Where’s the gold kept?
I hear a type of conversation which I wish I could intervene in.
It’s on the relative merits of getting and giving love.
I’m speaking about real love, true love, transformative love – such as we find in the higher dimensions.
A reader wrote me and said you don’t know anything about real love. Oh, yes, I do. That most precious of knowledge was gifted me in 2015 for a period of months. But I only feel it in wisps now.
Compared to that knowledge…. but let me not get started.
I suppose we wouldn’t be sending love out to the world unless others could “get” our love. But if we depend on love to be delivered to our door, so to speak, we run into problems like: Our partner doesn’t feel loving right now; they’re busy; they’re away; they’re preoccupied with a major deal.
We say we wish our spouses loved us more. If they’d only change…. Let’s go to counselling. Etc.
I personally believe that this view of love leaves us more or less in perpetual lack, always seeking love from others outside ourselves. So often, doing without, at least when we want or “need” it.
As more and more of us experience our hearts gradually opening, I think we’ll recognize at some point that our hearts are the major source of our love. (1)
And when we do, we begin to see another way in which the delivery of love happens – reliably, regularly, predictably.
When we get in the habit of drawing love up from our now-opened hearts on the in-breath and sending it out to others on the out-breath, we realize that we experience our love as it comes up and passes through us.
So that’s how we “get” love. Through the process of “giving” it to others. Clever.
For me, my experience of love happens mainly on the in-breath. Love arises and I fill myself with it. The out-breath is more or less the releasing of that love.
There’s no asking my partner to interrupt her day to fill my empty heart, so to speak. She’s not responsible for bringing me love, sending her love to me, etc. I am.
It’s true that even the thought of the beloved causes love to arise in my heart. But I’m the one who’s doing it.
Here’s my guess. The sooner we alter our viewpoint from seeking the flow of love from another to seeking the flow of love from our own hearts, the happier we’ll be as a society. No more trips to the counsellor. No more coaxing our partners. No more frustration and endlessly-postponed gratification.
The box that Eckhart Tolle’s beggar was sitting on, that contained the gold of love, (2) is our very own heart. Open the box and enjoy the bounty.
Footnotes
(1) Michael has told me that we can get love from the very air. My hypothesis is that our hearts are the major source for us.
(2) A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap.
“I have nothing to give you,” said the stranger. Then he asked: “What’s that you are sitting on?”
“Nothing,” replied the beggar. “Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.”
“Ever looked inside?” asked the stranger.
“No,” said the beggar. “What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.”
“Have a look inside,” insisted the stranger.
The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. Downloaded from https://www.inner-growth.info/power_of_now_tolle/eckhart_tolle_chapter1.htm)