“IYLI” CHAPTER TEN: EXPERIENCING LOVE
Experiencing Love... Once someone becomes love, the rest is only a matter of time – meaning, the work of this book is done, and the rest is up to your intent and your karma for this lifetime. By reaching a level of love as your subjective reality of life, you have arrived at a point where what comes next is between you and God, and the degree to which you have the fortitude to run the final legs of the surrender race and arrive at victorious peace.
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CHAPTER TEN:
Experiencing Love
It’s time to transcend understanding…
There are several goals for this book with regards to its creation:
1) provide insight and opportunity for someone to have the experience of God as imminent;
2) provide a context for the experience of God as Self;
3) provide a definable way to transcend the ego and arrive at a level of love or above in this lifetime.
Once someone becomes love, the rest is only a matter of time – meaning, the work of this book is done, and the rest is up to your intent and your karma for this lifetime. By reaching a level of love as your subjective reality of life, you have arrived at a point where what comes next is between you and God, and the degree to which you have the fortitude to run the final legs of the surrender race and arrive at victorious peace.
The 12-steps in and of themselves, as written in this book, have enough power to deliver someone from hell to heaven. Meaning, the first goal for writing this book, if the reader does and completes the steps integrously, has enough innate value to carry someone into an experience of God as real. The supporting information and commentary written throughout this book, apart from the actual steps, have the added authority of high degrees of truth which further provide a context for the power of the 12-steps. Lastly, the context of commentary and the steps taken together, absorbed, even if not understood, have the ability to deliver the reader directly into a level of love or above in this lifetime as a result with a high degree of likelihood.
This book makes no claim about delivering enlightenment into your life as a byproduct of reading it, but what it does do is point you glaringly in the direction of God through truth, as well as layout the roadmap for how to arrive at a final destination. If you have a desire to connect with God in many of the ways that Jesus connected with God, enlightenment is your goal, surrender is your first step, forgiveness is for everyone, and gratitude for the journey is what will keep you moving towards the destination.
The calibrated level of love is rarified air and where someone can find themselves calibrating innately if they chase after God without ceasing, and it’s also the first time a person has the opportunity to experience more sunshine on their daily experience than they do rain, or in another sense, more happiness present than pain experienced. Based on Hawkins’s map of consciousness, when someone is love, quite naturally their view of God is as a loving creator. The way this person sees life and interacts with life is benign, meaning, a natural disposition of grace and kindliness towards most of life. Their central emotional connection with life is reverence for mankind, for life, and with a natural degree of forgiveness emanating forth as their disposition towards life. Quite possibly, the greatest gift of calibrating at the level of love, is the fact that revelations about God, the universe, mankind, and the Self, all start matriculating into awareness as more regular occurrences, creating prolonged mountaintop experiences and immediate realities of God as real and prominent in all things.
What happens from calibrating as love and moving on to even higher states, is through love you have the contextual understanding and firsthand experience with divinity needed to reach what’s known as christhood, or through Hawkins’s map of consciousness, a calibrated level of consciousness of unconditional love. Without love being present as a reality first, there are not enough regular occurrences with truth to provide the experiencer with the realizations that only continued surrender and forgiveness will take you to what’s next. It is only through intensive and radical-based subjective honesty, can one reach the doorway of unconditional love through a surrendered life. To move on from love into higher dimensions, one first has to be willing to let go of all victimhood and be willing to forgive everyone for everything. You start that process by witnessing how God forgave you for what you thought at one point was unforgivable, and then use that understanding as the basis for projecting out the realized gift from firsthand experience to the world around you. It’s at the level of unconditional love where Christ’s words of “forgive them for they know not what they do” begin to provide actual context for daily living.
As I was going through this level of consciousness, the other thing that marks its reality is that suddenly, unexplainable phenomena start arising that present themselves as if out of nowhere, that are now with you for a moment but not for continued moments, which act like doorways into much higher dimensions of consciousness. At the level of love, you start to see higher truths in glimpses which are fleeting but instructional, and it’s the truth of these glimpses that help propel you ever onward and upward towards the next set of heights worth climbing. In essence, once you have moments with God, you can’t not want more time where God is present in ways you never thought imaginable. Love as your level of interacting with the world around you is the first time as a person where you have transcended a complete attachment to the ego. You have not, however, transcended it in totality.
