminently, experiments have shown that love energy sent to the leaf leads it to live much longer. In the opposite environment of hate or intent to kill, plants have been shown to have what seems like a stressful emotional response. It is as if they freak out when we simply think about cutting them up, and scream when we harm even another living being. In one such experiment, a plant registered the emotional response tantamount to horror the instant live shrimp were dropped into a pot of boiling water.

∞

So as you consider what love energy feels like to you, think of the times you felt the energy of love emanating from someone around you. Maybe their eyes penetrated you, and you felt truly seen. Perhaps the heat of their love warmed your entire being, and ignited a fiery passion within. Likely, their presence fused with yours, and you felt thoroughly heard, vital and alive. The two of you became like one, united in body and mind.

∞

8th Insight: Love welds one sphere of consciousness together with another.

Love energy welds the consciousness of our cells together into a coherent or collective sense of self. As our cells become our organs, tissues and bones working as one entire system, a sense of “I” consciousness emerges from the apparent sense of separateness.

We are called by love to be fully cognizant of this sense of “I”, the sphere of consciousness we experience as “self”. When we become self-aware, we realize who we are physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We sense what is needed to feel balanced at large. We come to know who we are at our core, what we can do, and what brings meaning to this uniquely fashioned self. We are conscious of our particular skills, our personal preferences, our highest ideals and values. This is the essence of healthy self-love.

As we love and weld our consciousness with another, there is a mutual sharing of our experience with theirs. “I” becomes “we”, a singular sense of bond or presence that we call relationship. No longer do we feel separate or distinct, but together as one. This reminds me of a story. I remember back in the 1980s when I was in Freeport Grand Bahama and going to UNEXSO to spend time swimming with the dolphins. As I got into the lagoon, I decided I was going to “be one with” the dolphins. (You have to realize, I love dolphins!) I literally decided to be a dolphin, to swim and play just as if I were in fact a dolphin. I remember racing across the lagoon in sheer joy, and next thing I knew three dolphins were racing with me. I was now in the pod! At some point, I stopped to look around. One came up vertically to me and wanted me to rub her belly. The other two were swimming, one in front and the other in back of me. I was in heaven! The other men and women in the lagoon were probably not too happy with me and one even accused me of “hogging” the dolphins to myself. But the point of this story is, when you “become one with” another being, whether person or dolphin, love is the inevitable cause and effect.

In our healthy personal relationships, we are not codependent. That is not what I mean by “become one with”. In codependence, we fail to realize ourselves, and seek another as host to our own experience. On the contrary, in healthy love we retain our individual awareness and fullness, while simultaneously enfolding the presence of others within our felt sense of identity. One whole person joins with another whole person in a synergistic marriage of united consciousness.

This newly enfolded consciousness brings with it not only empathy (the capacity to perceive or feel another’s emotional energies), but also a higher state or more evolved sense of compassion (the capacity to understand because of the sense of mutual experience that we share). It is love’s mutual experience that graces us with the ability to empathically feel the feelings of another, the ability to accurately read and perceive the beloved as is at the core, and the wisdom of compassionate understanding. It is love’s mutual experience that allows us to feel another’s pain, sorrow, anger or joy. Through love we know when someone is being authentic and truthful, rather than deceptive, and acting or performing a role in order to manipulate and contrive us. As we love, we know and therefore understand, and through that understanding find patience and compassion.

The wider we cast the net of our love, the higher our consciousness travels, the more evolved the abilities we bring in, and so, the greater our responsibility to share of our gifts. In love, there is an ongoing and continual sense of expansion into infinite “we-ness”. When we make love with our beloved, we transcend awareness of our personal self to fall into the expanded awareness of being a couple. We then expand our awareness from couple to family when we have children. Love progressively envelopes us into its felt presence, as one community, one nation, one planetary citizenship, and so forth.

Each time that we take another leap into a ring of love, we trade one sense of awareness for another, letting go of the previous to transcend into the higher more encompassing collective sense of awareness that we call consciousness; self evolves into the experience of Self, presence into Presence, consciousness into Consciousness, the entire field of Consciousness as a whole that we think of as the Divine.

