I just received an email announcement of a February love fest. This came from the people at www.entheos.com. These enthusiastic and caring souls put out some nice offerings. They are teaming up with Arielle Ford over at Evolving Wisdom. She is hosting a free tele-webinar type conference called The Art of Love: Relationship Series.
The series has a kick-off on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, and you are invited to this unique 10-day experience, which begins in earnest on Monday, February 18, 2013.
Revealing the most soulful and enriching relationship-building skills in “The Art of Love Relationship Series,” you’ll hear from and swoon with over 50 of the world’s most respected relationship luminaries; such as John Gray, Harville Hendrix, Jack Canfield, Neale Donald Walsch, Marianne Williamson, don Miguel Ruiz, Alison Armstrong, Katherine Woodward Thomas, Gay Hendricks, Katie Hendricks, Craig Hamilton, Claire Zammit, Debbie Ford, Jean Houston and more.
“These love geniuses have spent decades (and some, even lifetimes) studying the art of creating and maintaining healthy, vibrant, long-lasting relationships.”
And, it’s free. It should be free, after all, you know—It’s Love which is everywhere and ever present.
Actually, what you will experience is other people using word abstractions to describe how they think and feel about Love. Listening in you will be subject to these thinking love luminaries’ lovability, and you will then generate your own thoughts and feelings on the matter.
It looks to be a promising offering, and so I hope that you will consider a listen in. You can sign up and help spread the Love. Here is the site, once again: http://evolvingwisdom.com/artoflove2/.
And also, there is this one starting on February 27: http://www.entheos.com/academy/courses/Optimal-Living-101-Love
Crestone and Beyond
Today I had a 90 minute discussion with my college roommate of 43 years ago. He lives over in Charleston, South Carolina. He and I figure out everything about every fortnight or so.
Today we discussed aspects of healing and life growth, why we come to this incarnate plane from finer dimensional planes of existence, and then he brought up a recent conversation he had with a family relative who had experienced “hatred” from another.
He told me that he told her that there is no such thing as hatred. I told him that I agree, and that I had been thinking along these lines since before I ever met him. His name is John also, and he and I think and feel alike on most subjects.
We then mirrored one another’s realization that All is really just Love, perhaps in disguise, and there is no place or process or dimension or time where Love is not. Basically, we surmised that “hatred” is an absence of Love, and we agreed on our shared understanding that there is an impossibility of an absence of Love. So, we reasoned hatred out of our lexicon of existence.
Such a Heart felt and mental word abstraction on the subject of Love leaves us wondering about the many varieties of suffering which abound in our earthly dimension.
I cannot explain this seeming paradoxical conundrum to you; why we experience suffering if Love is all that is. I can only try to explain what is in my Heart and my fleshly spirit substance. You either have faith in a higher coherent intelligent creative ordering of all reality, or you doubt that such an intelligent creative ordering of all that is even exists.
You might even flatly deny that such intelligence exists at all. If you deny such, then you really should stroll out into Nature and become a student of the Teacher. You might be one of those people who never even wonders about how a cut on your skin heals. You might know people who just take everything for granted, except for when they feel deprived of their sense pleasures and little comforts.
To become a student of what we are–Nature– would mean that you would have to relax, open yourself, and release self imposed ego restraints. Just remember, before we had scholars and books and dogmas and religions and spiritual paths and spiritual teachers and all of this human egoistic intellectual anthropocentric hoop-la, we had Nature.
Become more pagan, if you will—you might learn more from Nature than from a rousing score of Love scholar geniuses and all of the God and spiritual theorists and practitioners in Kingdom Come, all put together. Take advantage of the Mother’s wisdom and generosity and abundance while she is still ready, willing, able—and easily available.
MLK allowed his own martyrdom for the sake of humankind’s evolution. He had fear, naturally, like all of us. However, he had more courage. The French word for Heart is Coeur. Courage is not the absence of fear; it is moving on into the adventure in spite of having the fear. We should never relinquish our fear instinct. We should refine it. Fear tells us that we are in danger, or that we are about to be in some sort of discomfort zone.
Two years ago on Valentine’s Day I wrote about my early explorations into the Love arenas of eros, philos, and agape. The entry is entitled “A Valentine Day’s Love.” It is one of my personal favorites because of the time period in my life (military high school), and the vignettes from that period, which I try to capture the essence of in this self examination of my journey into Love (This Journal is here: https://haelanlifestream.com/journal/a-valentines-day-love/.).
The ancient Greek philosophers established earlier considerations of eros, philos, and agape.
Eros is erotic relationship Love, and is one of the main subjects of consideration in the webinar study mentioned above.
Philos is philanthropy, or love of all of one’s global humanity. More global practice of philos would separate us from violence and war and geopolitical strife.
Agape is the over arching umbrella of all Love. It is the essence of the fabric of our Creation, according to the Love Geniuses that I have encountered.
One description of agape can be seen in the New Testament of the Bible in “I Corinthians, Chapter 13.”
One description of agape is encompassed in the Tibetan symbol known as Rigpa, which represents an open intrinsic awareness radiating as Joyful Loving Kindness. You would observe this in the presence and words of the current Dalai Lama, for instance.
Another type of word abstraction which one can attain to is also Buddhist in origin, and is known as The Four Immeasurables. These are Compassion, Equanimity, Sympathetic Joy, and Unconditional Presence.
These Four Immeasurables are good word abstractions concepts to contemplate, and build a daily meditation-in-action practice around. This would be like a Bhakti or Karma Yoga type of lifestyle.
The only way we come to these aspects of our intrinsic state of being Love is to heal, evolve, and remove the overlying clutter of egoistic misinformation which we hold onto. This knowing state is beyond words. However, words suffice to direct the faculty of discrimination out of its restless chatter and into the silence of the knowing.
Mother Nature can help us learn about this.
To know Love is to know Love of Self. Self is all encompassing. I am not writing about one’s small ego self. I am writing about higher Self. One should be able to discern higher Self through an interaction with Nature. You just have to go and see.
Self Love is life’s most powerful healer. Self Love involves a living Presence of those Four Immeasureables listed above.
Self Love also involves an ongoing practice of non judgment and forgiveness; first toward self and then toward other.
Today we move into the Chinese year of the Snake, and of this Snake Year current Chinese astrologers forecast economic upheaval and geopolitical chaos.
As the song from the 1960’s says, “What the world needs now is Love, sweet Love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of—”
Actually, it is abundantly omnipresent, but we have hidden ourselves from it.
Signing off from Crestone and Beyond.
Rigpa—-onward——