This step is designed to deliver someone into regular and right standing with divinity, by making life a continual practice of surrender, forgiveness and gratitude. Once this current step of the 12-steps is completed and practiced daily, you can now speak about the reality of gratitude firsthand in your everyday experience of life. Once you have walked through the fear of talking to someone about how you wronged them, by admitting those wrongs openly and then walking away with your side of the street cleaned, you know gratitude is a byproduct of faith in action and not just an occasional emotional set.
In this step, we make surrender and forgiveness a daily exercise, which in turn will create a context for understanding how to use gratitude as a driving force moving forward. Also, because of where we are in the steps, one can start to see that through the surrender process and the choice to forgive yourself, God and the world around you, gratitude starts naturally arising as a state of awareness, like what thoughts, feelings and emotions once arose as.
Gratitude for being forgiven is what propels the person forgiven into a world where they are now able to forgive where needed and admit when they were wrong without the fear of judgment. This step is about constantly coming face to face with humility, and in admitting we are not perfected beings while in this body capable of never making a mistake again, but what we are is found in the knowingness that we come from that which created us. This knowingness separates all lower levels from the level of love, as well as the experiencer of life from the witness of life unfolding naturally around you.
If you desire to know God, set your intent on being love. Once becoming love, surrender over ever reaching unconditional love and enlightenment and ask God to accept a new intent of transcending even love to know God more fully. To reach unconditional love requires several things, but for the purpose of this book we’ll look at the most important one: forgiving everyone, all the time, for everything, no matter what.
This doesn’t mean you have to take part in another’s folly again and again, but it does mean you understand and acknowledge that all must be forgiven for the sake of the person doing the forgiving, mainly because “they know not what they do” to start with. I came to this realization when I fully knew that God had forgiven me for choices made when I knew not what I was doing. The only sin for mankind is ignorance, everything else is a byproduct of such, and it’s through ignorance that fear-based decision making is chosen time and time again, with the byproduct of fear being destruction and devastation, judgment and anger, wrath and resentments, pain and suffering, desiring and craving, wanting and lusting, all to end with more pain and culminating in creating more fear. Fear leads to more fear, never to God. One does not find God through sackcloth and ashes, one starts to see God everywhere once they realize their creator does not require sackcloth and ashes for repentance. God does not judge you, you judge you. When you freely give forgiveness, without wanting anything in return, you quickly realize freedom and God are one in the same thing.
With this step, we have a new daily practice for putting forgiveness into action, humility into perspective, and gratitude into the awareness of who we are on a daily basis. Once you have found yourself on a regular basis forgiving the world around you, forgiving yourself, forgiving God, and forgiving another before they ask, you’re in rarified air and amongst angels in human form.
At the level of love, beauty takes on a new form as well, and don’t be surprised if sunsets bring tears to your eyes, or if the sight of two people in love stops you in your tracks, or if you find yourself unable to speak when certain music plays, for when you’re love you recognize such everywhere in the world, and the recognition of love when you look out into the world is nothing short of miraculous every time it’s witnessed.
TRUTHS
(Chuang Tzu) A wise man teaches others without using words.
(The Apocryphon of James) Seek wisdom earnestly through learning. Practice wisdom by being faithful, loving, and charitable.
(The Dhammapada) The body is a fragile thing. It must be protected against evil by the strong walls of wisdom.
(The Upanishads) Understanding immortality, those who are wise do not seek for truth among those things which are impermanent.
CONTEMPLATING ON TRUTH
For many years, I believed I was just and right in teaching others about life before I truly went out and lived it with any definable merit. I had a yearning to be the Tony Robbins type, complete with a program guaranteed to produce positive results for better living, and I dreamed of the time when crowds would gather around my feet to learn from my teaching and worship at the altar of Mason. I held this notion in mind as the pinnacle for my passions, and I used other speakers from around the globe as inspiration, motivation, and as possibilities for how my life could play out, and for what life would look like when I arrived finally at completion and happiness.