Within the energy of love, we are aware or conscious of our interconnectedness, our responsibility to one another, our particular meaning and purpose within the whole of life. Eventually as we extend our love to all that is, we become aware of ourselves as “One in Being with the Father”, a unified presence of multidimensional consciousness and awareness that we call Life. The more inclusive is our fusion of collective consciousness, the broader is our sense of presence, the happier or more ecstatic is our bliss, and the more extensive is our ability to serve as an example of pure unfiltered love.

9th Insight: The pulse of love moves us with its rhythmic beat at every dimension of our being.

The vibration of love moves us with its cosmic force. When we feel its pulse, we are stirred to fall into step with love. Each of us holds within our heart this spark of love that is ours to share uniquely with those around us. As we do so, we embody the divine fire of love and its blaze of passion for creative activity. Embodying the force and activity of love, we are moved to act on its behalf. In concert with love, each of us spirals forward in our collective evolutionary movement or progression – physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually – at every dimension of beingness. Physically, love moves us with its pulse, vibration, sound into a diversity of material form. As forms we are interconnected through visible structures and systems of relationship. Our corporeal body is simply one of these systems. Marriage is another, in which two bodies become one body of relationship working together for joint purpose. Family joins many bodies together, as does the church and all organized groups and communities. In reality, there is no objective or finite boundary dividing any of us, only that which we impose through our own mind, choice and perception. We think ourselves together or apart; and what we think, we perceive and call into our immediate experience. Yet despite all persisting illusions of singularity, into oneness love clasps us with its manifest wings…..enfolding us within its infinite embrace, and into cooperation with its harmonic rhythm, synchronous order and jeweled beauty. Love moves us emotionally, filling us initially with the desire for experience, and later with the passion to connect with similar others for specific purpose and function. As it does, motivation and inspiration flow through us, calling us to participate with the process of colloborative creativity. And as we are thus transformed by love, we fulfill our capacity for goodness. Love moves us mentally through our thoughts and ideas. Love gives us understanding of the responsibility we have toward others, brings us the determination to achieve our collective goals, and strengthens our resolve to persist and overcome all feared obstacles. Love graces us with compassion for ourselves, and eventually, for all of humanity, humbling us in the realization of how equally unfit any of us is to do it all alone, and yet how important each of us is as a piece in the construction of the divine puzzle that is the whole. Love moves us spiritually through our ideals, grants us the will and wisdom to do good, and the incentive to create for the well-being of all. The more we embody love energy, the more we are impulsed to do good, to take responsibility for what needs to be done, and to plunge into the work of building together, even when early on in our journey we don’t know why or for what purpose we are called to do what we are inspired to do.  

10th Insight: Love builds.

As St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Love builds”. As defined by Merriam-Webster.com, to build means “to form by ordering and uniting materials by gradual means into a composite whole”. Love brings order out of chaos, harmony out of opposing forces. Little by little, one by one, we are joined together by love as a unified field and collective whole. As love builds, life forms appear to be ordered as a series of wholes within wholes, unities within unities, holograms within holograms, like the nested dolls we see arrayed on tables and shelves in Russian shops. From atoms cohering into molecules, people gathering into families and social networks, planets aligning into solar orbits, solar systems into galaxies, and universes into multiverses, love builds by moving us co-operatively together in relationship. As the energy of love moves all of us within its spinning vortex, we co-participate in the process and activity of creation. The modern day mystic Ken Carey channeled this description of pure love in The Third Millennium: Living in the Post Historic World. “As you ride the love between the stellar fire and material grace…love is the energy of expansion, the vital current of creation. When it touches matter lightly, the matter responds with life forms such as you have on the earth today. When it touches matter fully, stars are born.” When we love ourselves, we construct our body to be strong and healthy. We sharpen our skills and intellect so that we have more to offer the collective good. We enlighten our heart until it is ablaze with fiery passion for all. When we love one another, we extend our heart so that no one is left out of the building process. We use our gifts to help those who need our talent. We teach willing minds seeking our instruction. We lead the way for pilgrims who ask direction. We empower little hearts to grow up big and wide. In the process of building and creating together, I help you manifest your highest goals and dreams to evolve our world. You support mine. Together, we build.

11th Insight: Love is freeing and allowing.

