Sliding softly into this week's Valentine vibe. . . here is a true jewel on ONELOVE from Gangaji
A Diamond in Your Pocket
And yet, love is what we crave. There is often a love/hate relationship
with the idea of love, most likely stemming from our experiences as
children where we loved helplessly. We projected love out onto our loved
ones - our mothers, fathers, brothers, or sisters - and at some point
found our loved ones to be unreliable. We confused their actions with
love and concluded that love was not trustworthy.
People are definitely not trustworthy, because in general, they are very
busy protecting their story of who they think they are. Since they are
mostly involved in their story, they can only give a certain amount of
love before they start wondering, 'Well, when do I get mine?' And since
love has been identified as being connected with another person, this
sets up a whole continuation of distrust around love. But love is not a
person. Love is the individual, collective, and universal soul. Love is
God. Love is truth. Love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is self. To know
yourself, to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to
love.
Many people are aware of their resistance, and they want to surrender,
but they don't know how. The only actual barrier to surrender is in not
seeing the underlying story you are telling yourself about the danger of
surrendering everything to love. And the degree to which you hold back
surrendering everything to love is the degree to which you suffer. The
degree to which you try to maintain the story about who you think you
are is the degree to which you feel isolated from love. Until you
realize, 'I want truth, which is love, more than anything,' you will
experience yourself as separate from love. Love is the constant. Love is
not an aspect of truth. Truth, God, and self are aspects of love.
What is the worst that could happen if you surrender to love? What we
seem to fear the most is the broken heart. Yet the very unwillingness
for the heart to be broken is the broken heart. The tragedy and the
irony is that in order to avoid a broken heart, people live in a state
of broken-heartedness. In the willingness to have the heart be broken a
million, trillion, zillion times, true love is revealed.
Let the whole world break your heart every instant of the remainder of
your life. Then this life can be lived in service to love. It does not
mean you stay in abusive relationships. It means only to stay true to
that which is always true to you, and that is love. Anything else is a
story. If the story is never investigated, your whole life is lived on
the assumption that the story is real, and that your heart, your soul,
and your love need to be protected. But that assumption is actually a
denial of your heart, your soul, your love. It is the denial of
self-love.
The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone anywhere.
In all of these aeons that you have been hiding from love, love is still
here, it is still open, it is still waiting for your commitment, still
waiting for you to say, 'Yes, I give my life to the truth of love. I vow
to let love live this life as it will, for better or worse, for richer
or poorer.'
Through honest self-investigation, it is possible to see why you may not
be surrendering to love, and to see that you actually have the choice to
surrender. It is a way to let the unconscious storylines become
conscious, the unknown become known. Ask yourself this question: Why is
it dangerous to surrender to love? Not why is it right to surrender to
love, or why is it good to surrender to love, but why is it dangerous to
surrender to love?
Let your individual consciousness drop down into the source of
consciousness, into the space where all of the reasons and
justifications for resisting surrender are seen simply as stories, as
something made up that you can very easily let go of. Allow all of the
stories, all of the defences, be seen for what they are. Are any of
these stories worth keeping? What is the cost to your life?
The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you.
It may be evoked by any number of people or events. A mountain can evoke
this love. A sunset can evoke this love. But finally, you must realize
that you are this love. The source of all love is within you.
From The Diamond In Your Pocket, by Gangaji