I now laugh at such naivety, mainly because I know that one man’s path is never the same as another person’s, but secondarily, what would another person's course of life be in comparison to finding out what this one has in store for you as the traveler? What one man does can only serve as a compass for another, never the actual trip in totality. What I searched for, prayed for, longed for, pleaded for, and downright lost my mind over, was a way to express love through words as opposed to factual experience, and even before I started to fully experience it, I wanted to tell others how to know truth as well. I was hoping to fake it until I made it, and not have the world know this about me. I wanted the end result of popularity due to creative wording, as opposed to the reward being the entity who is sure about the true absolutes of life for themselves.
Now, I no longer have the need for comparisons or for goals, ambitions, desires or any other form of wantingness to be like someone else or emulate their life. Today, through the gift of enveloping love and effervescent peace, what’s inside of me as well as inside of you, is the prize for the hours spent toiling away at arriving at the destination of freedom. Love rescued me from the never-ending cycle of rebirth, pain, sickness and old age. Love pulled me from the depths of hell and then delivered me into the experiential reality of continual perfection and Love witnessed, and no longer love witnessed as a phenomenon of two people joined in attachment, but of the natural order of life where God is present in ways many never get to see for themselves. Love, and only Love, is what the journey is for - to express it, experience it, feel it, touch it, think it, witness it, observe it, and then eventually be it. If you live a life dedicated to the pursuit of Love, you’ll find your "it" when you’re ready, and you’ll find that it was never in the direction towards crowds gathered at your feet to begin with.
During the early years of my life, I pursued a spiritual understanding that went far beyond book learning and classically styled research. For most of my adolescent life, more years than not, I had an unyielding intent to reach the truth about life, religion, and the point of it all, which I pursued with a reckless abandon in doing everything I could to reach truth. However, more than wanting answers to the aforementioned points of interest, I needed to know what God was and is, did God exist, why was I here, and what is this place we call earth all about with regards to being human? Then, after finding a direct awareness of God at age twenty, I spent twelve years doing my best to forget I ever had these questions answered, but thankfully for me, the past can only stay hidden for so long. At twenty years old, I had my first glimpse of the reality of God in the form of experiencing the knowingness that God is, but I didn’t have the life experience yet to fully comprehend the ramifications of this realization.
So, as I said, I spent years out on the lamb after that experience with innate divinity, doing my best to turn over every rock and squeeze every ounce out of life to find out what was the real truth, and not the truth someone else was selling. After finding myself squarely in hell, twelve years searching for language about God again out in the world, I woke up and decided I had gone long enough trying to hide from the questions which defined my childhood, sculpted my adolescence, matured my young adulthood, and now found my journey had delivered me squarely back to the question of what God is. To my amazement, God never forgot about me or my lines of questioning, and once I became ready to pay attention, God showed off and reminded me that love is the backdrop for all of everything there is that’s observable and unobservable. Along the way, I asked for a definition of what we all are, and the answer to that came as well: “I, in greater or lesser degrees of intensity.”
Which led to my next question, “What is “I,” exactly?” The reply was, “God, known through Love, experienced, witnessed and observed through consciousness.”
Upon further reflection, subsequent raises in consciousness levels, and an experienceable reality currently which justifies such bold writings as these, love continually shines through as all there is we can experience of God, because love is how we get to have awareness of God, in lesser or greater degrees of intensity. We know God through love and we know God because of love. God is not found in fear, or judgment, or resentments, or any other manifestation of the lower mind. God is known because of love, through acts of surrender, forgiveness and gratitude, eventually presenting the reality that God is all there is.
The physical body is nothing more than a vessel for experience to matriculate from. The physical body is fragile compared to that which created and sustains it. The physical body is limited compared to that which created it. The physical body is prone to disease and death, unlike that which created it. The physical body is what most people believe they are. The physical body is nothing more than a bag of meat, bones, along with a supercomputer, all working together to create the proper conditions allowable for experience to appear singular and separate from another.
