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Dear Friends
There will be times when a reader will send in a question that we all may benefit from. When this happens, in addition to my replying with a personal response, both the question and the response will be shared on these pages.
The following was received from one of our subscriber’s on the topic of conscious love:
If I understand you correctly, a person must in the awakened state of presence in order to experience conscious love. Is it possible to send me several examples of a few of awakened beings from the past and how they transmitted their conscious love?
Yes, a person must be in divine presence in order to experience and to share conscious love. I will cite examples from art, poetry, and literature.
In the area of art Rembrandt would be a fine example.
If we study his self-portraits from 1629 through the year of his death in 1669, we can actually detect the evolution of conscious love on Rembrandt’s face. In particular, the last two self portraits of his life illustrate that nearly everything false within him had dissolved into nothingness, and all that remained was the presence of conscious love.
In the area of poetry, there are numerous examples from a variety of mystical traditions.
There is the Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, the Italian poet Catherine of Sienna, the German poet Rilke, the British poet William Blake, and the American poet Walt Whitman. (Whitman’s ‘Song of the Road’ is an invitation for the reader to join him on the spiritual path.)
In literature, in addition to the sacred writings of the past such as the Bible (Old and New Testaments,) the Upanishads, The Koran, and The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, the following examples come to mind: The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Johann Von Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ the Persian writer Farid ud-Din Attar’s ‘Conference of the Birds,’ the Greek playwright Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Trilogy,’ and Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ and ‘The Odyssey.’
Through their selfless desire to teach and to share the conscious love which they struggled in this lifetime to attain, each of these men and women endearingly served humanity.
Conscious love is our birthright. We just need to be taught that it exists, and how to attain it.
CONSCIOUS LOVE - PART II
Anonymous English Monk: (Author of ‘The cloud of Unknowing.’)
By love, God can be grasped and held, but by thought neither grasped nor held.
When experiencing conscious love we are able to accept the divine on his terms, and not our own.
Our minds are hearts have difficulty grasping the idea of a loving divinity who allows for evil, illness, and untimely deaths. However, the soul that has fused with the divine has a different understanding.
For example, the spiritual state of conscious love which the Psalmist reflects in his writings expresses this understanding quite well.
Psalm 23: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.
Similar to a candle that is capable of lighting hundreds, if not thousands of other candles without losing any of its radiance, the mystic not only does not lose any of his radiance through serving others with his loving light, his soul increases as he dissolves further into conscious love.
Rumi: I vanished into my Beloved, graced by the essence of love.
In spite of all of the scholarly theories regarding who is the subject of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the mystic understands that like the Psalmist, the sonnets were composed by someone well immersed in the state of conscious love.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 29: For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings, that then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Those walking the spiritual path typically experience more and more moments of conscious love as their consciousness develops.
These sublime moments of divine love provide comfort and nourishment. Whereby, allowing these seekers to continue transforming all of the ‘thunderbolts’ they encounter along the way…all the way.
The kingdom of heaven (i.e. conscious love) is like a man seeking to purchase the world’s finest pearl, who, when he finally found it, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Free translation of Matthew 13:44)
He that has ears to hear, let him hear.