The Reality is Love

What kind of resistance arises for you when I announce, The Reality is Love?

Perhaps you want to disagree. And how is the reality NOT love? What do you consider “real”? And in what ways are they evidence that “Love is an Illusion”?

What is real? What is an illusion? What is true in my thoughts? What is a lie? I’ve come to feel that these questions do not have logical and rational answers, but instead the answers are a choice we have to make. There’s no denying or avoiding this choice—denial and avoidance are simply various options.

Be brave enough to feel the urgency of this. In every moment, you are already making a choice, whether you are conscious of it or not. So what are you choosing? What reality are you living in? And why?

My choice is that the reality is love. What is real, is love. What is an illusion, is the absence of it. What is true, is that there is love. What is a lie, is that there is none.

And let me be clear—I am not talking about mamsy-pambsy feel good love like everything is all good so don’t worry about it. I’m talking about the stark, irrational, deeply honest love that is unconditional. That’s right, the un-conditional love, the love of the goddess, the love of the holy mother, the love of Jesus Christ our Savior, the love of the nameless one, the love of the holies of holies, that deep juicy rich transformative kind of love. This is the reality.

The love that requires me to drop my judgments and my opinions. The love that requires me to speak my truth, and assert my boundaries with passion and precision. The love that requires me to drop my projections onto others and accept myself fully.
The love that requires me to BE love rather than SEEK it. To speak love into being rather than bemoan its lack. The love that requires me to see my whole self, and reveal it to myself, so it can all be loved, for if any part of myself is withheld from my own consciousness, I am setting up a wall. I am forcing the love that is to be limited, conditioned upon my own hiding.
We are all narcissists, at times. A narcissist is anyone who believes that we should only love when there is merit. It is love withheld, love made conditional, it is the effort to control love. That we should love one another when they fulfill our ideas of what a lovable person should be. We begin this bargaining with ourselves. We try everything we can to keep ourselves from actually loving who and what we are. Instead we adopt long and complicated stories about what it would take to just love and accept ourselves. This is the emptiness that we all know too well, the loneliness even when we are never alone.
We must be brave enough to face what the alternative really means. Unconditional love. We’ve heard about it before but do we really have the strength to believe it?

That’s right, Un-conditional. We say that, but do we understand it? No conditions.

Meaning, I love you even though you are pedophile. No conditions.

I will love you even though you are a murderer.
I will love you even though you are a psychopath.
I will love you even though you are a rapist.
I will love you even though you have abused your own family members.
I will love you even though you have molested your own family members.
I will love you even though you have abandoned your children.
I will love you even though you have refused the love of your partner.
I will love you even though you have rejected your gifts.
I will love you even though you are a terrorist.

Can we do it? Can we fathom it? Can we be it? Is it possible that there is love for even these people—and if we can’t imagine it, then is there really love for any of us?

To love someone is not to accept their behavior, nor to trust them. To love is to believe that no matter what anyone has ever done, no matter how much damage they have caused, no matter how dark their road has been, there is a light that they can turn to. That there is a wound that can be healed, and a place where love can blossom once again. I’m willing to stand for love in this way, no matter how many times I’m rejected or told that I am being ridiculous. No matter how much I am taught that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, that there are good people and bad people, and that I have to dole out my approval accordingly. That I have to open my heart to some and not others…no I am just not going to do it.

To be clear I am not saying let’s all go wound ourselves by exposing our hearts to the whims of other people who are deeply wounded, and who have turned away so profoundly from the love inside of their very own hearts. Just because we remind people that the reality is love does not mean we then accept their behavior, one that is rooted in the lie that there is no love after all.

After all, this love I am talking about is not satisfied with surface level stuff, this love I am talking about, it is like a heat seeking missile and where it sees the absence of love, where it knows that there is someone lost in the illusion that love does not exist it is not afraid to call it out! To explode upon this illusion a bomb of truth, and to set up firm boundaries, lines in the sand, to demand, choose love is real on this side, or know that I will never be silenced until you do.

That’s right I will not stand for anyone who wants to promote these lies any longer, and I will stand in peace and devotion, with my arm outstretched. Choose this reality with me. Stand on the side of the courageous, of the strong-willed, of the truth-tellers, of the mystery lovers, of the boundary pushers, of the artists, the wild eyed ones, and let us howl together as we build up this new world where yes, again and again yes, the reality is love.

If we are to be this kind of love, if we are to trust that this love is the reality, start within. Start within. Do whatever you need to do to make this reality alive inside of you. Don’t take no for an answer. Don’t take anyone else’s needs a priority over your own. Work as hard as you know how to work on this love and believe that you will find it. That you will sow it. And that it will grow. And then once it grows, by its very nature, it will want to spread.

It will want to pour out of you, like the water going over the rocks, like the sprays coming out of the broken fire hydrants attracting the children like moths to a flame to play in its beautiful and messy and broken freedom.

Oh yes, this is the love I am talking about. Can we all decide today to choose it as our reality? What more will it take it make it real than our own collective determination? We are all making a choice, right here, right now. What is yours?