Far from the misconceived notion of love as a chain that binds, with healthy human love there is spaciousness and well-being, movement and allowing. There is acceptance and respect, the freedom to be for all those who participate in love’s activity. In love, I am free to be my highest self. You are free to be your highest self. Together we build and create some-thing from no-thing. Contemplating the words of St. Paul and other mystics about love as freedom, the Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin said it this way in The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation (page 11): “Where there is love there is no coercion; where there is coercion there is no love. And the greater the love, the greater the freedom. A person who loves all humanity is free in this human universe; a person who loves the whole universe is free in the whole world. A person who hates the world is the greatest of slaves – subjectively and objectively. Anything or anybody is his enemy, anything or anybody hinders him, opposes him, presses upon him, limits his freedom incessantly, at every turn, in every action, in every thought, emotion, or volition. The whole world, from inanimate objects up to his fellow man, becomes his prison filled with innumerable executioners.” It is fear that blocks the free-flowing movement of love. Fear constrains us from accepting and aligning with our highest innermost self, and plunges us into this lower vibrational world of darkness like the devil it is. Feeling stuck and irritable in this emotional lake of burning fire, we feel as if we were possessed by demons. Even with the very ones we claim to love, we demand, expect, judge, reject, control, and restrain. Worse, we find ourselves lashing out through every form of violence and destruction. Consumed by fear, it is we who condemn ourselves to a life of hell and damnation. Wise in understanding, love allows mistakes to be forgiven, rebirth to start anew, grace to re-turn us all to the path of our envelopment.

12th Insight: Forgiveness is the bridge.

Forgiveness is the bridge to freedom, the key that unlocks the binding chains of fear. It is forgiveness that tears down the prison walls we have erected trying to defend ourselves from that which we did not recognize to be ourselves. It is forgiveness that allows us to freely move forward, that gives us the space to continue the journey of love. As we forgive ourselves, our heart becomes free to forgive others. Withholding self-forgiveness, we tend to withhold other-forgiveness. The power of forgiveness to kindle love has been documented throughout the ages. Sorokin observed that it happens more often than we might believe by those who insist on fighting aggression with more aggression. In story after story, Sorokin relayed examples of soldiers transforming their captors, prison wardens transforming prisoners, communities transforming murderous bands of attackers, even national leaders transforming their enemies, all with the power of forgiveness and its brothers kindness, mercy, and absolution. The story of Les Miserables is just one such story built upon this truth, that the power of unconditional love can transform bullies, robbers, murderers, even national enemies into our friends. The evidence tells us that the use of harmful force, even in our defense, serves only to amplify hatred and retaliation. On the other hand, when we respond to harm with unexpected acts of loving understanding, charity, and friendship it is far more effective, especially in the long run, for diffusing fear energy and inspiring true moral transformation in our aggressors. It seems at every level that when we consistently look like an unconditionally loving friend, it becomes easier for others to let down their guard, trust and believe that we are indeed a friend. To forgive does not imply that we minimize a horrendous act as harmless. Forgiveness is an act of loving power so mighty that it has the capacity to rebirth new life and to free us all from even the most destructive of evils.

13th Insight: Love is the divine force of attraction that synthesizes all into wholeness.

Love is the First Cause. Love joins one heart with another. Love brings couples, families, organizations, nations and planets together. Love brings one being into harmony and co-operation with another being.

How? From our human perspective, love works energetically through the law of attraction at the level of the soul. Our inner core, our authentic self and pure subjective being that is the soul, attracts similar others into groups for purposes of love’s activity. When we align with our true self, we are naturally magnetic and, without any effort at all, draw others to us in synchronous fashion, so that we may co-participate in love.

To fall into love is truely to fall into alignment with the divine force of attraction. As we fall into love, love energy infuses us with information, moves us with its rhythm, builds us into cooperative groups and communities, does not get distracted by our errors, works with what we have to offer, and uses us where we are for its higher purposes.  As the creative divine force, love accepts what is, and builds from there.

Contrary to popular misinterpretation, it is not our personality, and its lower, weaker, more material desires, that has the magnetic power to effortlessly attract what we bring into our life. Because for most of us, random energy in, random energy out. Our minds are spread too thinly; our thoughts are too unfocused and fleeting. We chase after short-lived sensory pleasures, temporal material distractions, momentary and self-serving desires. Such energy is diffuse and scattered, and being such, does not have the lasting power and influence to attract group force.

