IV. Seeking and Finding, P 1
1 The ego is certain that love is dangerous, and this is always its central teaching. It never puts it this way; on the contrary, everyone who believes that the ego is salvation seems to be intensely engaged in the search for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search for love very actively, makes one proviso; do not find it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as: “Seek and do not find.” This is the one promise the ego holds out to you, and the one promise it will keep. For the ego pursues its goal with fanatic insistence, and its judgment, though severely impaired, is completely consistent.
Journal
The ego mind believes in the search for love, it just doesn’t know what love is. As long as I use the ego mind to do my thinking, I do not know what love is. So I search endlessly and of course since I don’t know love, I have no way of finding it. The ego goes on insisting that the search simply isn’t complete and I need to keep looking.
I’ve been married and divorced three times. Each time I found a new “love” I thought, “This is it! This is the one!” As if love could be contained only in a single person meant just for me. As if I could not have love unless I found this one special person. And even when I followed the ego’s dictates and found that love object, I was always disappointed, because that one did not live up to the ego expectations.
As far as I can tell, the egos idea of love is a bargain made between two people in which there is an agreement to limit love. If God is love then it is an agreement to limit God. Love then becomes an impossibility if not an outright attack. This doesn’t seem like love to me so much as it feels like guilt, and guilt feels like fear.
Some relationships seem to offer love more than others, but even in these there is a bargain struck. “You be the person I think I need you to be, and I will feel loved,” is the basis of the contract. When that ceases to happen, the feeling of “love” turns into hate. Even if the bargain seems to be holding, there is an undercurrent of anxiety. What if there is betrayal? What if there is abandonment? Love that can be lost is a source of fear. Is love fear?
There is love that is real and perfect with no fear or guilt attached to it. This love has no object; it isn’t special to one or the other. This love is complete as it is, and is not contained within one relationship, and denied to another. It does not begin, nor does it end. It simply is, eternally. The ego can only read about this love, it cannot understand it. It certainly cannot offer it and so it keeps the mind busy looking for love that isn’t love.
I can imagine love that is not special to any one person. I can even imagine loving everyone equally. I haven’t done this yet, but I have made inroads and I have tasted this, and so I can imagine it. But I cannot yet imagine love that has no object to attach itself. I hear the words and understand the concept of love that is just love without a need to be directed toward anything or anybody. But I can’t seem to get past the idea to the actual experience of that.
Perhaps I simply have not risen through this dense state of form to the point that I can imagine formlessness. My mind still attaches to the idea of there being a “what” I love or “who” I love, or at least that I could love every thing and every one. But to simply love, to be love, that love is all that is, so that there could not be anything else. That evades me.
What a thought, though! That seems to be what Jesus is teaching us. God is in this chair, this pencil, this person. God is in everything I see because God is in my mind. Love is in this chair, this pencil, this person. Love is in everything I see because love is in my mind. Love is in my mind. Love is my mind. Love is.
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