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Knowing Love

 

Have you noticed your tendency to look for love in all your social interactions. We already know that love is real, and we seek the happiness and contentment that we associate with the promise of love. But love is even more than an emotional experience, love is both the movement of reality and our fulfillment. Love is already fully contained within us, and is fully discoverable.

 

Over the past few years I have frequently referenced a quote variously attributed to both Rumi and A Course in Miracles (ACIM), as follows: "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." ACIM continues "It is not necessary to seek for what is true but it is necessary to seek for what is false." Our work in satsang is often centered on exposing these obstacles to knowing love.

 

Spiritual teachers urge us to discover that we are the source of love - it resides within us waiting to be revealed. Can you open your tender heart to allow your love to flourish? Perhaps these quotations might serve as guidance.

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Quotes

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Actions that take place from emptiness cannot be actions without love. One does not consciously practice doing the loving thing. In the pure mind, an urge arises and action takes place. 

~ Jac O'Keeffe 

 

Love, like a sleeping beauty, lies in the heart. And awareness is the prince that goes inside and kisses the sleeping beauty. We take our awareness into the heart to find love, and just one kiss, awareness and love, awakens Truth. In this love affair it's nice to bring the beloved a little gift - tiny. We sacrifice what is held dearest: not a cow, not a camel, not a goal, but just a little bit of individuality we give her as a gift. We hand her the castle walls and defenses as our gift - a small trade. 

~ Pamela Wilson 

 

"What is love?"; "The total absence of fear," said the Master; "What is it we fear?"; "Love," said the Master.

 ~ Anthony de Mello 

 

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. 

~ Eckhart Tolle 

 

The guises you employ to protect yourself from the world Also deny you full access to your heart. To love fully and completely demands the willingness To be annihilated. 

~ Wu Hsin 

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Self is the indweller of all Beings, so love of others is Love of Self, your Self.

Self is the greatest Love and the dearest of all lovers.

Love is the attraction of Self to Self in Self.

There is nothing besides this Love, this source of Joy.

See your own beauty and you are this Indweller, this Love and the beauty itself. 

~ Papaji

 

I saw God when the heart was opened, And every veil that hinders soul's eyes torn away, And one was I with Creator and with creature, And knew that Lover, Loving and Beloved were identical. 

~ Samuel Lewis (sufi Sam) 

 

When you are willing to shine the light of love onto the parts that you are not proud of - onto the unaccepted parts, the unloved parts, the unwanted emotions, into all the darkened corners of your soul - love will suffuse them, embrace them, until you are left as nothing but love itself. Love arises when you expose everything. 

~ Brandon Bays 

 

We search for love out there in the world, only to discover that we never lacked love, and there is no 'out there'. 

~ Jeff Foster 

 

When you experience yourself AS Love, you will radiate like an overflowing ocean and everywhere you go will be the Garden of Eden. Love is discovered to be the fully empty openness of Being, through which alone your present perception - whatever it contains - exists. Relax defining your experiences and automatically notice how you are essentially rested as free love itself, already. 

~ Bentinho Massaro 

 

To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. 

~ Byron Katie 

 

The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone anywhere. In all of these eons 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". 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 you are this love. The source of all love is within you. 

~ Gangaji 

 

Let your will burn in this fire so that it takes you nowhere else. Let your self be burned in this fire of eternity, love and peace. Don't be afraid of this fire, it is love itself. This desire for freedom is the fire of love ! 

~ Papaji 

 

Love is a tremendous caring that arises in the wake of transcending the personal self. In the wake of this transcendence, something amazing arises. A deep love and caring arises from within emptiness, from nowhere. This love and caring seeks only the Truth in every moment and in all circumstances. True love is something far greater than anything that could be called personal. True love is a non-personal miracle. It is the nature of reality itself. It is the natural and spontaneous expression of the undivided Self. 

~ Adyashanti 

 

All love is God’s infinite love shining in each of our minds.

~ Rupert Spira

 

Oneness is immaculate, because the whole source of everything is only unconditional love, and obviously it embraces everything, including hatred and anger. Nothing is excluded - all is the absolute. 

~ Tony Parsons 

 

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all....When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all, you love each. One and all are not exclusive.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.

~ Marianne Williamson

 

Admit something: Everyone you see,, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud; Otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, This great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? 

~ Hafiz

 

Love is not inside me or inside you. It is the very substance of us both. It cannot be shared or given. It defies any appearance of separation. Any appearance of separate bodies. Love does not recognize separateness. It does not split itself in two. It does not see the other as the other. It only sees itself. 

~ Unmani

 

Despite all of our limitations, it is simply the truth that freedom and peace, love and joy, wisdom and truth, in their highest capacity, are awaiting within the heart of every being to be remembered, embraced, embodied and celebrated. 

~ Isira 

 

Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions. The experience of Self is only love, which is seeing only love, hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love and smelling only love, which is bliss. 

~ Ramana Maharshi 

 

The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. But finally, you must realize you are this love. The source of all love is within you. 

~ Gangaji 

 

I used to believe that love was something I had to do. That it was something I had to find. That it was a goal to reach or a state to experience. That it was a desired quality of a separate person. For a time, I even refused to use the word 'love'. "Love is just a concept!", I would exclaim. "Love comes and goes!" "There is nobody here who loves!" "Love implies two!" These days, I love to use the word love. Why not! It's simply a word that points to this total non-conceptual intimacy right at the heart of present experience. It points to the absolute non-separation between who I am and life itself. No need to find it, or do it, or reach it, or understand it, or even experience it - for it is always right here, closer and more intimate than breathing, prior to all understanding, without an opposite, and indestructible. Call it love, or life, or Being, or nothing, or even refuse to talk about it - even in the midst of apparent devastation, it IS. Even pain is allowed in its radical embrace. The ocean cannot be destroyed by the storm of life. It rests in itself, always. You are the love you seek, and this isn't just some comforting New Age belief. 

~ Jeff foster 

 

Can we open into love, not knowing where it will take us? Trust it to dissolve whatever we have accrued that is not fundamentally who we are, let it take us out on a limb and mould us into full embodiment - so we literally become what we are here to be - the presence of love in human flesh upon this earth? 

~ Miranda Macpherson 

 

When life breathes love, what can we do but dance?

~ Pamela Wilson

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