It is the soul that attracts through group force. It is for group purpose that the soul is magnetic. It is when we align with the creative impulses of our higher nature that we are impulsed to move in concert with the divine power that is working through us, usually in ways we don’t consciously understand completely. As we learn to focus, concentrate, and meditate on love, on group purpose, we organize our energy into one coherent laser-like ray of light. Thought, mind, desire, inspiration, actions, behaviors…..all unite with soul purpose the goal. Our thoughts are consistently pointed in a loving direction, our hearts are pure and open, and our actions are congruent with love’s higher ways. Coherent like a laser, love can streamline through us in a very efficient and automatic fashion. This is the energy that effortlessly attracts what is needed to carry out love’s harmonizing objectives.

When we are in harmony with love energy, a mind of intuitional love replaces the mind of instinctual fear. Our personal mind becomes fused with spiritual mind; we are now co-operating within the higher sphere or vibrational plane consciousness of soul awareness. We live predominantly through the quiet knowingness of intuitive consciousness. Our heart gives us direction, silently pointing the way toward our next step. Loving behaviors naturally supersede fearful behaviors as our habitual way of acting in the world. Synchronicities appear because our vision is from a higher and broader, more inclusive, meaning-full perspective. This is what it is like to live from the consciousness of the soul, and its law of attraction and synchronicity, in which we fulfill our higher purpose.

The heart and brain work together to convert these faster and higher states of soul consciousness into the lower and slower language of words and sentences. But we often find that words cannot convey the all-encompassing web-like vision of the soul.

As we learn to hold the light of love steady in our heart and head, we get better at practicing courage, increasingly faithful that love will give us what we require to fulfill its law. We get better at “walking in the dark”, walking into the unseen, the unknown, the void. As we take one step, it is then we see arise our next clue as to where to go next. After a further step, another clue appears. It feels like we are following a mystical trail of breadcrumbs that materialize one at a time with each stride ahead. “As we go, we know.” This is the symphonic activity of love that keeps us moving, despite our fear of the unknown in which we forge ahead.

If we plan too far ahead and too rigidly for our lives, we may miss out on the synergism that arises from this law of attraction, this co-creative process called love. As long as we insist on staying in the “known”, we exclude ourselves from the most exciting regions of life’s creativity. Let me give you a couple of examples of how love energy at the level of soul consciousness continues to move us in the direction and for the good of the higher whole, through its law of attraction and the accompanying synchronicities that arise.

I was finally licensed as a professional counselor, feeling “the call” toward private practice but waiting, as we do, for what seemed like the “right” time. My husband was between jobs and it certainly didn’t sound rational to leave a paying job for the unknown of private practice, where it was anyone’s guess how much I would make in the first year. But the call was too loud, and having learned to recognize when I just have to trust, I gave my notice for a few months ahead. The last day of March 2006 was set to be my last day. The synchronicities began, and the tests of strength in faith. Though he had not found a job in his field for a couple of years due to the economy, my husband suddenly got exactly the job he had been waiting for, and was to start on March 22. We were both elated. Then on March 21, it seemed like catastrophe. My husband was diagnosed with stage IIIc colon cancer, and our health insurance was under my about-to-be-former employer. Yet, miracle after little miracle, the universe of love steadfastly continued to support my path. On March 22, my husband had me drive him to the office where he was supposed to have his first day at his new job. He told them about his diagnosis received just the day prior, and informed them that he could not stay that day because he was scheduled for surgery that very afternoon. My employer uncharacteristically found little writing projects for me to do from home over the next several months. This gave me the opportunity to earn some money part-time, and “coincidentally”, maintain just enough hours of employment for us to retain our existing health insurance. This new arrangement now afforded me the flexibility to work around all the hectic hours needed for me to be there for my husband during his treatment – to attend his chemotherapy sessions, to go with him to all of his medical appointments, to fill his prescriptions and run other errands for him, to set the alarm every few hours to administer pain and related medications – all of which I never would have been able to do in my old position. Because his treatments took their toll on both of us, I now thankfully had a job that I could actually do while also giving him the support he needed as he suffered through chemo. My husband’s new employer miraculously agreed to hold the job for him so he could start six weeks after his March 22 surgery. And, about the time that my employer regretfully informed me that she couldn’t find anything else for me to do and my work would end July 1, his benefits kicked in exactly July 1, and we were able to be under his new company’s health insurance plan. As if that weren’t enough stress, my fifteen-year-old Buick was on its last miles. Yet his new salary was enough to allow us to buy a new one. All in all, it could have been a crisis of faith for me, as well as a health crisis for my hubby, but it all worked out beautifully in the end. And this unexpected twist into the world of cancer and treatments, simply catalyzed my journey into the world of health and healing with the energy of love. The law of attraction is a real force. It is the force of love, and it encourages us to fall into synch with others who are most similar to us in their innermost subjective heart, yet complementary to us in outer objective form, body, talents, or circumstances.

