The greatest thing in all the world is to love....

Nat King Cole sang a song that says "The greatest thing in all the world is to love and be loved in return". What happens if you are not loved in return?  It can be devastating and destructive.  Some people end up destroying themselves or others over being rejected.   Love is a very potent energy.  It can make you do really stupid things.  

How does one find the courage to love again?  Based on my own personal experience, you must learn to love unconditionally.  Sometimes people need something different in their lives and if you really love them, you will understand and accept what is best for the person that you love, no matter how painful it may be to you.  Another term for this is selfless love.  

I am still very much in love with my first boyfriend.  We came to understand that there is no way we could be together and parting was very painful.  I carry him fondly in my heart with the understanding that we each need different things in our life.  Accepting this does not invalidate our love for each other but it does free us up to love again.  

Unconditional love is not an antidote to the pain you feel when you must let someone go out of your life.  But it is the key to forgiveness and forgiveness is the key to loving again.  When you learn to love unconditionally, you begin to understand that your love is not based on being loved in return. The greatest thing in all the world is to love.  That is where the song should end.

It takes courage to love but you cannot find courage without love.  Here is one of my favorite quotes.  Perhaps fodder for another post?  Will see.    

“Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.”   ― Delmore Schwartz, Last and Lost Poems

How will we live tomorrow?

A little over a year ago an acquaintance was planning a cross country bicycle trip.  He sent out to a number of his contacts a question that he asked us to respond to and his intention was to explore this question with the people he met across the country.  The question, "How will we live tomorrow?" was provocative so I wanted to share my thoughts here.

How will we live tomorrow?

To answer this question we must first define living and then define tomorrow.  Living implies having a life as opposed to mere survival.  To the spiritual mind, living implies being awake as opposed to just going through the motions of life.  If we live in a wakeful state of consciousness, the physical conditions in which we experience life are merely that, experiences.  In my youth, I read a book by Kilgore Trout (aka Kurt Vonnegut) called Venus on the Halfshell.  The premise of the book is that the last living human on earth is left with a spaceship and a robot programmed for sex.  Their mission was to travel the universe asking the primordial question of ‘Why was man created to suffer and die?’  Man was not created to suffer and die, man was created to experience creation.  Once while pondering these thoughts of purpose, the following comment came into my mind.  ‘Your awareness allows me to experience my creation’.  I wrote this on my mirror so that I would see it every morning.  Then I received an overwhelming feeling that the statement was wrong.  The correction came as “My awareness allows me to experience my creation.  So back to the original question of ‘How will we live..’?  We will live in a state of awareness of who we are.

So the second part of your question concerns tomorrow.  How will we live tomorrow.  What is tomorrow for there is only now.  Quite an esoteric statement that has become a cliche.  We are living in a linear, time based consciousness and therefore there will be a tomorrow within this reality.  For the mystic, even if we destroy the world, mankind is destined to wake up to the reality of who we really are.  That is the tomorrow we are all waiting for.  So how we live tomorrow will be dictated by how we live today.  If you believe in the eternity of the energy we identify with as being human, then we will never cease to have experience but the experience of tomorrow will be determined by our actions of today.  There is a meme that pops up in my Facebook  feed occasionally about the wisdom of the old man that plants a tree whose shade he will never sit under.  The real wisdom of this meme is that the old man is planting a tree that will provide shade for a future incarnation of himself.  We are the children that will inherit the earth we leave behind.  This is the irony of tomorrow.  

Perhaps your question should be ‘How will we live today?’

Understanding intention is the key to forgiveness

We have all been hurt by someone that we love.  Sometimes the hurt is so extreme that we find it hard to forgive.  We may say that we forgive but the next time you find yourself in a similar situation with this person, the anger and pain of the previous hurt compiles on top of the current hurt until there is an underlying seething that is always ready to surface, sometimes at the most minor incident.

How can we get past these feelings?  Forgiveness.  I don't mean the kind of forgiveness that someone says they are sorry and you say, "okay, I forgive you" and you move on but place that hurt in a folder to take out next time it happens.  True forgiveness comes from not just letting go of the pain but also letting go of the incident that caused the pain.  Not putting it into a folder to save for the next time.

The key to forgiveness is in understanding the intentions of the other person.  You can only do this through Agape - unconditional love.  Agape is the purist kind of love because it transcends the ego.

When you love someone unconditionally, you can easily forgive because you can see through the persona of the person into their core.  You can see their heart.  When you can see someones heart then you know their intentions.  If there is no malice with intent to hurt you then how can you not forgive?

Love has many flavors but love in the purist form is unconditional.  It will not shield you from being hurt but it will allow you to forgive and continue loving.  Love is the most precious and valuable experience a human can have.  All the riches in the world cannot buy love.

What the fuck is Love anyway?

So what is love?  

Love has so many different meanings. I love my parents, I love my children, I love my siblings, I love my apartment, I love my life in Boston, I love you. We use the same word to describe something we cannot measure with an instrument, cannot see, taste, smell or know in any other way other than our feelings. While we use the same word to describe how we feel about people and things in our life, are we really describing the same energy? Is the energy I feel towards my lover the same energy I feel towards my children or my parents or my dog? First reaction is of course it is not the same energy but actually it is. It is the same energy that has been flavored differently by us. We add the flavors through our feelings. 