We are not our bodies, but most believe they are. We are not our thoughts, but most believe they are. We are not our feelings and emotions, but most believe they are.
The physical body allows the witness of experience to have a subjective reality of localized consciousness. The body is subject to the mind until it is not any longer. The mind is a receptor point for consciousness and the ego alike. The body will create within itself what the mind holds as allowable and permissible. The body will move forward against evil only when the witnesser of experience has the intent to do so. The body is subject to karma and what the witness holds in mind to be true, and because of this, effects of fear are often misinterpreted as credible, and then act as aids to the manifestation of a weak mind-body experience. If the mind is allowed to remain in the gutter of negative and despondent thinking, of false witnessing, of chosen ego, the body will follow with disease, pain, injury, depression, and eventually motivated expiration.
The body is a fragile thing, and the way to protect it is seeking Truth in all its forms above believing in feelings in all their illusory forms. Truth makes the body strong and falsehood makes the body go weak. Truth gives the body energy and falsehood drains one’s physicality. When a person decides to move towards truth in their pursuit of understanding and experience of life, the body naturally follows the mind’s loving lead, and never the other way around. From ashes the body arises and to ashes it returns, but what we truly are never dies or extinguishes, it only transforms into whatever consciousness experiences and witnesses/observes next. Be not in love with your body but have love for the body. Be not attached to the body for such a thing only brings pain. When you truly know you are not the body, you have realized a great truth. When you know you’re not the mind, freedom is close.
Understanding immortality is made clear when the person seeking to understand life and death lets go of his/her attachment to anything physical in nature, and then seeks to understand that the non-physical elements of inquiry present an attachment as well. Understanding immortality, without fully living a life where attachments and expectations of all things content driven are better left in a past life, is like learning how to swim on dry land, while continually asking yourself why it is the sand is not more waterlike. Is it possible to know about water from the vantage point of dry land? Yes, but not conducive to actually swimming in it. Is it possible to watch someone swimming and get an idea for how it’s done? Yes, but in this case, you’re not the one having to stay afloat. Is it even possible to practice your strokes while fixed to the shoreline and have an idea of what it feels like to swim? Yes, but the feelings are only best-guesses.
Contemplating immortality and experiencing immortality are entirely different paradigms of existence. The person who seeks to know the nature of God is on the path to experiencing God. However, being on the path is not knowing the scenery of the destination, but only the steps currently taken. When you decide to let go of attachments and expectations to your beliefs of God, the nature of man, and the reasons for existence, you won’t have to try and understand Life anymore. You’ll start fully experiencing it to the point where floating above water is effortless and witnessing Life and Observing Life take on degrees of buoyancy rather than lead-laden shoes.
To those who are wise among us reading this thought here, and for those who are reading this thought and desiring wisdom in their life, either beginning scenario can create the same end where one knows what it is to swim: understanding trumps guessing, experiencing trumps understanding, knowingness trumps experiencing, and witnessing/observing as byproducts of knowingness allows for immortality to become evident. Seek truth for its own sake and without attachment to what’s found, and soon experience will present itself in a way where guessing about what comes after physical death is no more a part of your knowingness than trying to swim while still affixed to the soil, which only ever butted up to the water.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR STEP TEN
This step can be performed in several different ways, with the first being at the end of each day, looking back over the day, for moments you judged another, lied, need to forgive another or be forgiven by another, were quick to anger with someone, gave your opinion unsolicited to another person, or otherwise didn’t treat another as you would wish to be treated.
Once seeing these instances, agreeing to reach out to these people and admit where you were wrong, or working these instances through the 4th step matrix and presenting your findings to the person you wronged the next day.
Either way, this step is about admitting where we fell short of grace during the course of the day, and then taking immediate action where possible to ask for forgiveness and practice humility. In my daily practice of this step, in every moment, surrender is facilitated where applicable, and when possible, in the moment, seeking innately to remedy the situation.
STEP TEN
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Endeavor to do both daily, take personal inventory and where I’m wrong, quickly admit it.
STEP TEN PRAYER
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I surrender over my desires to be right, to be appreciated, wanted, desired, thought highly of, and all desires to be better than another or lord over another.