A client of mine was recently distressed at feeling strongly pulled toward two seemingly different majors in college. She did not believe that either was a choice pressured from outside of her, and instead insisted that both felt equally intuitive. I reminded her that she may have to find a way to double major, and trust that the universe had a plan to use both sets of information within her. The way I diagramed it out for her was to take out a piece of blank paper, and have her imagine that the white space was the entire creative conscious loving universe. Then I put a tiny dot in one small corner, and told her that it represented her personal creative consciousness. I filled in the “universe” with lots of other dots, resembling stars in the midnight sky. I reminded her of how the stars are in continuous movement, how Venus does not always appear so close to Jupiter to our eyes, and how constellations come into view in different ways at various times of the night, even years. For her to want to see her career constellation in place now was perhaps premature; perhaps it was still moving toward her, and would come into view at some later date. She would have to have faith that the intense call she felt for both majors would somehow make sense closer to graduation. Maybe then she would see what the two had to do with one another. Just like for me in the 1980s when I was initially called to search out the distinct “stars” of psychology, spiritual wisdom and quantum physics, yet remained clueless at the time about what those had to do with one another. Had I been more wise and steadfast in my faith, I might have majored in at least one of them for my bachelors’ degree. Instead, I majored in something more “practical” like business, feeling pressured by others, only having to go back to school later (well after the elevator scene!) to complete a masters’ in counseling psychology. The broader view from 2000 was an altogether different constellation compared to 1980. It was only after further advances in quantum physics and consciousness research that I could see how all three “stars” came together within the same constellation of consciousness-based health. Love’s law of attraction beckons us unconditionally, always there to remind us of our most creative opportunity in the conscious whole.

14th Insight: Encompassing all things, love IS omnipresence.

Love energy is the multidimensional presence, the Holy Spirit, within all things. Love is the energy at our individual and collective core that gives us our sense of existence and being. As described in the Bible, love is the fresh yeast that raises us up and brings us life. When we meditate on the sense of being within ourselves, we can find ourselves lifted up into previously uncharted territories of awareness. Where moments prior we saw a boundary between ourselves, the rest of the universe, even time and space, it is now lifted. The shadowy veil dissolves upon our close attention, leaving us in a state of realization that “My being is inherently interconnected with your being”. I am within you and you are within me. We are one within the moving force of overriding loving Presence we call God. When we embrace the being within ourselves and within our beloved, we unite in love’s presence. This is the intention we put out when we pray “Namaste”, a term derived from Sanskrit and brought to the west through Indian culture. As we unite our hands together and raise them to our heart, we cohere the energy of our heart into a laser of love. As we lift our hands to the space between our eyes, we make our eyes like one, seeing through the consciousness of One. In the Peshitta Aramaic translation of Matthew 6:22, we learn that the lamp of the body is the eye made singular, an activity of love that brings illumination to the entire body. To receive love fully, we must open our being and allow another’s authentic presence to join with ours. When we love others in this way, we unconditionally gift them with our own loving presence. This does not suggest that we lose awareness of our own personal boundaries in our daily lives, for that would lead to a disintegrated self that would have to be built up in order to be healthy. It does mean that we have to learn to be vulnerable to being fully seen, open and receptive. And it does signify that we love without condition, no matter what. Love is the infinite process of embracing the pure beingness within ourselves, then within another, and inevitably within all that is. When we love all, we fuse our awareness into one omnipresent collective whole and singular eye of consciousness. As we love in this way, we are raised up into a state of ecstatic bliss that only the sense of unified wholeness or pure love brings.

