by Gerrit Gielen

Preface

We seem to be always looking for love, and we especially want and expect it from our fellow human beings: as a child, from our parents, and later in life, from our partner. The latter, in particular, often turns out to be a disappointment, which in many cases leads to bitter reproaches. Divorces are often accompanied by tremendous hatred and resentment; people feel betrayed. The partner did not give us the love we thought we were entitled to, and now, apparently, we are without love.

Why do we need that love from the other so badly? Is it because we are unable to give ourselves love? Apparently, we are not very good at doing that, otherwise many divorces would be a lot less dramatic.

We all have a source of love in us, or we would not be able to give love. But why do we feel so unloved by ourselves?

What is blocking that source and stopping the inner flow of love? And what is love anyway?

In this article, I want to address those questions, and I will start with the last question.

What is love anyway?

In answer to that question, we quickly arrive at one definition: “feeling deep affection for another”. There is, however, a problem there: the word “affection” is a kind of synonym for the word love, so this definition is of no use to us, it is circular. It is difficult to define something as basic as love, so let us try to describe it by looking at its properties.

To begin with, love is unconditional. Conditional love is not true love. A parent who only loves a child if the child meets certain expectations does not really love that child. If you really love someone, you accept that person completely, including all their flaws. Love is beyond our ideas of right and wrong.

Love is energy, an energy that gives something; you immediately feel better when you receive love from someone. Love makes you feel seen, relaxed, and you blossom.

Love is also unifying: we feel connected to those whom we love.

This means that love is a giving and connecting energy that says “yes” to both light and dark; it includes both. Love brings together things which are broken, love heals. It is an energy that encompasses everything, heals everything, reconnects everything. The universe seems to be made up of an infinite number of life forms, of unique lives. Love is the inner connection between all those lives, which makes them all as one.

It rises above all boxes and divisions. Those separations are made possible only by time and space, and are created by our judgments; for example, good and evil.

So love is fundamentally an energy that transcends time and space, good and evil: the connecting and healing energy behind all forms.

Mystics often say that all is one. Love is the force that makes that happen. It is the reality of the oneness behind all forms; the reality that encompasses and permeates all those forms. It is the highest field of consciousness that is connected from within with everything, with the source.

The moment we say to another, “I love you”, we allow that reality back into our hearts. Then we lift ourselves for a moment to that level of unity and let go of the boxes in which we have fitted ourselves. Time and space, and all judgments about the other, then disappear for a moment. That is what love does. Love makes you aware again of the timeless, eternal reality. Love is the ultimate, most fundamental, reality in the universe, although this is at odds with all the ways of thinking that classify reality into boxes. As a result, many people live in a tension between what our thoughts tell us about ourselves and the reality around us, and what our hearts make us feel about it: walls versus unity; separateness versus connectedness.

The source of love in us

What do I mean by the source?

When we talk about the concept of source, we often think of the concept of origin. For example, we were created by a God, so that is our source, our origin. Or the universe was created from the big bang; that is the source of everything.

This way of thinking is problematic, because we then place the source outside ourselves through an immense separation in time. That separation is a thought construction: the expression of a belief that we are separate from the source.

This belief is incorrect. We are never separated from the source.

The source is something that exists outside time and space, that is, the source is now, the source is here. The source is not outside us, but within us. We are the source of love, we are love.

Being connected with the source, feeling the love that we are, should therefore be very natural for us. It is being who you really are, feeling who you really are; accepting yourself completely.

This is how it should be. So where have things gone wrong? By the way we think about ourselves. By all the thought constructions that alienate us from the source.

As we think about the reality outside us, so we think about ourselves. If we see the reality outside us as a struggle of “all against all”, it means that we are also at odds with ourselves. People who judge others harshly, do not love themselves.

How do we feel about ourselves?

Let’s look at that. How do you feel about yourself?

Do you consider yourself a good person? Do you consider yourself good enough to be entitled to love?

Many people do not think so. They think of themselves as so bad that they must continually hide their true nature and thoughts from others. They see others as normal, but they as not.

In other words, we feel that love should be only for good people, that love needs to be earned. So this is mistake number one. Love is unconditional, and the very people who call themselves bad need love the most. What we call evil comes forth from a lack of love.

Could it not be that all those evil thoughts you have, everything you are ashamed of, stem from a lack of love?

