Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
– John Newman (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

It became apparent to Thomas and me as we were reading blog comments last Sunday that it was time for us to talk again about what growing spiritually actually means. Just a bit of a refresher course, since we haven’t discussed spiritual growth in much detail here in going on five years. And this is such an important topic! Giving people a place to grow spiritually is the reason why this material universe, with its billions of stars and its trillions of planets, even exists in the first place. Growing spiritually is the reason why you chose to be born in that material body to experience all these earthly pains. And teaching you how to better grow spiritually is the reason why Jesus even chose to be born from out of the Godhead two thousand earth-years ago. So you might quite justifiably say that this is the most important topic that anyone ever might conceivably choose to write about, hands-down.

As we said last week, Consciousness is all that exists. It is, as we said then, both the Sculptor and the stone on which that Sculptor works. And Consciousness exists in a range of emotion-based vibrations, from fear at the lowest and slowest vibration to perfect love at the highest and most rapid vibration. At its very highest vibration, Consciousness is what Jesus called the Father. It is the ultimate High God. Every human mind is a part of Consciousness, and exists somewhere along that continuum. And so, very simply put, spiritual growth consists in raising your personal spiritual vibration away from fear and more toward perfect love in the most efficient way possible. Of course, your personal spiritual vibration is going to vary in the course of a day. But its resting vibration, the set point to which it will naturally keep returning, can be raised if you will make the effort. And it is raising that set point as much as possible that you are eagerly bent upon doing when you and your primary spirit guide draw up your plan for spiritual growth in this lifetime.

Why can’t you simply resolve to grow spiritually when you are at home in the astral plane, so you can thereby avoid the need to live any more of these stressful lifetimes on earth? It turns out that growing spiritually is very much like exercising what amount to spiritual muscles. We cannot do it just by thinking about it. We have to do it by acting on it. Love and fear are not just theoretical forces! So in order to learn how the difference between love and fear actually feels in practice, how to cleave to the one and to push against the other, we come to this material universe, which is a place where we can experience that difference firsthand. Craig Hogan calls this planet Earth School, while I think of it more as a spiritual gym. But really, just one very stressful lifetime in which you can experience what it is all about should do it for you. You come here, you follow Jesus’s teachings as best you can, you raise your personal spiritual vibration to the upper fifth level of the astral plane with the help of some awful fear-based earth-experiences, and then you can cease incarnating on the earth forevermore. After that, your further spiritual growth can happen in the upper fifth and the sixth levels of the astral plane. So it is flat astonishing to me to realize that estimates have it that most of us have lived anywhere from several dozens to literally hundreds of lifetimes on earth!  

How can we possibly be such dullards? Even given that we come back to earth with amnesia for the reason why we are here, you would think that we would keep some vestigial subconscious memory after a while that would make our learning just a little bit easier? After all, it is possible for you and me to get all the way to the top of level five, and past the need to incarnate again, in a single lifetime!  

You can accomplish the requisite spiritual growth using Eastern spiritual techniques. But those methods generally require meditation, chanting, and other transformational processes that can take considerable time and a lot of personal commitment on your part, and they can sometimes take years before you notice measurable results in your life. By far the easiest method for Westerners to use is the one that Jesus taught, which feels familiar to people with a Christian background and is remarkably self-reinforcing, and which amazingly can show you noticeable effects in your life within a few months’ time. Very briefly, here it is again:

• Gratitude. Jesus didn’t make a big deal of gratitude in the Gospel teachings that survive, but He did imply it. And beginning with gratitude greases your wheels for the heavier lifting of forgiveness, which comes next. Simply buy a blank booklet, and every morning write down one thing for which you are grateful, and also write down why you are grateful for it. No duplicates. For the first few months, this will be easy! By month four, though, if you take this exercise seriously, you will be down to keeping lists of random things that you still have not been grateful for, and worrying on the afternoon before each morning about how you can sincerely express your gratitude for things like ants and mosquitoes, or for your neighbor’s dog that barks at night.
• Forgiveness. The entire key to raising your personal spiritual vibration is to learn prevenient forgiveness. Once you have forgiven everything before it even happens – and please trust me on this – you will already be approaching vibrational level five, because nothing ever will bother you again. In addition, forgiveness is great for your health! This entire process is better explained in The Fun of Growing Forever. And it is so simple. You just trick your lazy mind into no longer caring when someone does you wrong through the use of “forgiveness balls.” Set aside a few weeks to get the retraining process well started, and keep using it until forgiveness for you is entirely prevenient and automatic. Until then, whenever anything needs to be forgiven and your forgiveness process is not yet automatic, you simply gather whatever might be bothering you at all with big sweeps of your arms, including all the people involved and including yourself as well, and you squash it all down into a nice tight bundle with your hands, and then you slowly push that whole bundle away with both hands as you say aloud, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.” Still not feeling that all of it has been completely forgiven? Then you just do it all again. You are retraining your mind to never again in your life ever resent anything! And believe me, this really works. When someone recently defrauded my husband and me out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which was most of our retirement savings, I forgave both the criminal and the loss at once and without a thought. No forgiveness ball was even needed.  
• Love. Loving more and more as you master forgiveness is just your natural state. Try to help it along, but it will require little added effort on your part. As your spiritual vibration rises, though, one of the things that you might notice will be that you seem to be loving everyone more equally. I thought at first that I was losing some of my love for those closest to me, but that wasn’t it. No, it was more that my feelings for perfect strangers were coming close to approaching the way that I felt about even my cherished family members. I could look at a stranger’s face and love that stranger, care about her needs, feel compassion for him as I never had before. It was beautiful, and it was amazing to begin to see strangers as individual people and not as wallpaper! It was oddly alarming, too, because to care so much about strangers made me feel responsible for them now, as I never before had felt responsible for strangers. I learned to control those new feelings with time, which was a relief. But seeing people as I had begun to see people made me briefly see them all much more the way that Thomas tells me that Jesus always has seen people. Jesus sees each individual person as a cherished object of His personal love.    

Spiritual growth is governed by simple Consciousness physics. Scientists have never been able to define Consciousness at all. More than a decade ago, before I ever knew Thomas, I began to wondered what Consciousness even was, since no good definition of it was to be found. Then from somewhere – I know now that it must have come from Thomas – but from out of nowhere came what is the best definition of Consciousness that we are likely to find. Thomas said in my mind, “Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” I thought, Wow!

Our minds are all part of that one Consciousness, so we are eternal by definition. Furthermore, because we all share a single Consciousness, as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibration within that whole, we each will minutely raise the Consciousness vibrations of all the other people on the face of the earth. It has been estimated that if only ten percent of the people on earth were to perfect themselves vibrationally, we could materially begin to raise the vibrations of this entire planet out of the fear-based danger zone where the population of the earth is at present. By removing more of the barriers to love’s awareness in the world, we can materially help to turn things around, very much as a bubble of air will rise in water toward the light.  

All the divisions among people that we imagine are there are completely artificial, anyway. And this is especially true of  all our perceived racial divisions! There is much more genetic diversity within the continent of Africa than there is between East Africans and Europeans, who began to lose the melanin in our skin via a set of genes that were introduced into Europe from the Ural Mountains less than eight thousand years ago, so recently that civilization had by then already begun. Europe was largely populated by East African migrants less than ten thousand years ago, as the last ice age ended. In fact, human beings almost went extinct altogether so very recently that every person on earth is descended from two common ancestors, a male and a female, who lived in Botswana less than 200,000 years ago.

