CHAPTER 3
Don't Fall in Love, Jump!
Now that we have discussed the fear side of creation and how to begin to transcend its pernicious hold on your attention, we turn to the expansive side of the equation. The very nature of existence supports and encourages the expression of expansion. It is the experience you call love that is the basis of all that is. Love rules the infinite universe. Isn't that nice?
But what is love? We promise you, it is so very much more than any human definition can capture. To limit love to the emotional experience of film and fairy tale is sad as can be. Love is abandon, wholly and selflessly expanding. It has no identity and so no attachments, no agenda. The unconditional love that you have heard so much about is merely the tip of the iceberg. As the foundation of eternity, love permeates every thought and feeling, every action and intention. While fear is ubiquitous, love is even more so. It is the stuff of which fear is made.
We recognize the difficulty you have while in human form to remember that all of creation that you can perceive with your human senses is made of thought and feeling. Matter does not create itself. As we have shared in previous works, the matter that you perceive does not exist independent of you; at least not until after you create it with a projection of your thought and feeling. What independent reality it then has is as a thought construct which you can then flesh out at will. For you, these processes are almost entirely unconscious. Your search for truth has brought you to desire a more conscious role in creation and so it has brought you to us.
We have brought our program outline for "How to Make Your Dreams Come True" and inserted it, seemingly out of context, as a reference for both transcending fear and creating the experience of love in your life. We will not review this material now. We refer you to "Life is Nothing Personal" for the details. Instead, we will apply the principles of reality creation to the act of opening to love, the nature of your essential beingness.
There are certain barriers to making your dreams come true that are common to nearly all of humanity, regardless of cultural background. All of them spring from a limited definition of love and of human beingness. The most basic barrier is worthiness. You feel unworthy of divinity. You even legislate against the idea. You extend this sense of existential unworthiness into every portion of your life and your world. It forms the root of nearly every internal conflict to the formation and expression of your aspirations. Therefore, unworthiness needs to be addressed from two directions.
On the passive side, we suggest that you find the fear that bubbles up every time you consider what you want. It is there. There is a component of fear in every thought and feeling. Remember? Find it! Acknowledge its existence. Then replace it with a variation of this belief, "I deserve to have what I want." While this takes a little time and practice, it requires precious little effort. You will be amazed at how ever present these feelings of unworthiness are. They are everywhere in your psyche. Their tendrils reach out to touch every facet of human existence. Still, they are neither powerful nor undefeatable. Indeed, only awareness is required to take back the power that they have been granted by you throughout your years. Finding these thoughts and feelings begs an attitude of openness to self awareness. Be willing to embrace your pain and fear as part of the wholeness of who you are. Such experience is not all that you are, there is pleasure and love in there as well. Openness to the former allows openness to the latter. If you resist experiencing pain and fear, you will deny the pleasure and love as well. This point bears repeating.
These fears of unworthiness are only thoughts and feelings. They do not describe the infinite expansion of which all is made. They are the inward turning of the infinite expansion only. Like a wave, the feeling of unworthiness will pass through you quickly and smoothly if you allow it to. Lovingly embrace it as it does and you will be released from the battle that resistance foments.
On the active side of the equation you will find expression. Express what you desire, to the extent that you are aware of it, loudly and unhesitatingly. Trust that the fear, which you feel as you sing out to the universe what you want, will pass on its own and leave no scars or road blocks. Your expression will, in fact, bring your deeper fears right to the surface. Remember that this is a good thing and plow ahead. The more you express your desire, the more clear it will become. Your ability to know what your heart cries out for is clouded by your fear that you are not worthy of having your desire fulfilled. After many years of practice you have learned to want little on any deep level. The result is a low grade, long term dissatisfaction that runs through your entire life.
One of the prime skills of salesmanship and one of the hardest for most people to learn is asking for the sale. After extolling all the virtues of the product (you) and discussing the prospects needs, the time comes to ask directly that the prospect buy the product. It is the crux of the interaction, the point of it all. Everything is on the line at this juncture. It is all or nothing for this brief moment. This is the turning point that we urge you toward. Ask for the sale! Tell the world what you want. It is truly scary to say, "I love you and want you to love me." It can feel intensely vulnerable and risky. It is also the very best way to get what you want. Perhaps you can practice on smaller things first. Asking for what you want for dinner or which movie you want to see or where to go on vacation would be easier places to begin. The point is that unworthiness must be faced and stepped through or it will paralyse you. You will be frozen in your movement into growth and happiness. Muster your courage and say out loud who you want to be.