15th Insight: God is Love.

In 1 John 4:7-8 of the Bible we read “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In this passage, we are taught that the way to God is upon the active path of love. Love is the ladder we climb one rung at a time until we are One with Divine Love. Consider that God is the source, activity, and substance of love. Notice in the Bible verse above that love and knowledge of God are considered inseparable, for with pure love comes revelation of God. Love is the process by which we know God, Divine Presence. It is as we love that we come to know the Divine Creator of all that is because God is the source of such love, the process or activity of that love, and ultimately the substance through which that love is made manifest. When we join in the activity and movement of love, we join in God. So even among us, love and knowledge of one another are inseparable. It is impossible to truly know another without love’s complete openness to know and to be known. And in the openness comes the sharing in each others’ presence, in their beingness, in the core essence of who they really are, which is love. As we learn to love, we unfold like a thousand-petalled flower, revealing our pure essence within that is love. Gradually, inevitably, we peel away every petal that may cloak the pure essence of love within each of us. No matter how long it takes. No matter the circumstances we need to learn and unfold that love. No matter how many lifetimes we need. As we love, we are illuminated and enlightened, ultimately realizing that all is One within the divine robe of love. In that realization of Oneness, we find God. We discover that we are part of the whole of all creation. As we sense the wholeness, the completeness of all that is, we join in the beingness and the presence we call God. So as we love, we gather into our own presence, the presence of all that is. We come to know all through our love, and in that knowing find our oneness with all. As we love, we find God, for God is  Love.

16th Insight: God is Light.

In 1 John 1:5 of the Bible we read “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” And from verses 10-11, “Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.” Allegorically, light is the ability to see and to know, the activity of realization, pure awareness and presence, consciousness itself. When we love purely, we see ourselves and others clearly. We see each others’ potential, we know each others’ shadows, and we accept each other as incomplete works in progress. The more bravely we choose to love, the brighter we shine with the light and look of friendship and caring, which allows us to give up our guns and other defenses, and trust that we are safe. Assuming, even knowing, that we are safe, we walk freely among others as brothers and sisters. With freedom in our hearts, we have no fear to be our authentic self, and therefore no fear to allow others to be their authentic selves, no matter how different they are from us. We are able to trust that they have their purpose, as we have ours. In love’s purist light, we can see deeply into another, and love all that we see. In this way, we are free to live together in the pure light of love. What is unknown has yet to be embraced with love, and so is perceived darkly, obscurely, and with great fear and trepidation. What we do not know is feared only when we fail to love what is. When we choose to love and accept whatever comes our way, we find the peace within our heart that enables us to love more purely. Once we have come to see all, know all, trust all, accept all, freely interact with all, we blaze with the Divine light of love. It is love’s light that brightens our heart, and sheds the fear that blocks the Divine Sun from lighting up and loving all that is.

17th Insight: Light is the substance of love.

As love is made manifest, the vibration slows to that of matter. All matter is comprised of electromagnetic fields of energy, which we call radiation or light. Visible light is only a tiny fraction of all light, specifically the light which travels at speeds or frequencies between red and violet. Slower than red frequencies are infrared, microwave and radio waves. Faster than violet frequencies are ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. Of course, these are only what most scientists have been able to detect and measure to date. When we see visible white light split into its rainbow of colors, we see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each color has its own frequency and sound. (In fact, all atoms have their own unique signature, “fingerprint”, or set of frequencies. We really are special!) With visible light only a tiny fraction of the entire spectrum of light, imagine what exists that the human eye cannot detect. Light can be measured as a massless particle called a photon, or as a wave-like pattern of energy. Because of this, quantum physicists say that light exists as a wave-particle duality. They have also stumbled upon the discovery that light acts like a wave when the observer predicts it to be a wave, and acts like a particle when the observer expects it to be a particle. Even more amazing, they have found that it works both backward and forward in time! As a result, many of these quantum physicists have concluded that it is consciousness that determines whether light manifests as a particle or exists as a wave or field of energy. This insight has, in turn, given rise to the idea that it is the entire field of quantum consciousness that is the ground or primary reality underneath our physical existence, and so, for them, God is the entire field of potentiality called quantum consciousness. Really all forms of light, visible and invisible, are essentially the same thing…..photons traveling around. But the slower the speed of the photon’s journey, the less energy contained by the photon. The faster the speed, the more energy the photon radiates. Now here is the really fun part (to me at least!)…..quantum scientists have also realized that we are made of photons. Just like the God of Light says when giving us hints that we are made in the image of God. The image of God. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word image is defined as a visual representation, an imitation in solid form, a likeness, an idea, a mental picture, and in days of old, an illusion. In cutting edge science, the image is now viewed as a hologram. It seems that, like Princess Leia in Star Wars, we are holograms within holograms, projections of light in multiple dimensions. Way beyond 3-D. So it seems that God of Love may be more like quantum consciousness. And God of Light may be more the realm of the physical, which is made in God’s image when God chooses. And therefore, we are indeed light, the substance of God’s love, projected in the divine image of all that is, which is the entire field of pure consciousness itself.