So every human being on the face of the earth is your own close cousin. We all belong quite literally to a single extended African family. Yes, our lack of understanding of what spiritual growth is and why it is so important has allowed us to feel free to do terrible things to one another. Humanity’s past has been horrible in just about every generation since civilization began. And if we don’t begin to change course soon, it seems pretty clear that our future is likely to be even worse than our past has been. But the wonderful truth is that we know now for certain that there is no barrier to our uniting every member of the human family in the joy of literal familial love. All of us are members of a single family! And we know now that there is no barrier to our living as a single family. But only our universal spiritual growth can accomplish this ultimate goal. No worldwide government clumsily attempting to impose some sort of unity from above can do anything but to make our present problems even worse. You and I alone possess the power to uplift and unite the world. And the fastest way to make that happen will be for us to make our individual spiritual growth our first priority.

The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been devised. As I note in The Fun of Growing Forever, strictly following the teachings of Jesus can substantially raise your own spiritual vibration, beginning in a matter of months, and without the need for you to meditate, do yoga, chant, find a guru, or really do much of anything beyond using those teachings to reprogram your easily-reprogrammed mind. The Gospel teachings do this by removing the barriers to love’s awareness, since as soon as those barriers are gone, your level of consciousness rises naturally toward ever greater love as a bubble will rise through water toward the light.

 Spiritual growth toward love and away from fear feels wonderful! Perhaps the best thing about the Gospel teachings of Jesus is that when you follow them and begin to feel their positive effects, those teachings are remarkably self-reinforcing. The key for me was to learn the easy trick of forgiving in advance every negative thing that might happen in the whole rest of my life. Resentments and angers of every kind are very low-vibration emotions, so they act as negative ballast. That was why when Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). It is essential that you get rid of every one of your angers and resentments, no matter how small, since they can keep your consciousness vibrating at the lower end of its range. Get rid of your every impulse toward anger, and soon you will have risen spiritually to such a level that nothing ever will bother you again.

Which is a big reason why growing spiritually makes you so happy! Even if you don’t feel a pressing need to raise this planet’s consciousness vibration before humankind altogether self-destructs, and even if you aren’t thinking about trying to achieve a higher afterlife level, the little effort that growing spiritually will take you is going to reward you richly, and pretty much right away. It gives you a life removed altogether from stresses, a kindly feeling for each new face, and perhaps above all a certainty that you yourself are supremely and eternally loved. Whatever it is that you think you are seeking, growing spiritually is going to help you find it.

Our frame-verse was written by a slave trader who was miraculously saved from a storm at sea, and he promptly gave up his former occupation and became an ardent abolitionist. John Newman saw the light of truth, but to this day materialist scientists remain stubbornly clueless. It is both sad and silly that even despite important insights given to them by the likes of Max Planck and Albert Einstein and other great twentieth-century physicists, the scientific community at large still refuses to accept the fact that all our minds are part of one vast eternal Mind. The scientific community remains so willfully brain-dead that even though they still cannot even begin to define Consciousness, they are currently spending a billion dollars trying to find a source for whatever Consciousness might be inside the human brain. But that clueless level of scientific folly need not hamper you and me! We know that we are eternal beings, and we are invited by Jesus Himself to live now, even while we are still on earth, in the perfect eternal peace of God. As Moses said almost 3500 years ago, “the eternal God is a dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27).

Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come.
‘Twas grace that brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

 When we’ve been here ten thousand years,
Bright, shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
– John Newman (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand

But now I can say
If you are discouraged
Struggling just to make it through another day
You got to let it go, let it all go
And this is what you have to say

CHORUS:
I release and I let go
I let the Spirit run my life
And my heart is open wide
Yes it’s only up to God

No more struggle, no more strife
With my faith I see the light
I am free in the Spirit
Yes it’s only up to God
– Michael Gott, “I Release and I Let Go” (1990)

It seems apparent now that Jesus is preparing to take a more active earthly role. You might say that He is about to “Return.” But Thomas will never ask Jesus any of my questions about what He might be planning to do, because he tells me that mine are not the sorts of questions that Jesus is ever going to answer for people who are in earthly bodies. So other than noticing the revivals on college campuses, the “He Gets Us” ad campaign and the surprisingly successful movies and TV series, I have no idea what Jesus might be doing or about to do. Thomas does say, though, that Jesus never would do anything that could affect the earth by much, even in a positive way.

