Love in All the Worlds

(Introduction)

Love inhabits the core of all reality. Love is known by many names and appears in many guises ranging from the absolute purity of non-separateness to its increasingly tainted aberrations in the utter separateness of egoistic materiality. This range of the faces of love includes unity, oneness, sameness, compassion, devotion, connection, friendship, need, attraction, ambition, greed, desire, envy, jealousy, and obsession, among others. Because love inhabits the core of all reality, it also inhabits our own core and that of every living being. Dig deep enough into yourself, or into any person, and you will find love, though it may be well hidden and out of reach. The deeper you dig, the purer it is, though some versions appear right on the surface, such as the love of a parent for their child.

This whole universe could be considered a manifestation of love, from the attractive force of gravity to the awe-inspiring beauty of galaxies to the life-giving power of the Sun to the visceral kindness of Mother Earth. Life itself is a manifestation of love, with human life, in particular, showing the centrality of love. Love is the goal of all the arts. Arts produce beauty and the perception of beauty is a manifestation of love. The arts reveal truth and the greatest of all truths is the reality of love: the unity of all the worlds, the unity of all of us. Interconnectedness is one level and behind it lies unity.

Love manifests in so many ways, yet always constrained by the level of its vehicle. When that vehicle is us, love's reach depends on our inner state. That state can be defined in terms of the world we occupy, within the hierarchy of worlds from the material world to the highest power. If we live enmeshed in the world of our personality, in all those ingrained and enthralling patterns of thought and emotion revolving around ourself, then the love at our core gets garbled as it manifests the only way it can: through that personality, in the form of ambition, greed, desire, obsession and the rest. If we could live in the complete purity of the world of unity, love would manifest in its true nature as non-separateness, as the oneness at the root of reality.

In between these two poles are the worlds we can work our way through, by diligent and devoted spiritual practice. We can and do have flashes of even the purest versions of selfless, unitive love. But if we wish to have that become part of our normal way of living and being, we have work to do. We start at the beginning and climb our way up Jacob's ladder.

On our planet today, we can see many signs of love. Yet so much is lost in love's descent through the worlds that we are mired in a civilization that also generates wars, group hatreds, harmful exploitation, poverty, an overheating planet, and a myriad of other ills. All of these result from putting the other out of our heart, from treating people as things, from treating Mother Nature as anything but our mother. This human race is in an early stage of our evolution, an evolution that can be measured in the degree of manifestation of love, in the degree to which we act from our individual, surface separateness or from our hidden unity. Despite the waves of hatred and greed, every individual act of kindness ripples out into the ocean of humanity. Can we open to our inner nature where kindness is who we are?

In this inner work series on Love in All the Worlds, we will explore how love manifests at each level. At the same time, and crucially, we will explore some aspects of the inner work required to raise us to that level and make it our new home.

For this week, please notice how love enters your world and notice what in you interferes with your seeing through the eyes of love.

Follow @innerfrontier

About Inner Frontier Send us email