At home alone, stand before a mirror, looking into your own eyes and say, "I love you!" Do this many times, over and over. In a few days, it will get easier and more comfortable. When it does, start taking your clothes off and repeat the exercise. Don't let fear stop you. When this becomes not only possible but genuinely felt, experiment with various expressions of feeling. Put an angry face on as you look in the mirror and repeat, "I love you!" Try a sad expression and a joyous one. Work your way up to a rapturously loving expression. In a matter of a month or so, your relationship to your Self will be transformed. Many fears will arise throughout the effort but then many fears will be transcended.
If you do not practice this exercise, you will not reap the rewards. Hard as it may be to begin, there are no adequate excuses. Put the book down and begin right now!
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Love is a decision! It does not happen to you. It is not about anyone or anything outside your Self. Ice cream is not responsible for you loving its taste and texture. You choose to love. Chemistry is a myth. Yes at certain levels of your psyche you are totally unaware of decisions made at other levels. You may have no conscious idea of why you prefer one body type over all others and respond sexually with greater intensity. At a deeper level you know that you have built this preference over many years from images and feelings often quite unrelated to physiques.
The attributes of who and what you choose to love are so unimportant. You can let them go right now! If you are looking for a partner, you can let go of your demands about who they are. What they look like, what they are interested in, how they do things, who they are, none of this will help you get what you want. First, be who you want, love who you are and be open to love from the world around you. You do not need to choose who to love. Love and the right person will come to you. This is a simple fact of existence, as sure as a single oxygen atom will be drawn to a hydrogen atom or a bumblebee to clover. The perfect person comes only when you are ready to love and be loved by them. Practice with the whole world and watch what marvels come your way.
As a conscious being, you have a choice in every moment. The choice you make determines how you experience the present moment. Thought, feeling and action burst forth from the wholeness of your Self in response to your willful choice. The world you perceive as surrounding you is a construct which expresses your choices, built up over time. Once created by your immediate present moment choice, nothing ceases to exist. Even if a creation is no longer perceivable in your present universe, its influence will be felt. A "past" idea or feeling can affect you throughout your days. So, the choice you make in this moment will spread its influence though dimensions human and otherwise.
While this is true of every creation of thought or feeling or matter, it is very large and powerful a dynamic when your decision in the present moment is rife with passion and conscious willfulness. Now, that passion can be fear. That will make a definite impression. If the passion be love though, well, you can imagine.
Yes! Imagine! Imagine love, unbridled, unhesitant. Imagine an entire life based upon loving without question, without strings. Imagine the adventure of a life built upon a decision to love.
You live in a universe of infinite resources which you command consciously and unconsciously. The very contents of your world conform to the choices you make on both conscious and unconscious levels. When you choose to be a conscious participant in this creation process, you begin to dismantle your conflicting desires and fears. You do this by choosing what you really want to live and who you really want to be. Keep choosing that in every moment and your conflicts will become increasingly obvious and truly surmountable.
If you choose to be in love, to release your attachment to the results of your actions or the actions of others, you set in motion a growing energy which invariably brings love your way. You do not need to change yourself, your habits, your appearance or anything else. All that needs to change is your beliefs about love not being possible for you. Then, you choose to love and then choose to love again and again. Look forward toward your aspiration and leave past thoughts and feelings and experience behind. Find every piece of evidence of your aspiration achieved and relish it. Let gratitude fill you with each example of your desire fulfilled and it will grow even more. Let go of the details and demands for how life gives you more of what you want. Accept what comes and enjoy.
What comes up as you contemplate such a fantastic imagining? Is it safe? Do you deserve to love and be loved? Security is certainly an issue in the effort to open to love. You have been offered many reasons to feel unsafe. You fear that your heart may be broken, your affections spurned, your generosity taken advantage of, your faith betrayed. The more you look for safety outside your Self, in the guise of the "right" person, or having enough money or things, the further from genuine security you fade.
As we have stated, that which appears to be outside of yourself is an expression of what exists within you. Your beliefs about yourself and the world you inhabit structure your experiences. If you believe you are safe and secure, you are. Fostering a deep seated belief in your security is just like fostering any other belief. It is a matter of finding the old belief within yourself and replacing it with the new one. At first, you will encounter the old belief already in progress, expressed into the world around you. Here it seems so real that it takes extra effort to replace it with your new belief. If you have, for instance, a job which you despise even though it pays you very well, choosing to believe it is safe to pursue your dream to be an artist is quite a leap. Can you feel safe without that income?
When you consistently find the courage to act on your new belief about your security springing forth from within, you will find evidence to prove it true. Instances of the old belief become conflicts to the new instead of the overriding experience they once were. As you find them, replace them with your new empowerment and act accordingly. The action gives power to the new belief and pockets of resistance will be released.