People have been looking for Jesus’s Second Coming for centuries. But Thomas believes that Jesus has been sufficiently distant from the earth for so long that  the term “Second Coming” is  meaningless to Him. It comes from the the Biblical Book of Revelation, which of course was written after His death. But apparently what Jesus is focused on doing is just what He began to do two thousand earth-years ago. He wants to begin again to teach those now living on earth how to perfect themselves spiritually, so every dear person on the face of the earth can achieve the Godhead level as soon as possible. Now that the religion will soon be out of the way and no longer coming between us and Jesus, Thomas tells me that Jesus wants to get back to doing the love-based teaching that is dear to His heart.

We are used to associating religions with spirituality, but in fact the two are polar opposites. There is no religion that can give us much, or even give us any spiritual help at all, but instead religions are human-made artifacts from an early stage of humankind’s development. Even the concept of religions is a fear-based hangover. When primitive people had no way to comprehend the reality in which they found themselves, which was cold and dark and full of terrors, people self-protectively invented gods that might be able to protect them. Those gods became more and more real to them as the ages passed, ever bigger and more elaborate. And as their human-created gods grew in people’s minds, those gods demanded from the people they were supposed to be protecting ever-fancier rituals and ever-greater sacrifices. But at least they allowed people to feel that they were gaining some illusory sense of control. And the shamans of those early religions were the earliest human manipulators and rulers: if you were someone who could speak for the gods, then you held a lot of power. And every modern religion can be traced back to those first stone-age religions in an unbroken line. They all worked the same way. They all were based in worshiping gods who created the world, and created us, and who made demands of us in return. So then eventually we got Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of infants into his fiery belly; and then the YHWH of the Hebrews; and then the Christian God. Fear of what was unknowable, and sacrifices that were demanded in exchange for protection, have been at the core of every god to this day.

There can be no creation without a Creator. Something cannot have come from nothing. And although officially materialist science still insists that our reality must have begun in a Big Bang of something arising from nothing, a few scientists with more sense than the rest did discover in the twentieth century that in fact there is indeed a creative force. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, found that Consciousness underlies everything. And it is legitimate for us to capitalize that word now, since our friend Max learned that Consciousness is indeed the base creative force. Max Planck thereby discovered the genuine God. In 1931 he said, “I regard Consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness. We cannot get behind Consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates Consciousness.” 

And now, thanks to Dr. Planck’s great insight, we have come to know so very much more! You live inside one great illusion, and you have no memory of ever having lived outside of it. No less a leading scientific light than Albert Einstein told us that this universe is indeed one heck of an illusion, but an illusion is indeed what it is. And it is important that you begin to see this illusion frankly, so then at last you will be able to begin to focus some of your attention on the much greater wonders that lie beyond it. My precious friend, you are so much more than you can possibly imagine!

Consciousness is everything that exists. It is the sculptor, and it is the stone. It is both the dancer and the dance. And since the Consciousness that is all that exists is a form of energy, Consciousness vibrates. It is governed by what we experience as emotion – go figure! – and at its lowest and slowest vibratory rate, Consciousness is highly negative, and it is governed by all the ishy emotions, like fear and rage; while at its highest vibratory rate, Consciousness is gorgeous and positive and it is governed by what we experience as perfect love. This is our objective reality that we are talking about here! It is the same objective reality that scientists busily study with their whiteboards full of mathematical equations.

THIS IS OUR REALITY. This is the ultra-super-solid reality that scientists assume has got to be just chock-full of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or at least, you know, gluons. Or something. Doesn’t that solid reality even exist? Well, not really. Not so much. What scientists used to believe were solid particles are actually just miniscule vortices of energy. If the nucleus of an atom were the White House, where it is and the size that it is, its closest orbiting electron could be as far away as Denver. They would both be just vortices of energy. And there would be nothing whatsoever between them. Please just sit quietly for a moment and let all of this truly sink in. All of it is energy-like Consciousness. And it is all governed by what you and I experience as emotion.

