Our ability to experience and express love is a reflection of our state of being.
The quality with which we feel and express love is something that is worthy of our reflection.
There is a way of reviewing your capacity for love and see how conditional or unconditional,
What it stands upon,
What brings it about in you or how able or unable you are to feel it.
It's an expression of the state of our consciousness and the way or the integrity with which life is expressing itself through us.
One way we could look at it is that our capacity for love is a reflection of how much we've damaged our innate,
Vital,
Pure expression of life,
Which you are always inclined towards,
An expression of love.
And so it's a healing process to access an ever greater sense of feeling of love within you.
Your highest expression is your capacity for love.
There's the love you're capable of experiencing prior to your reaching a state of total acceptance and then there's the love that you're capable of expressing afterwards.
It's an extremely important part of what we are.
Now we may have lost sight of that in our entanglement with ourselves,
Our entanglement with the suffering that we've brought upon ourselves.
We may have been so preoccupied for so long in our,
And just keeping our head above water and survival and trying to avoid suffering or lessen our suffering or free ourselves from suffering that we might have lost track of the fact that our greatest longing is to know the true nature of love.
There is a point where we lose that thread because we've got ourselves in such a muddle that it's just a struggle to free ourselves from suffering.
And we don't have that much energy available to explore at its most profound level what love is.
When we lose that inner light within ourselves our path may,
We may perceive our path to be the path to bring us out of suffering.
While we still can perceive that light and the heart's deep longing there's a part of us that knows that,
And that's where we make a decision at various times in our soul path to forbear the suffering of coming into being whilst still prone to suffering because of our desire to know love.
And that's where the quality of that desire can bring us to no end of suffering because it can be entirely selfish.
There's nothing or very little connection to love at all.
But there's the pure longing to know love or to experience it when our heart is clear.
And that elevates to an extremely high level.
It's the highest state of consciousness,
Active consciousness that can arise in us.
The misery that we've caused on account of our selfish pursuit of love is most of the suffering that we've experienced.
At one level or another we can trace back nearly all of our suffering to our selfish pursuit of what we thought was love when it gets entangled with other things like desire and like instinct and like all kinds of messier parts of us.
So this path that gets to the place that comes to know the true nature of love has to be very very skillfully integrated into the path of liberation because there is that love that you can experience before you are free and there's that love that you can experience after you are free.
There's love with and without fear.
There's love with and without desire.
There's love with and without conditions.
And it's the things that arise alongside that impulse that determine how,
Whether it elevates us or holds us back.
In the same way I've spoken about messy compassion,
The number of times we choose to pursue messy love in all kinds of ways or to express it in a messy way.
Yeah,
It's probably more than we can count.
The patience,
The paramy that it takes to experience and express love is almost as great as the paramy that it takes to free yourself from suffering.
What I'm saying is the completion of that or the fulfillment of that desire belongs at the tail end of our journey because if you sacrifice the other things that are important for the messy pursuit,
You go round and round in circles many times.
Your journey in life is largely a lesson in learning to love.
That's the wholly positive part of being alive.
What it takes to learn to do it is many noble qualities and it is the developing of those qualities within us that brings us to the place where we can genuinely experience the thing that we long to know.
To live our life entirely in the pursuit of that and be driven by it blindly and to the point where we would believe that we could find it in places that we're not going to find it or hope that what isn't love might turn into love or what couldn't be love could be,
Is a form of ignorance.
And freeing ourselves of that ignorance so that we can really understand what love is and experience it.
It's probably as challenging as freeing ourselves of the ignorance that brings us to self-love.
You know there are stages of learning upon the path and always to learn to love in the best way we can is part of it and should be part of our journey.
And don't judge your success in the pursuit of love unnecessarily and don't you judge others for their capacity or lack of it.
There is a direct correlation somewhere between our capacity to express and experience love and our level of awakening.
So see these things as going hand in hand.
Where you are learning the lessons of how to love be it through family or companionship or partnership or just the love of life where you don't experience it.
Always look to yourself non-judgmentally rather than the world around you in the same way that only we can free ourselves from suffering.
Only we can generate within ourselves the true capacity for love.
But always understand that love does not judge itself by what it receives.
It's an act of generosity.
It's the longing for the happiness of another person.
It's a decision not an inevitability to walk your path beside another.
If you expect of someone things that they don't have it within them to give you're in a downward spiral.
Love is an act of generosity.
Our messy part is just as capable of resonating with another as our highest part.
So look carefully at what it is that's attracting you to someone when you are considering whether or not to make a bonded relationship out of it.
Because it's a long time and it's your life and it's theirs.
And there are plenty of cases where it doesn't turn into everything that it's dreamed to be.
It might be a very long time before you learn to love fearlessly and boundlessly and unconditionally and the time you put in to preparing yourself to do it is worth it.
So don't be pulled by your fear of being alone.
When you know how to be alone you know how to be with another.
When you don't know how to be alone you are dependent.
It's a high state of being that truly loves another person unconditionally.
You know the success or the height to which your life may reach will not be a reflection of what you achieve in this material world.
It will be reflected in either the progress you've made on the path out of suffering and the progress you've made towards no longer being the cause of suffering and or the degree to which you have elevated yourself in your capacity to know the true nature of love.
So you know if you've tried and failed a few times then keep banging your head against the wall and maybe put some time into it so you become that person who next time is more likely to succeed.
That goes at every level of all relationships.
Healing the relationships that are damaged and wounded so that you can feel love in those places where you couldn't before is the work that you do or part of it to prepare yourself to love more fully in the future.
Whether it is in your capacity as a parent or child or a partner or a companion.
Every aspect of our life,
Everything we do eventually we should be a gesture towards making ourselves a better person.
So you know if you want to know that love put the time into it.
May we rest in peace.
