There Is Only Love

Anything you or anyone else has ever done has been the movement of love. What shapes this movement of love is the sense of me. What we’re always doing is taking care of the self, whether it is a small sense of self or a more expanded one. Whenever that sense of self is contracted and small, we take care of that me. And when it’s expanded, we take care of that larger sense of self. All we have ever done is tried to take care of the self in the best way we know how, which is always a loving act.

But, of course, when our actions only take care of a contracted me, they don’t take care of or take into account other things. For example, we might take care of our taste buds, but not our whole body. Or if we are so identified with a feeling that all we can do is take care of it, we may not be taking care of our whole Being. Taking care of only the taste buds or only the emotions is still a loving act, but because it’s such a narrow way of loving ourselves, it can be neglectful or even harmful to other aspects of our Being.

We can be afraid that if we see love in everything it will mean we will allow rape, murder, and other horribly narrow ways of taking care of a small separate sense of me to continue. Yet in discovering that there is only love, the surprising thing is that our actions naturally become more loving. If we see murder as an evil that needs to be abolished without also seeing it’s true loving nature, that’s when it makes sense to murder. If murder is really bad, then it makes sense to kill someone who has murdered someone else. Or it even makes sense to kill someone before they kill us. It makes sense to bomb a country before it attacks us. But when we see the loving nature of even murder, we can respond to it in a way that doesn’t perpetuate it…

It is possible to recognize the love that is already inside of us and already acting through all of us. It is in recognizing that love that the possibility exists for even greater recognition of love. Contrarily, when we reject any aspect of love-which includes anything that’s happening-the more contracted our experience will be and the less completely loving our actions will be. So, in condemning, we actually become more like what we condemn. Seeing the beauty, perfection, and love within something is what allows it to transform, to move into a more complete way of loving.

When the sense of our self expands, our actions aren’t really any more loving; they’re just more loving towards a more complete view of the self. When our loving actions take care of a larger sense of ourselves, we appear more saint-like because they’re taking into account everybody, since we recognize that we are everybody. These actions are still self-gratifying, but they’re gratifying to a much bigger sense of self.