Jesus said, “Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24). And now you can understand why Jesus was perfectly right.

Jesus also said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth” (JN 4:24). And understanding, as you do now, that the genuine God is the highest aspect of Consciousness, and further understanding, as you also do now, that the highest aspect of Consciousness is perfect love, again you can see how, even two thousand years ago, again Jesus was perfectly right.

So at this point, and until it abandons its century-old materialist dogma which never made any sense to begin with, science seems to be in as much of a counterproductive blind alley as are all the human-made religions. We have talked before about the fact that materialist science has turned itself into just another beliefs-based religion. Science will continue to provide us with all our various useful electronic toys for daily living, our personal computers and cars and phones that have been vastly improving our lives over the past century and a quarter. But until mainstream science abandons the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism that it put into place more than a century ago to protect its physicists from ever inadvertently finding God, there will be no more fundamental scientific discoveries about reality forthcoming. So for our purposes, we can simply ignore science, just as we are ignoring religions.

No matter how solid it might look, and no matter how coldly clockwork-driven our reality might seem to us to be, all of this reality is, as Albert Einstein told us that it was, simply one gigantic illusion. And you and I find ourselves on our own with Jesus in this entirely beliefs-free and Consciousness-based illusory reality within a greater reality where we are able to see and understand the truth for what it is. We know that science can be of no help to us here, and all the religions are dying after the end of what has been a very long run of something like two hundred thousand years. We have no more need for any of it now, since at last we have found, and we so completely trust and adore the genuine Consciousness-based God. And we have various spiritual teachers who are able to help us to directly raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from the low and fear-based vibratory Consciousness range and toward the higher, love-based range of Consciousness. For many people willing to put forth a bit of effort, it will not be difficult to go most or even all of the way to the Godhead level in a single lifetime.

There are of course the various Eastern spiritual traditions on offer. They involve meditation, chanting, breathwork, and even altered states of Consciousness, and for Westerners they take some time and effort to learn and to perform; but they generally can work very well indeed. However, for most people who were reared in Christianity, turning to Jesus in an effort to grow spiritually really does feel like coming home. And the teachings of Jesus as they are preserved in the Biblical Gospels are the simplest and most effective method for growing spiritually that ever has been devised. Gratitude, forgiveness, and love, in that order. It is just a literal piece of cake. Oh, Jesus puts a fancier spin on those teachings, He makes it feel like wisdom to follow them, and He offers some tricks to make them easier to learn; but basically, that is all they are. And when you put your mind to it, the teachings of Jesus can begin to transform you spiritually in just a few months’ time.

The greatest wonder about the teachings of Jesus to me is that Jesus knew all of this two thousand years ago. It is quite literally as if a modern man had been transported back in time! But of course, Jesus was born from out of the timeless Godhead. And Jesus is more than God’s emissary. He is the genuine God in human form, come to dwell among the people of that ancient day so He could seek to better understand them and then teach them on their level and on their own terms. God among us, born in that ancient day, and the greatest Teacher who has ever lived.

And now Jesus is coming back to us as our Teacher once again.  Not on a white horse and brandishing a sword, but apparently first of all in the hearts of the very young. He will tell us nothing of His plans, but that only adds to the excitement and the joy of it. And so we wait together now in wonder for that ultimate Christmas morning….

If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way.
Round in circles I’d go!
Longin’ to tell you,
But afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you’d leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know how I loved you.
If I loved you.
– Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “If I loved you” (1945)

When Thomas and I set out last week to attempt to define the word “love,” we didn’t expect to spark a controversy. But a controversy in the comments was what we got! Or in fact, what we really had was multiple controversies. Someone was irate at the notion that Jesus might have given us love as a commandment. So, what now? Now our choosing to love was not up to us? For someone else, The A Course in Miracles idea of lesser “special loves” seemed hurtful. There was even, I thought, a sense that our attempting to pin down the word “love” with a limiting definition felt like a kind of third rail, as if we were caging an exotic bird that must forever be allowed to fly free. But Thomas and I liked the controversy. We thought it was spicing things up! As always happens, our wonderful commenters worked things out for one another over the ensuing week. And meanwhile, they helped us to realize that this topic itself deserved a deeper dive.