18th Insight: The energetic field of quantum consciousness itself is the divine activity of pure love.

In this blog, we have contemplated how our fundamental reality is really vibrating waves of information, intelligent energy stretching out infinitely in all directions. As introduced in the last insight, quantum scientists call this underlying field the divine field or matrix, the collective field of quantum consciousness itself, because they believe that this mysterious field of energy blinking in and out of view is THE basic building layer to our existence, and is the ultimate force that influences and creates all material forms. This worldview holds that it is quantum consciousness that builds some-thing from no-thing. In his book God is Not Dead, Amit Goswami, PhD summarizes the evidence for quantum consciousness as our primary reality, and additionally concludes that this field is the same force as the Divine Force we more simply refer to as God. So if God is quantum consciousness, the all-knowing light, the substance created and the source creator, the spiraling energy we call love that attracts, coheres, builds, and synthesizes all streams of energy into one collective ocean of interconnected relationship we call multidimensional awareness or presence, then perhaps we can conclude that the force of divine love is the same force that is the living matrix of quantum consciousness. And as divine love, quantum consciousness is the son or interplay of father spirit and mother matter. Many scientists from diverse backgrounds (not only quantum physics but also quantum biology, medicine, psychology, energy healing, and other disciplines) seem to be describing various properties of the mysterious energy field of quantum consciousness, in the way that mystics have described the various aspects and powers of pure divine love. If they indeed are one and the same force, then we can theorize that pure love energy is:

• the collective field of quantum consciousness
• the synthesizing force of all interconnected spheres of consciousness or intelligent energy
• THE unifying and unified field, that is, the primary force which unifies all physical forces
• the synchronistic field of collective activity
• the harmonic convergence of all that is
• the symphonic vibrational web which underlies physical creation
• the holographic, multidimensional array that is our seen and unseen multi-verse
• the energetic matrix which interconnects everything that exists subjectively with objective outer form
• the lower vibrational, more physical magnetic and gravitational forces that attract a negatively charged objective body to its positively charged subjective essence that is its most immediate source of life
• the higher vibrational, more fundamental Law of Attraction, in which like attracts like into relationship, by which subjective essence merges with similar subjective essence, and creates a more encompassing inner sphere of life, a larger whole of consciousness, a wider sphere of awareness
• the Divine pulse or vitalizing force known by doctors to heal all of our wounds
• the coherent laser-like energy field that is correlated with health, in contrast with the incoherent more dispersed field that leads to disease

Summarizing in terms that blend mysticism with science, we could more concisely say that: Love is the activity of intelligent expanding awareness that for us manifests as the field of light, knowledge, pure awareness, of divine consciousness itself. And that love, as the living field of collective quantum consciousness, is the collective force that unifies, synthesizes, builds us up, heals and makes us whole. Love as energy is the unified field of consciousness itself, the whirling dance of fast-stepping subjective pure energy or Spirit with its partner, slow-stepping objective dense energy we call our material life or matter. Love as consciousness is the living and intelligent field of subjective life fused with objective life; the ever-expanding sphere or field of collective and shared “we-ness”, awareness vibrationally structured as a series of wholes within wholes; presence itself. Love as human experience is the mindful and heartful, full sensory awareness of multidimensional interconnectedness with another being, a shared collective experience of oneness that dissolves us in its bliss.