Expanding Consciousness:The Journey to Love
Expanding Consciousness
Part 3: The Journey to Love
If consciousness expands sufficiently, we become love. At least, that is what the Heartfulness spiritual journey is all about. What a concept! It sounded intriguing to me – even great. But then I started wondering ‘What does it really mean, and how on earth can such a transformation happen’?
To begin to explore this issue, first I needed to consider ‘what is love?’. Love often is described as a feeling that arises with partners, children, and close friends. When we examine this love closely, we find that almost always there is an element of wanting something – wanting to ‘feel loved’ (‘They make me feel so special’), of wanting the loved one to do something for us (‘If you really love me you would …’). Chariji (my first spiritual teacher) helped me to see that this as ‘transactional love’. From a spiritual perspective, love is something quite different. I now have a feeling that the only words I can use to describe love from this perspective is total acceptance without attachment. This is how I came to this understanding:
Yogic transmission, or pranahuti, which is central to the Heartfulness practices, has been described in a variety of ways including ‘vibrationless vibration’ and ‘love’. Yogic transmission also has been described as the original vibration that existed at the time before creation – the pure vibration of ‘oneness’. I have come to appreciate that this original vibration is part of each and every living being. However, this original vibration has gradually become completely obscured by the many vibrations that each of us has created by our own ‘small selves’. Our individual vibrations arise from likes and dislikes such as prejudice, anger, fear, jealousy, insecurity. (This topic is explored in detail in Blog #6). Thus even though this universal vibration is in all of us, often it is so covered up by our own individual vibrations that we don’t perceive it. Of great importance, when we cannot perceive the universal vibration, we cannot live in harmony with it.
Acceptance in a real sense is awareness that I am you and you are me - - that there is no difference in our fundamental vibratory selves (Part 2 in this series). To truly accept you as me, I first need to accept my self with all my foibles, insecurities, mistakes, and blemishes. Unless I accept myself, I am still living in duality (I like this about myself, but not that). As long as I haven’t accepted myself, how on earth can I truly accept you?
Years ago, I learned from Chariji that whatever I see in another is actually something in myself. I have come to understand that if I am uncomfortable with another person or if I am reacting to something in that person, that reaction is a signal that the ‘something’ is in me as well.
With self acceptance, I can begin to find that original vibration of love within myself and can begin to resonate with the pure vibration of reality. And this in turn allows me to subconsciously tune to that vibration in others, thereby resonating with their inner purity rather than resonating with the vibrations of their own creation.
Early in my spiritual journey I had a profound experience of the meaning of love in relation to my mother. She and I were at loggerheads almost from the day I was born. The story is that from my first ability to speak, I made it clear that ‘I wanted to do it myself’. My mother, on the other hand, was insecure, dependent and not an assertive person to say the least. I have the sense that she was quite threatened by my independence from very early in our life together. For the first half of my life, my mother and I had a truly difficult relationship. I wanted to talk to her and for her to listen. She couldn’t share anything personal, intimate, or – in my view – meaningful. As a child, I wanted attention; she had no time. (I was one of many). I wanted ‘love’ from her; she gave me presents.
After about ten years on my spiritual journey, I had an experience of what ‘love’ is. I had come home from the office during a heavy snowstorm. The next morning, when I went back to the office, I saw my woolen neck scarf. It was in the street, packed with ice, snow, sand from the snowplows and had been flattened by cars rolling over it. I stood looking at the scarf and was sad because my niece had brought this scarf back from South America for me. I had been really touched that she had thought to bring me such a gift. So I bent down to pick up the scarf, planning to clean it up and somehow restore it.
As I picked up the scarf I happened to glance down at the gloves on my hands. These gloves had been given to me by my mother almost a decade earlier when I was going to Denmark one December to see my spiritual teacher at the time, Chariji. When my mother gave me the gloves I was very irritated. First, I was irritated because I was living then in a warm climate and didn’t need extra gloves. She had little money at the time, and I was frustrated that she was spending it on something that I didn’t need. Also, I was irritated because she kept telling me that she had these gloves for me, but didn’t mail them, so in the end she sent them by FedEx which was quite expensive – and again, she didn’t have money to spend that way. I was truly irritated when they came because they were leather gloves, lined with rabbit fur – which I wouldn’t buy and didn’t want to wear. And furthermore, they were gloves for slim, trim long fingers, and mine were short and stubby so that I had to work hard to get these gloves on and my fingers didn’t reach the end.
Nevertheless, I wore those gloves, at first uneasily, but over the ten years, more and more as old familiar friends. Looking at the gloves, I realized for the first time, the love that had caused my mother to send these gloves to me. In that moment, I could feel that love as a vibration, unrelated to any of the physical/material acts with which I had associated it. I saw that my mother had always loved me, but that her love had come in a form that I couldn’t perceive and couldn’t accept. I had had a picture of what that love should be, and so I never saw the love that was.
Over the ensuing years, I came to accept my mother as she was. And the more I accepted her, the more she opened up to me. By the end of her life, we had a good relationship so that I perceived her as a mother, and also as a friend.
Over time, I have come to appreciate that the love which was my mother’s fundamental self was obscured by what I perceived as her deep insecurity. And for my part, I was unable to recognize that love because my perception was obscured by my wants and desires. Further, my reaction to her insecurity is an indication that I, too, must harbor insecurity.
It occurred to me that if I want to truly love, I first need to accept myself and then become one with my ‘Self’. From that place of oneness with Self, I cannot but accept everyone else, because I can then perceive the vibration that is their ‘Self’ – the vibration that links us as one. Love is simply total acceptance without attachment. To love is to accept everyone and everything without distinction, without expectation and without desire - - so that I feel no differentiation between you and me. Expectation and desire have no place in love.
And this brings me to a last and profound realization. If I become one within myself - - one with the eternal vibration of oneness, of unity – then I will no longer be aware of any other vibration in anyone or any thing. I cannot ‘love’ because ‘to love’ implies that there is someone or something to ‘not love’. All that I can hope for is to ‘become love’.