I suppose you could say that love is many things. At its base level, love is an affinity that greases the wheels of daily life, in service and in politics and in everything in general. Love is part and parcel of our everyday lives. We take it as a given that we will be treated with simple courtesy in stores, and in reality that is a form of love. We expect to be given respect by major corporations as they compete for our business. We wrestle with the idea of love in everything and every day, whether or not we ever see it as love, and even whether or not we think about any of it consciously.

I have practiced law for four years shy of fifty as a counselor to owners of family businesses. And I enjoy what I do so much that I hope now never to retire. While this work requires a broad knowledge of the law, even much more than that it needs an understanding of how to help families live and work very closely together all the time, spending every day and night in close proximity through multiple generations. I have lost count of the number of times I have said that I am really “in the love business” more than anything else. And I think that in the business world altogether that is so often the case, and the whole world of work is less about numbers and widgets and barrels, and much more about the way we have learned to treat people on a daily basis. Interpersonal relationships built on mutual warmth and trust are what grease the wheels of commerce in the modern world.

And yet, you probably never have considered any of these kinds of interactions as in the nature of love-based relationships. You go to work and say a pleasant hello to the boss that half the people in the office cannot stand, and you don’t see your need to treat him kindly because you are hoping for a promotion as in the nature of a love-based relationship. Then you stop by your local grocery on the way home to pick up ingredients for your family’s evening meal, and you remember to ask if your favorite cashier’s husband’s back surgery went well, and that doesn’t strike you as a love-based relationship, either. You pick up your child or grandchild at daycare and you ask his carers how his day went, feeling grateful to the two young women who have spent their day dealing with his issues that center around throwing food and too often bullying smaller children. And all of these daily interactions may not have felt to you as if love was any part of them. But yet all of them were in fact love-based interactions. And all the corporate pressures weighing on your boss, the worries plaguing that cashier, and the almost insuperable burden of caring for a dozen preschoolers carried by those two women who must keep children safe so their families can work can be eased tremendously if only you will introduce some genuine love into your side of every one of these relationships! It is in fact our task to learn to see every interaction in our lives as essentially love-based.  

Love in one or another of its forms is integral to everything that people do with other people. Call it something else, if you want to be persnickety about it. Call it affinity, cooperation, friendliness, basic kindness, or some other term. But Jesus would tell you that love is what all of it is.

Our lives on earth are lived close together in order to force love to be a constant issue. We must find ways to accommodate one another’s needs so we can live in such close proximity, so therefore we create formal customs, simple manners, and rules of the road when we are driving. Just ways to handle situations that are bound to keep recurring, in an effort to minimize the number of times that we are likely to get in one another’s way. But love is what underlies it all.

Seeing how love works in family businesses is a simple case in point. In the past fifty years I have served every kind of closely-held business that you can imagine, from a foundry to a printer to a tenting company to building contractors, a delivery-truck factory, and so many more. Decades ago I enjoyed giving informational dinners, until I could no longer cope with the number of clients those dinners generated, and it amazed me to see all the different ways these people had found to make a very nice living. I soon learned that one of the biggest problems for family businesses is all the things that can go wrong when you want to pass your business to the next generation.

 Family businesses are all around you. They are the best way on earth to make a wonderful living! Parents naturally want to bring their children into the business, often beginning in their teens, and children reared in a beautiful home that was paid for by daddy’s or mommy’s nice business quite naturally want to take that business over. But knowing all the ins and outs of making and delivering pizzas at a profit is a far different matter from knowing how best to provide for your own retirement while at the same time you are passing your great chain of pizza restaurants along to your three sons and a daughter without starting a family war. Especially if the best one of the four to become CEO of the chain is your daughter, and she is also the youngest. There is a right way to do this, based in love, and it is something that I can do now in my sleep, but no MBA program teaches it. I have spent my working lifetime figuring it out.  

