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As we evolve in love, Love moves us from small to big, from specific to Universal. Love grows in us from personal to transpersonal, and on to cosmic.
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Personal or interpersonal love means human power. Everything you do is created through your own personal effort to care for and consider another.
Transpersonal love arises from Divine inspiration. It is not created by the individual, it is ALLOWED by the individual, and works THROUGH the individual. [To the reader: we're referring here to the Still Small Voice.] Transpersonal love provides more healing power and higher purity than an individual can create PERSONALLY.
Cosmic love, unlike the prior two levels, is not a transaction. It is not a movement of energy from one entity to another, or even from God to an entity. Cosmic love IS. We refer to that Reality when we say God is Love. Because God is everywhere and God is love, love is everywhere already. And therefore it doesn't move from point to point because it is already at every point.
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Thus, progressively, the act of creating love becomes the grace of allowing Love. And eventually, the entire movement of love, both interpersonal and transpersonal, grows like a river till it empties into the ocean of cosmic Love, becoming peaceful and still.
How love evolves step by step
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There's always the kid in elementary school who is self-deluded enough to think he could run the country right now. Even so, truth is built from the ground up; we cannot get to where we are going by skipping steps.
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You've got to crawl before you can walk.
You've got to walk before you can run.
You've got to run before you can fly.
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You've got to fly high before you can see that there is no high or low, and nowhere to go -- you are already where you are going, and where you are going is already Here. And Love is Everywhere, always.
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Personal (and interpersonal) love
We progress in love step-wise: We love personally, first; only later can we love transpersonally. Otherwise, the ethical poverty of NOT loving personally so confuses the mind and deludes the soul that we are not in a position to hear Divine promptings. And due to our unwillingness to commit ourselves personally, we are unprepared to obey Divine promptings. Thus, we must first master personal love.
Personal love becomes effective when you SURRENDER -- by physically doing what you can, as a human with your own power, to be good to others and by trying your best to address the needs of others as you see them.
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A CRY FOR LOVE
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LOVING RESPONSE
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RESULT
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NOTE
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"I am upset because no one gives me flowers."
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Address the person's expressed needs, knowing that nothing else is likely to be acceptable. So: "Here are some flowers for you."
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Creates a little opening, a little relief -- a small but crucial improvement.
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Love cannot effectively introduce itself to a person who, doubled over in pain, is unreceptive to much good. So: patiently, tenderly, thoroughly, Love attends to the wound until the furrow disappears from the brow.
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"You mean someone CARES?"
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Provide assurance: "Look, I love you. Love is a reality in your life."
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Addresses the problem -- the assumption of want and lack. ("No one loves me," etc.)
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The person now can open their eyes and, looking upward, behold the smiling face of Love, and at least see that beauty is here.
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"But it's hard for me to accept that you love me."
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Ask for consciousness: "Yes, but open your eyes, and you will see. Just be here with me."
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The person begins to experience the present reality of Love.
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By remaining in the condition of love long enough to be raised to a higher vibration, the person moves onward and upward towards a more perfect cognition of Love's true Expanse.
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"Okay. I do love you, and I see that you love me."
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"Yes, and now we need to sit and bask in the love we share with each other."
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The wound of loneliness is healed and strength develops.
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The individual becomes peaceful enough to hear the still small voice, and strong enough to implement its promptings.
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Transpersonal love
Graduation to transpersonal love requires willingness to follow inner guidance in loving action. Otherwise, love remains stuck at the personal level.
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To evolve into transpersonal love, you sufficiently transcend selfishness and unwillingness so that you are rarely troubled or defensive. You don't spend much time mulling over everything, trying to figure out how to defend yourself because you're in trouble or expect to be. The mind relaxes. You have done what you could or should have. Now there's room to hear the Divine promptings. And now the surrender and willingness you have developed by obeying your own conscience allows you to more consistently obey Divine direction. As you become established in transpersonal love, you are reaffirmed in the beauty and efficacy of Divine promptings.
Your relationship with God deepens. You grow more grateful, more receptive. Your relationship with your fellow man improves vastly because God shares real love through you.
Transpersonal love brilliantly outshines romance and acquisition; it exceeds any consoling, gratifying, or preferred involvement with another human being or any object of exclusive devotion. Self transcendence is a disposition which, once you understand it and experience it, you experience in relation to ALL beings and ALL things -- fundamentally equally.
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TRANSPERSONAL ORIENTATION
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RESULT
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NOTE
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I am moved to love you, and I... RECOGNIZE the inner urges to Love as Divine promptings. STRIVE to obey those promptings when given and as given -- thereby delivering God's Love messages to the intended recipients.
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Fantastically effective and reliable results. The power and appropriateness of Divinely inspired work is always found to be incomparable.
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Loving is no longer a matter of trying to love personally, as an ego or as an individual. We are living agents of God's Love. And yet, the experience of Love is still mostly limited to surges of Love and loving transactions.
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I do what I am told to, and I... feel grateful to God for the joy and relief of being able to help in the Cosmic plan.
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A refined awareness of God's presence, which becomes steadier and steadier as obedience improves. An increasingly secure sense of identity as God's child.
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At first transpersonal love supplements personal love, but then, progressively, the movement of Divine Love practically REPLACES the individual effort to love.
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Cosmic love
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As you live a life of transpersonal love, at a certain stage you begin to realize that you are doing things in God. Even your bad hair day happens within a good hair day called God. You become aware that all actions are happening within a non-action called Being, and you actually are the Being itself within which these actions are being performed. This is cosmic love -- the kind of love that does not need to be "done," because it is already and always done, that is, always complete and finished. Realizing that love truly is a Condition and a Reality, your task is to simply remain in the Condition of Love by virtue of mindfulness.
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What is called universal love, or agape, is not cosmic love, because it presumes that someone is personally involved in universal loving. No person can claim ownership of cosmic love. When you are truly involved in cosmic love, you are out of the loop as YOU, an ego. Cosmic love is of God and not of anyone's business. The limited business that WE have as an individual is:
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to commit ourselves to personal love
to submit as transmitters of Divine promptings for the realization of transpersonal love
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And this marks the end and limit of any business that we, as individuals could have with loving. But this is the Divine way, the Eternal Truth. Is it not?
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STATE OF THE HEART
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NATURAL RESPONSE
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RESULT
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NOTE
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We feel God's Love all around us. We feel that we are living IN Love, and we are living IN God.
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The joyful recognition that God is Everywhere, and that Love is everywhere.
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The sense of separateness starts to break down. Loving is less and less a PROCESS or a TRANSACTION.
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The healing work of Love now becomes more a matter of Being in God.
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We are not separate, after all! We are one in God!
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We relax our sense of separateness.
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We melt into the one Being, the Light out of which we all arise, and in which we are truly One. We shed the sense of separate identity.
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The archetypal love transaction, born of the pressures of presumed differences, is consumed and consummated in the realization of the real Condition of Unity.
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Thank you for understanding
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We have tried to speak honestly about the nature of Love, knowing that we are speaking in pure terms about a pure thing, and hoping that does not make love sound difficult. We trust that our reader is ready and willing to see that love IS a Transcendent Reality, not a personal possession; and that loving, the actual transmission of Love, is an ego-transcending movement that occurs within the larger Reality of Universal Love. For the sake of realism, those points had to be made. Even so, loving isn't impossible, or difficult: it is the way of being who you really are. Okay?
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