I’m struck by what Jesus said a few days ago: “It has never been the learning to love; it is the acceptance, allowing and remembering of love.” (1)
Had I not been privileged to experience transformative love for an extended period of time in 2015, (2) this passage would not really make sense to me. But that experience of transformative love opens up the meaning of Jesus’ words.
Here I am, like so many others, writing reams on a single passage from Jesus. His ability to put a rich lesson in a few words is characteristic of his teachings.
The task that faces us has never been to learn to love, as if the enterprise is new to us. We’ve always had the innate knowledge of love and ability to love, which has been covered up by several things.
First, it’s obscured by the natural density of the Third-Dimensional body, which makes it a relative non-conductor of things like emotions or divine states of consciousness.
Second, the stress that we generate results in bands of muscular tension which increase the body’s non-conductivity by causing us to tense up even more than we naturally do.
Third, our inadequate concepts of Reality prevent us from suspecting we are love or knowing ourselves as love.
Fourth, our residue of old issues and upsets exerts further drag on us.
And I could go on.
But when we accept our love and allow it to rise from the heart and go out into the world, then we set in motion events that will reclaim for us this innate knowledge of love and ability to love.
Here’s another example. He put a second matter in a puzzling yet enticing manner, so characteristic of Jesus: “We invite you home to the new reality of ancient existence.” New reality… ancient existence … home…. How can a new reality be ancient? How is it our home?
God is our home. Since God is all there is, our home becomes all there is, which is something that we’d need to realize to know.
God is love. Since that’s the case, the new reality of overarching, universal, or transformative love that we feel at some point in our Ascension journey is both new to us in this lifetime and ancient. It’s our original home and the one we return to after all our journeying. How did T.S. Eliot phrase it?
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (3)
Jesus is inviting us to return to our original and ancient home of love, which will appear to us to be a new reality but which is our home since forever, since before time began.
When we return home, we see it newly, as if for the first time.
Moreover, and equally importantly, the experience of transformative love is itself always new. It never tires. It never pales. It never flags. This newness of love is another way in which transformative love is a “new reality.”
Simple intellectual knowledge of this and other truths is a faint reflection of the actual truth. To be known, the truth must be realized.
This reality is “new” in the sense that it exists in a dimension of reality that is totally unknown to us in our present state of consciousness. When we enter any higher dimension of reality, the experience is that we’ve entered a space that’s entirely “new.”
The higher-dimensional experience is certainly new to the aspirant. But it simply restores that person to a state they knew long ago, which is why Jesus called it “ancient.” They left this state when they journeyed down into Third Dimensionality on their voyage from God to God. But, just as we’re remembering love, so we’re also remembering higher-dimensional states we once knew.
As we go forward, teachers will look at higher and higher dimensions of experience and express things in ways that puzzle us. However, if we’ve ever had a transformational moment, peak experience, or enlightenment experience, we’ll know that the space we end up in is entirely new and different from the space we were in before. It cannot easily be described in words that apply to the lower and denser version of reality.
We end up trying to suggest those differences by using paradoxes to induce an “Aha!”, a moment of realization. Only, really, by realizing the higher space can it be known.
One minute in a higher-dimensional space immediately makes the difficulties facing the teachers plain. Simple, plain, descriptive language proves not enough to make that difficulty come alive to others or to explain what it is the sages are trying to say. We end up, as Adyashanti said, failing but hopefully failing well.
Here I go again, writing and writing on two sentences from Jesus. His teachings are like that.
Footnotes
(1) Actually said in March 1998, but posted yesterday (April 23, 2016): “Jesus: The New Reality of Ancient Existence” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=275872
(2) From March 15, 2015, when I had a heart opening and began to experience transformative love, until the love was extended and subsumed in bliss from Sept. 30, 2015 till around January 2016.
(3) From Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot; at https://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot2.htm