 So if love and the need to always apply love underlies just about everything we do, why don’t we ever talk about that fact? Ah. That is an excellent question. I think in part that we are afraid to cheapen the word “love.” We want to save it for moonlight and roses, but the L-word escaped its limited romantic use a very long time ago. We use it now for everything from salad dressing to a new pair of socks. And what we are talking about here is loving every one of the people who in any way touch our lives! Each person is uniquely precious as a part, together with us, of the one Consciousness which is all that exists. Surely, for us to learn to muster love for each of these infinitely precious brothers and sisters in Consciousness cannot be such an insuperable task?

In family businesses, we generally make it about Mom. It is a curious fact that husbands and wives can almost never work together happily in a family business that is very much beyond startup size, and it is usually the wife who retires from the business once it really starts to prosper. She either becomes a homemaker, or she begins an entirely different career. But still, when I work with a family business, the mother is part of our annual meetings. She is much involved in preparing the next generation to take the business over; and if there is squabbling in the next generation, it is mother love and not fatherly bluster that wisely straightens everything out. And, yes, sometimes there is no mother. But there always is some individual at the center of the family but outside the business – an oldest sister, a grandfather, or a venerable maiden aunt. The point is that love has to be nearby and available in order to work its magic. I am shameless about invoking the name of that beloved elder at the center of an extended family whenever there is squabbling in a family business. And since people in unstable families always know that this is going to happen, they will sometimes mention the name before I do. And just that name alone will change the atmosphere. Love. There is nothing that it cannot do.

 And of course, in daily family life having rituals is of immeasurable help. For example, my family has held hands and said grace at nightly sit-down dinners since my children were toddlers. I taught my oldest to read at the age of three, and soon she found a grace that she liked, so we made saying her grace a part of our family life that continues to this day. If you have family rituals and traditions, for heaven’s sake, be sure to keep them up! There were times during the first tempestuous twenty or so years of my marriage when I would have paid you quite a bit to simply take my husband off my hands, and I said my family’s traditional grace on many nights through gritted teeth. But still, I always said it. And to this day my husband, old-fashioned stiff that he basically is, still reads The Wall Street Journal in paper form each morning; while I, old-fashioned wife that I still basically am, prefer to go out and fetch his paper for him. So even if he gets up before I do, which is seldom, he will wait and allow me still to do that. Whenever either of us leaves or returns to the house, we never do it without a kiss, and we still hold hands when we are walking anywhere. And what began as a very rocky marriage has lasted now for fifty years. Go figure.  

 It is all these “small-l” forms of love in all its endless varieties in public and in private that grease the myriad wheels of our daily lives. I almost wrote that it is these endless forms of daily love that are what make our living so close together even bearable, and to a considerable extent that is true. Let’s think about this for a moment. Please try, if you can, to imagine a society in which every human interaction is between dead-eyed strangers. Not hostile. Just stiff and cold. If you went through the day at home, at work, in stores, and in that daycare center, and every face was blank, wouldn’t your life soon begin to feel like a screaming hell? Isn’t it the dead faces of those zombies in zombie movies that makes those movies the horror that they are? Even Amazon, giant company that it is, wears a human smile on every package. And when I work with family businesses, over and over again it is clear that it is the love within the families that own those businesses that makes the businesses so strong. It is never the other way around.

This is the great wonder of the simple love that Jesus taught. Jesus knew even two thousand years ago that we are all eternally one in God. And the love that Jesus taught is a core recognition of the grounding and the root of all being, which is our universal human oneness in Consciousness. Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (MT 22:39). Because in Consciousness, your neighbor is yourself.