So what is this energy that we feel?  It is the creative force.  It is the energy we use every day.   We use this energy to do creative things.  We can also use this energy to do destructive things. Even when we do destructive things, it is the same energy that is being used.  It is the consciousness level of man that determines if we live in a creative society based in love, or a destructive society based on fear.  God, Consciousness, Source or whatever you want to call it does not discern for us what is good and bad.  We make that determination.  Some want to latch hold of a book or doctrine that has been passed down over the ages and claim that it alone determines what is good or bad but I disagree.  It is the evolution of our consciousness that determines what is good or bad and it starts with choosing for yourself.  I do not lie, cheat, or steal.  Not because of a law or doctrine against these things but because my consciousness tells me that it is not who I am.

When people's consciousness transitions and becomes aware of the bigger picture, they cease to do destructive things because that is not who they are.  In the spiritual community,  this is known as waking up.   Everything that man is learning and discovering already exists in Consciousness.  The new things people invent and discoveries  already exist and are revealed through the combined intuition of the teams of people working together.  We accumulate knowledge of that which exists through the revelations brought about through our intuition.

Our intuition is about feelings. Feelings are about love. Feelings are the tools we use to manipulate the love energy to create different things. It is the creative process for everything. When two or more are gathered in my name, I am there also. Words from Jesus.

Two or more people put their heads together and the creative juices will begin to flow. This flow of creative energy will not happen without love. All creativity comes about through love.
There are only two emotions that drive our every thought, love or fear. So what is fear? Fear is the absence of love. People do awful, horrid things to each other and the environment.  This would not be possible in a state of love.

Since fear is the absence of love, love is all there is. That is the state of being we all seek. To be in love.

Tragedy brings people together in and act of love.

This article was sent to me today.  When I read the article, I literally wept over the love and compassion that was displayed by a group of Orthodox Jewish men towards their gay brothers after the Orlando shooting.  They actually went to a gay bar to express their brotherhood and the response they got was beautiful.  This my friends is a beautiful example of love.  I hope you will take the time to read the article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06/15/what-happened-when-an-orthodox-jewish-congregation-went-to-a-gay-bar-to-mourn-orlando/

The River

Today is a beautiful day.   Since I had no work, I decided to go to my favorite nude hangout in Vermont.   It is such a beautiful place.  The scenery is beautiful but what makes this place special is that it is a place where people can be themselves.   Only a handful of people here today but I have so many wonderful memories of the various characters I have met here.  This is a place where there is no shame and everyone is accepted and respected.  If someone gets sexually aroused, nobody cares.  If you want to go up into the woods and explore your sexual urges, nobody cares.  This is a place where judgment, prejudices and intolerance is not acceptable.  Everyone is welcome.

I needed to come to a place like this after the horrific events in Orlando.   On Saturday I marched proudly with the gay fathers and there were hundreds of thousands of spectators lining both sides of the streets cheering and clapping and generally showing their support of us.  It felt like they were cheering for me personally, for finally embracing who I am.   It brought me to tears to experience this.  Then as the news came out about Orlando,  I had many more tearful moments, balanced between the extremes of love and hate.  Then to see all the hateful posts from my conservative background popping up on Facebook just made it more painful.   I had to get away and this is the perfect oasis to collect my thoughts.

This is a place where love can and does manifest.   I am not referring to sexual play, but the love respect and comeradery that can be found among the people that come here.  All walks of life, all income brackets, all age groups, all races, all body types and all types of professions are represented here.  It is a microcosm of the type of world that is possible.  No shame in your body, no shame in the sexual nature of our being.  No shame in being and expressing yourself.  This is a safe place.

This is a place where you don't need to be anyone, just Be.  If this is not an expression of love then what is?

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Orlando we cry for you. We cry for all of us.

On Saturday, June 11th, Boston celebrated Pride.  The highlight event was the parade.  I marched in the parade with The Gay Fathers of Greater Boston.  The parade route was 2.7 miles long and there were estimated to be over 25,000 participants with 200 groups represented.  The streets on both sides were packed with people all cheering and shouting out their support.  It was young people, old people, mothers, fathers and children all out to lend their voice to acceptance.  It was emotionally moving to walk down the street to this cheering crowd.  One estimate I heard that has not been verified is that there were around 700,000 attendees.

Then Sunday morning we wake up to the news of the carnage in Orlando.  This violence was born out of hatred for the gay community.  The family of the gunman said that he was distraught over seeing two men kissing.  A simple act of kissing created the rage that took 50 innocent lives?

Such a juxtaposition of love and hate.  Two men showing their affection towards each other brings about so much death?  How can that be?

Where is the love in the world?  Where is the love between people?  For that is where it starts.   We must learn to love each other.  How do we do that?

It starts by looking within your own heart and rooting out the prejudice.  Oh but I am not prejudice.  Yea, right.  We all are.  We were taught from an early age to be.  Pay attention to your own thoughts and you will see it.  We are all guilty of intolerance.  Find yours and root it out.  That is where we start.