Entering a new relationship with all of the baggage of past hurts is an act of courage in and of itself. Imagine taking a brand new attitude into that relationship; an attitude of responsibility and self-empowerment. No longer feeling at the mercy of another person's response to you, you can feel free to be open and self-revealing simply because it feels so good. Your willingness to share yourself is what ensures your safety. The idea of turning the other cheek that exists in your collective consciousness puts forth the simple truth that your willingness to be vulnerable is your greatest protection. Believing that there is nothing to fear, that no harm can come to you, draws only good things to you.
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As we have stated many times, choosing to love will, with its high spiritual frequencies, light up the fear that you hold within you. Every choice to love in the moment will show you the barriers you have erected to hold off your fear. Choose love again in the face of that fear and you step right through it. Every time you step through in this way makes the next step easier. Your fears will always be there. They are part of you after all. That doesn't mean you have to be ruled by them.
Our friend here provides another good example to illustrate our point. As he progressed through early adulthood, every confrontation with his partner inspired an new round of hiding, avoiding, suppressing and repressing. His fear of intimacy grew constantly over the years. The fact that he blamed this on his partner's flaws only made things worse. Indeed, his actions in response to his fear pushed his partner farther away consistently. By the inevitable end of his marriage, he had created a classic broken heart for himself. It certainly felt real enough to him. He could continue to blame his partner and proclaim that she didn't love him. He could claim that he loved her though and was willing to sacrifice everything to the marriage. Because she didn't want him, he was justified in withdrawing further. This self-deception continued for years while he merrily suffered the pain of the self-righteous. It was in that self-created agony that the marriage finally ended. He was still terrified of intimacy and thoroughly barricaded from it. He was, at least, willing to feel the pain that he had manufactured to be the ultimate rejection.
In the years that followed the end of his marriage, he discovered, in the safety of living alone, a renewed desire for intimacy. That was, after all, the core of his withheld energy. He had defended his own vulnerability to the point of explosion and now needed to express it through his pain. He had come to the conclusion that he had suffered enough for his safety.
Coming out of his shell did not happen overnight though. Each new relationship was marked by layers of distrust. Each new person exhibited for him attributes that he could feel threatened by and so justify the fear of intimacy that he had never really faced in himself. Recognizing that facing his fears released the pain when he separated from his wife, he began to approach these experiences differently. He began to look for, express and step through fears as they came up. Progress was being made through these years. Each new relationship reflected that progress, becoming more intimate on one level or another. The range of people he tried to love provided stimulus to many facets of his psyche and healing was broadly based. One person offered a place to cry, another a chance to face rejection, another sexual expression, another mystical experience and so on. In every one, his growing commitment to real love was challenged and strengthened. Finally, after consciously choosing and expressing a commitment to loving unconditionally, he became open to a relationship which embodies just such idealistic values. He did not search for someone to share love with, he simply loved. He no longer hid from intimacy, he opened his heart and shared himself as much and as often as he could remember to do so. He chose to be in love. The world responded in kind.
Thus it is in your dimension. You choose who to be and your world responds in kind. If you choose to be afraid, your world offers you danger and threat. If you choose to be in love, you find beauty, kindness and joy in your world. You have been living a combination of these extremes throughout your life. You crave and revere love but hold fears which conflict with your desire. Thus, life is a complicated trial for you. By making this dynamic thoroughly conscious, you can choose to make it simple and joyous. Your commitment to becoming conscious is all that you require.
Before urging you to choose to love everything unconditionally, let's look at what that means. Just as it might seem, to such divine love there are no judgements, conditions or demands; no strings attached. No response is required, of any sort. Everything is accepted and appreciated just as it is; no change necessary. There is no, "I will love you if you love me." This is the love which God showers on you, feeding you life itself no matter who you are or what you do or what you think of yourself. It is the very stuff of which you are made. Therefore, you have plenty to share. Indeed, the more of it you give away, the more of it you get to play with, live within and enjoy. Loving without conditions is the most wonderful experience you will ever know and it is available in every moment.
To make such ecstatic experience a part of your every moment can become incredibly simple. Like most "achievements", we suggest a two pronged approach. First, aspire! Make a decision that you desire to live in love unconditional and freely share it. Commit to this as a way of life, knowing fully that is a constant source of great joy. This is the greatest gift you can offer to yourself and to your world. Such a way of living uplifts all of creation in your universe and beyond. Even the judgmental love which is coloured by sadness and pain, yours and that of others, is rich with life. All forms of love expand limitlessly and growth is always the result. Throw yourself into love. Hold nothing back. Commit to it fully. In every moment, commit anew. It is your choice in every moment whether to love or to fear. Choose love and let the light of your Soul shine through you. After all, the alternative ain't great.