If you think that you are not entitled to love because your thoughts are sometimes not that nice, even though those thoughts are a result of the lack of love, then you will never get there. You have locked yourself in a thought circle that hides your inner sun like a dark cloud.

This is an important blockade. Many bad, angry, and fearful thoughts and feelings have arisen in us due to a lack of love. And because we have them, we do not consider ourselves worthy of love. In this way, we trap ourselves in a negative circle in which we do not allow love to enter and so we lose our connection with the source. This is reflected in a belief that there is an enormous gap in time and space between the source and our world.

Allow love

How do we get out of that way of reacting? To begin with, by thinking differently about love; by seeing love as something that is unconditional. True love has no conditions. Love that makes demands – “I love you so much, therefore you have to…” – is not love, it is blackmail.

Love is not only unconditional, love really wants to flow to places where it is needed. Just as light longs to brighten the darkness, love longs to gently touch and comfort all pain, all sorrow, all anger. Stop holding back. Remove the blockages between the love source in you and the child in you who so longs for love.

Let go of the thought that you have no right to love. Everything that exists is entitled to love. And love especially wants to flow to the dark places within you. Do not hold back any longer.

The key is stop thinking that you are not the source.

How do you do that? It is very simple: assume you are the source right now.

Tell yourself: “I am the source, I have always been that source. I love myself.” Allow that thought into your head for a moment, even though there may not yet be any feeling. That is step one.

Then ask yourself: “What part of me needs love most now?” Look within yourself. Imagine that somewhere in you is hiding a scared or angry person who thinks he has no right to love, who may think he is bad, that he is different, that he does not belong.

Then feel how badly that person needs love; how in your heart you desire to love that person.

Now you have discovered the truth: you are love, you are the source.

Now let your love flow into that lost part of yourself. Hug and speak soft, sweet words to it: “I see you, you are part of me, you belong, we move on together.”

Letting the inner love flow consists of three steps:

– Realize that everything in the universe is entitled to love, including you, and be willing to open to love.

– Imagine you are the source. That you are not poor, but rich, rich in love.

– Then let the love flow from the source to that most lost part in yourself.

When you first do that exercise, you may not feel much love flowing. But, gradually, something will break open within you. Slowly, it will start to flow.

The inner flow of love

The inner flow of love is blocked by thoughts of unworthiness associated with deep beliefs telling us that we are separated from the source. Think of the old belief of the Fall: God cast man out of paradise.

A human is a complex being. There is a part in us that is separate from the source: the personality that wants to live the wonderful adventure of life, the discovery of the universe, is also still the source. With one foot we stand in the world of a thousand forms, with the other foot in the timeless source. These are the two sides of us: the polarity of our being. Everything that exists has the same polarity; therefore we can say that everything is one.

The inner flow of love arises when we fully allow the consciousness of those two sides into us and completely let go of the thoughts that separate them. The little human self in us, our personality, then comes all the way back into the radiant loving light of its inner sun. The dark thought clouds blocking the light are gone.

The moment the personality again allows the light in is when love starts to flow. This inner flow provides a connection with the outer flow of life. No longer trapped in rigid thoughts, we come back to life. We allow ourselves to again be carried along with the flow of life and we feel that love is not only in us, but is present all around us.

Finally, activate the flow of love in the world

We all long for a world of more light, love, and harmony, but we will never achieve that if we continue to believe in, and criticize, the bad intentions of our fellow humans. By doing that, we only create hardening, struggle, and duality. By doing that, we create boxes based on our judgments and anger in which we lock up ourselves: cubicles that block both the flow of life and of love. By projecting our own darkness onto our fellow human beings, we do not see the darkness within ourselves, and a part of us remains devoid of the flow of love.

The solution is to see our fellow human beings with eyes of love.

By looking in this way, we can see the good, the love, in them.

By looking in this way, we can again realize that no one is born a perpetrator, that there is a difference between a person’s beliefs and his true nature.

By looking in this way, we activate the good in another.

By allowing the flow of love within ourselves, we also start the flow of love in the world around us.

Only then will the new Earth be created, the world we so long for.

The new Earth is ultimately a reflection of the new Earth within ourselves: the human being that is created when we completely immerse our personality in the light of our love, the light of the source that we are.

© Gerrit Gielen

Edited by Frank Tehan

---