Transcript

Welcome. I’m going to suggest something quite simple about love and I’ll come onto that. Let’s begin with love as a universal energy. So wherever you go in the Universe, you can find love. It is in that sense ubiquitous. As you know from your own experience, love can show up in all sorts of ways and love can be quite well hidden, but it’s an underlying universal force. We might consider that it is the most powerful force in the Universe. Even if that isn’t exactly the definition that we will use on this occasion, we can say that there isn’t a force in the Universe that is more powerful than love. 

01:13

You’re most familiar with love as a cohesive force. It draws people together. It draws people and things, worlds, together. And the suggestion I have on this occasion is that to consider love only as a cohesive force, a force that tends to draw together, is misleading and that it might be more useful to consider that love also has a dispersing aspect to it. It can gather together and it can expand outwards, it can accumulate and it can disperse. So we might begin to liken it to a kind of universal breath, as an inbreath and an outbreath. This way of thinking about love can be useful, perhaps, at least to consider in your world, where there is perhaps a greater emphasis upon love in its cohesive aspect, and that can often play out into attachment and all the issues that attachment brings into your lives. So that one reason for emphasising this other aspect of love is a contribution to the process by which you become free of attachment in the world. 

03:17

If we consider love in its human aspect, the feeling of loving someone, being loved by someone, naturally and very often you’ll experience that as being drawn together. When you love someone, you like to spend time with them, it can be as simple as that. But if we add in that other aspect, that other side of all that love is, then we might consider, for example, a loving relationship consisting simultaneously of that draw, that desire to be together, with the liberating, the granting of freedom, the lack of attachment, the lack of pull. So in this way of talking about love, that attractive energy and that dispersive energy are not about pull or about push. The attraction of one person for another, the desire to be together to spend time together doesn’t work very well when there’s pull involved. It builds up a resistance. But if you allow in that dispersive energy, that aspect of love, and know that it’s not about pushing either, any more than the attractive force of love is about pulling, then we may begin to consider love in relationship to the whole Universe. Its ubiquity and what it is it’s doing everywhere. Is it holding everything together or pushing it apart?

05:48

You understand yourselves to be in an expanding Universe. So we might therefore say that in that aspect of the Universe, love is a dispersive force becoming more of itself by expanding. But then if we come down to the other end of the scale, and if we look at the structure of an atom, for example, find very powerful forces at work within an atom, creating a cohesion, a coherence that enables you to feel being human in a physical world, to know that, to live it. So we might consider love as being ultimately neither about push nor pull, neither about disperse, nor about attract, but about an understanding, a knowing of the nature of being.

06:56

It’s about right order, we might say, but order not as a construct, not as something fixed, but more as an abiding principle that the Universe offers all who exist within it, an opportunity for deeper experience and deeper again. And that paying attention to the nature and presence of love is what opens up those deeper experiences of being. The order then might be considered a Divine order, an order of Source for Source’s Universe, in which you take your part; that you can read, you might say, dd or come to understand the purpose of source by allowing love to grow in your life.

08:12

And although of course in many instances you find that your love is partial, that it has a certain kind of prejudice, and that you have preferences – that’s part of being human. A simple example, you love some foods more than others, why not? But at a deeper level, the more you’re able to find love unconditionally operating, the more you’re able to be simultaneously in that mode of drawing together and releasing outwards, a gathering of breath and a breathing out, you become, in a sense, one breath, a breath that is continuously present, both drawing in from the Universe and releasing out to the Universe, both inbibing the essence of the Universe and contributing to it.

09:30

And by degrees in this way, you leave behind the tendency for love to be about pull, without needing to flip over into becoming about push, and more into a state of knowing that you are love. And so that when we speak of coming to know the Universe, to know the purpose of Source by looking for love wherever it may be and coming to know it, then we can also say that the primary place in which you can look and find love is within your own being, whether that is acknowledging the being you are with love and allowing yourself to love unconditionally all the aspects of yourself that you discover or whether it is about recognising your experience of love as you connect with others, as you connect with the Universe.

10:44

And indeed, ultimately of course, you find that there’s very little, if any, distinction between that inner experience of love and the outward expression of love. What love tells you, you might say, is that you are one with the Universe, that there is no being in the Universe who is alien. Certainly some forms and presentations may give you rise to wonder. But if so, it is merely that you are encouraging yourself to find love where you hadn’t noticed it before. So that as you apply and explore the kind of principles I’m sketching in here that aspect of love that we can call compassion is very useful.

11:50

Again, compassion not least for yourself. Be compassionate towards yourself. If nothing else, it gives you good practice in this skill. But as you look into the world around you, let your look be carried on the energy of compassion. We might say literally that when you consider a situation far away affecting people whom you don’t know personally, but feel a resonance with simply because they’re human like you, then as you examine with your inner eye, the eye of your mind, the situation you’re considering, let it be carried on an outward flowing tide of your love expressed as compassion.

12:55

So that inner eye, which has its own reality, which is able (and you will find this increasingly so) to regard distance as no kind of obstacle, as that inner eye travels to other places, brings you back information for you to digest, to make peace with perhaps sometimes. And if you allow that vision to travel out on the tide of compassion, then it arrives where you have gone to look, where your inner eye is questing, with that energy. You look, in a sense, not now through the eye of your mind, but through the eye of your heart, through the eye of your compassion. And your visit then on the inner planes to that far-off place that has caught your attention, becomes of itself a healing visit, even as you are feeding back to yourself energy impressions of that situation or location.

14:20

And as you bring these imprints back into your awareness, let compassion be there too. Many of you are very sensitive to the changing energies of the world to the dynamic and sometimes fractured, sometimes disintegrating, patterns of energy finding expression in the world at this time. As you drink in something of those energies, bathe them in your compassion. It dissolves patterns of energy that have become stark or acute in some way so that there is a jaggedness, a sharpness, let that energy of compassion open up the possibility of flow, of ease of being. So this then is you in the Universe: you have your local experience, but as a being you are Universe wide, indeed the Universe is merely an aspect of your consciousness, a temporary aspect, even though it may live much, much longer than this particular human form you are using to explore with. As you travel outwards with that energy of love in its expansive mode, allowing compassion to carry you into the unknown, so you find love everywhere you look and that love then with the inbreath of your consciousness is drawn back to you so that you may come to know more of the being you are. You are the inbreath and the outbreath of the Universe. Good. Thank you. Thank you for listening.