The other prong to this task is to trust. Root out the fears that block your choice in every moment to love unconditionally. See those fears for the made up descriptions of your world that they are. Make up new descriptions that support your aspiration to love. Redefine your universe to be one in which it is safe to love, to trust and to express who you really are in every moment. In a universe where your belief structures the reality you perceive, you get to choose love. It is safe to let your sustenance come to you just like the flora and fauna of nature do. It is safe to let love come to you in whatever form it will. You need not demand who or how or why. By trusting alone, you create the mechanism which draws love and life to you. No effort required. Your willingness to love makes a powerful statement to the universe that the universe responds to in kind. Your willingness to trust in the face of your fears powers you through them easily and quickly.
Do you see now why we spent so many words speaking about fear and how to transcend it? You innately know, deep down inside of you, that love is the fundamental experience of life. Love is the voice of your Soul singing in your heart. Because it is innate in you, it flows under its own power through you. It needs no manufacturing or forcing from you. It needs only to have the barriers to its flow removed. Those barriers lie on the surface of your conscious mind and deep within your unconscious. To release them, you must let them become conscious. Then choose love in the face of them. How that gets accomplished is as unique as you are. There is no right or wrong way (love unconditional remember?). Our suggestions are only the beginning. The task is yours to choose as you will.
The reason that this task is ultimately so simple is that in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance, healing is instantaneous. Every motion in that direction brings healing to your fears. To heal a sickness in your body, accept it as it is, see its perfection in the moment and celebrate it. Thus, it is released. To heal a fear, which runs deeper and is the force behind and beneath illness, do the same. It is perfection in action in the present moment. Love it, honour its meaning (that does not mean to act on your fear) and celebrate it by expressing it freely. Then make a new choice. The extent to which you do this is the extent to which you will be instantly and completely liberated from your fear.
Like a wave on the ocean, your experience of love and fear ebbs and swells in alternating undulation. Each moment of love brings new swells of fear to light, showing you any blocks you have to experiencing that love. The power and intensity of your love will be measurable by the barriers you throw up against it. The converse is equally true. By willingly experiencing that fear and opening to it too, you open to the next wave of love to wash through you. Eventually, with practice, you need never step out of loving consciousness. You apply it equally to fear and to love. That is unconditionality. As one side of the equation grows, so too does the other. Your understanding and appreciation of your fear and distrust and insecurity will take over as your openness to love grows.
The willingness to experience life is the pathway to living in full accord with your Soul. Can you see how hard you have resisted experiencing your life in its wholeness? Every fear you have pushed away is a piece of your Soul you have refused. To love your fear will release you from pain and suffering forever. All of the pieces of your whole being will return to you effortlessly when you choose to accept them as they are
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Truly, Life is Nothing Personal. It is unconditional at its very essence. God cares not who you are or who you think you are. God loves you completely regardless of your beliefs and your actions. Your love can be just as complete and divine. Let go of the belief that you must change your world and its occupants. Love does not require you to hurt when others hurt. Love does not require anything! Love sees perfection in everything seen and unseen. Love knows the wholeness of all creation and honours that wholeness. The pain of Self and others is perfect too. Love it and you let go of judgements. Pain becomes intense sensation, just like ecstasy. As such, it is a stimulus to growth into wholeness. As such, it, too, is divine.
Now if you can think of a better feeling than to be in love, choose that instead. Do not let anything deter you from pursuing your aspiration. Do not even let your beliefs about how you must earn what you get or how you do not deserve such reward stop you from having what you want right now. As we have described in "Life is Nothing Personal", what you seek is the experience of your desires fulfilled. That experience lay, not in the action or in things which represent success, but in the feeling of success, in the realized idea of your desires. These you can grant to yourself right now. Then go looking in the physical world for examples of this desire fulfilled. Give yourself the feeling of being in love, seeing the perfection of the beloved and accepting this love into your Self. Let the world reply with equal vigour and embrace the love it offers to you. Unconditional love expands and so it is the universe as a whole that you love, life itself. Even more than another human, you can love life with complete abandon. It will love you back just as completely.
The tales you have heard of sages and saints speak of a total devotion to life, to God, to love. Though their love was tested by their beliefs about being human, always it was rewarded with bliss. Such a story is your life too. For now, your devotion is tentative at best. You commit yourself so sparingly. You have the right to commit to your own happiness. This does not go against God's will. Indeed, your happiness is the greatest gift you can offer. Your Soul whispers to you of love. Its desire is to express love as only you can. There are infinite aspects to your Soul and all yearn to love. All express that yearning in unique ways. Your way can only be perfect. It is your divine Self speaking.
On to Chapter 4:
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