Is There A Place?

Poems and Readings

Dec 17

Awakening to Divine Love and the Path of Conscious Relationship

Beyond the black wire mesh of the fireplace screen, a fire burns hot. The embers are orange and white.

Is there a place one can go
to say “I’m on fire,”
where instead of a dousing,
I am met by
a knowing glance,
a smile emanating
from the heart?

Love Is Always A Flow

When Love awakens in the human heart, its force can overwhelm the nervous system.

Why does Love awaken us?
How do we bear this beautiful intensity responsibly?
Are there guides for this geography of the spiritual life?

The Emergence of Love, Context and Guidance

This SAND podcast episode with guests Cynthia Bourgeault and A.H. Almaas is a nourishing teaching that illuminates a reality with precision and destigmatizing seriousness.

Bourgeault shares autobiographically, grounding her teaching in a human context. She normalizes the first force (the affirming force) of divine eros that draws us into a whirlpool of attraction, emphatic that this force must not be repressed or denied. She describes a requisite second force (denying force) that must come against the initial emergence, as our residues of pain and habitual patterns draw us into denser inner geographies. Many relational fields cannot bear this friction.

According to Bourgeault, for spacious and transformative love to manifest, there must be a bridging element, a third force (reconciling force), for union to be possible in a flow of mutual self-giving.

It is important to understand that this as an ongoing dynamism, not a linear progression. Through consistent practices of surrender and attention, we can develop the capacity to bear more of our own and each others suffering.

Alchemy of Love Quotes

Bourgeault’s phenomenological description illuminates a path of conscious love vividly.

Cynthia Bourgeault: There's a union that either consumes or is consumed by the object of its craving. And there's a union that allows a deeper differentiation, a deeper diversification to come into being.
That was what got Teilhard de Chardin so excited when he was teaching about love. And at one point is quoted was saying the structure of the universe is love. He was talking about this basic evolutionary principle of union diversifies and diversity unites so that people who are in a bond of relationship at that, that highest and most spacious and dare say nondual level are able in a particularly realized way.
To hold in their hearts the other's entire becoming and to create space for the other to differentiate diversity and become more whole, become themselves within the nurturing field of this dynamic bond.
There is an element of crucifixion to use Christian language or pain built right into the emergence of love…you have to begin with this fundamental constriction or conflation, the desiring, which is also the source of evil if it doesn't turn around. But but then that has to transform itself. Suffer itself to be laid down for the sake of something else so that a larger and more spacious love emerges in its wake, which can hold the opposites at a new level.
If that initial Eros is tempered and transformed in the deep kenosis, as they call it in Christianity, that willingness to make space, to let go in honesty, to look at your own stuff in as much as it's hurting the beloved, to confess to repent.
So it's the struggle to realize this love at a higher level…it really transforms that initial kind of free boost you get from the initial attraction into something sacred. And holy safe, and flowing, transfigured. It's the transfiguration of the particular, not the denial of it, or repression of it, or elimination of it.

Almaas’ poetic language about love is stabilizing and evocative.

A.H. Almaas: What I''m talking about is the actual syrup that flows from God's heart, the syrup that liberates, the sweet syrup of goodness. So you could experience it in its beingness and its fullness. As a substantiality that is a glowing. And giving and dynamic substantiality when I say substantiality, you don't just feel an energy or emotion, you feel something filling your heart, filling your soul, filling it to the brim, filling it with something that is nourishing.
So we need to know what love is, and not deceive ourselves that we know love because we love somebody, we might yet not know where this loving somebody comes from. It comes from the essence of love, which for us to know love, we need to know the essence of love, which is the beingness of love, the ontology of love, which is God's love.
The divine love is something that is true, that is objective is. Not produced by the past, not produced by relationship, not because somebody is good to me, they're beautiful. I love them. It's produced by something naturally giving the true love. First of all, it is a beingness as a a medium of fullness and richness.
It has a texture that has a taste. It has a an aroma like appreciative love, for instance, and I appreciate it when I say I like somebody. When you go to the essence of it, it's beautiful, pink, fluffy, like a fluffy pink rose and it smells like roses. When you go to passionate love, it's deep pomegranate color and pomegranate flavor.
And it is like a pomegranate syrup. And so when I talk about love, I'm talking about the ontological dimension of love, which mean the truth of love as it is, as is emanates from the divine source, not the outer expression, which is saying something or doing something that is loving all these are good, but that these are not love.
And if love, the true love is there, then the expression will naturally be giving, not self centered, will bring in union with space…if we love somebody, we want what's good for them. We love them because we know them as much for what they are as possible.
Where I know them and their uniqueness and their preciousness and we want what's good for them. We love them not because we want something from them, but we want to give something to them. And then, and there is a mutual love, then an exchange of giving. Really, which expands the love, which brings, which the syrup becomes a puddle.
The puddle becomes a lake and the lake becomes an ocean.