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions to charity,
and if I surrender my body so that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant.
It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit;
it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered,
it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.
It keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
– Jesus as channeled through the Apostle Paul, from 1 Corinthians 13

Coming up with a topic for our blog post each week is my Thomas’s task. He proposes our topic on the previous weekend, and then he lets me flounder with it until Friday, at which point he steps in and helps me finish and polish it. Late last Sunday afternoon he still hadn’t said anything, so as I was going through emails I said to him, “It’s time. What have you got for me?” I was opening Patheos.com’s daily email of articles. He said from behind my left shoulder, “Try that.”  

The top article was about the Biblical definition of love. I said, “That? That’s boring. He said, “No. Define the word ‘love’.”  And he was right. We talk about love all the time. But do we really all share one definition for the word “love”? Love as the Bible defines it is pretty much limited to Jesus’s loving us enough to die on a cross to save us from God’s judgment for our sins. Which, as we know now, is a nonsense idea. Jesus tells us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us (JN 5:22-23). So Jesus didn’t need to die as a sacrifice to God. We have Jesus’s own thoughts about love as a Core Teaching on teachingsbyjesus.com, and we might consult that. But what do you and I mean by the word “love” when we use it in conversation? What really is love, anyway?

I have written about love here repeatedly, and I am embarrassed now to say that I have never satisfactorily defined the word. The Merriam & Webster’s dictionary definition is also unsatisfying, since it boils down to synonyms. “Love is a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” “Love is attraction based on sexual desire; affection and tenderness felt by lovers.” “Love is affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.” So basically, love is a positive feeling, and you and I know it when we feel it? But what really is love, anyway?

Of course, what further complicates our question is the fact that A Course in Miracles would call all the personal loves in the paragraph above just “special loves.” The loves that we have for particular individuals are all special loves, and ACIM derisively tells us that special loves are as counterproductive spiritually as are “special hates.” Well, that’s a real downer!

As a first pass, at least we can say that love is a positive feeling for someone beyond oneself. But there are so many kinds of love! I am reminded of what my Thomas has told us about his brother six thousand years ago, the sweet teenage boy who in his next incarnation was going to be born from the Godhead as Jesus. That boy was so entranced with people that even while a war was going on and his tribesmen were finishing off the losing side, he went searching for people who might be hidden away, hoping to find and save some of them before the soldiers could get to them. And when he found a terrified mother with her children, he rescued them and kept them safe until he could find a man of his own victorious tribe who would take the woman for a second wife and would adopt her children. That was Jesus in the making.

Then when Jesus was born from the Godhead four thousand years later, He had some definitive things to say about love! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Biblical Ten Commandments. Instead, He was all about love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Ah, now we are getting somewhere! In shifting the base of the entire existing Hebrew religion to His new Law of Love, Jesus is telling us that love has become fundamental. Nothing is more important. Jesus has moved us from a transactional relationship with God, one in which the breaking of arbitrary rules once called for the payment of penalties in the form of pigeons or unblemished heifers, to one in which God now requires of us that we love with our whole heart, soul, and mind. In a way, this is letting us off easy. We do get to keep all our pigeons and heifers. But on the other hand, to give up your whole heart, soul, and mind to God might turn out to be an even greater burden. It all depends on what love means.

What A Course in Miracles is about fundamentally is forgiveness. An unwillingness to forgive is the ultimate barrier to being able to master perfect love. But forgiveness is much harder than it sounds! You and I are transactional by nature, just as were the ancient Hebrews. We carry around a scale in our minds. For us to be wronged and to forgive that wrong will set our mental scale out of balance, and will make our being able to freely love that much harder. In a way, a lot of what our lives on earth are about is learning to get rid of that mental scale so we can forgive easily and completely, even despite our having been wronged. This is especially true of forgiving God! I will occasionally get emails that are full of woe-is-me complaints about people’s lives, and right beneath the surface it is clear that really the senders are in a rage against God for the problems that they themselves had planned into their own lives as spiritual growth challenges. By far the greatest habit that any of us can learn is complete, automatic forgiveness of wrongs. But doing that goes against human nature, which is why ACIM is called A Course in Miracles. With a big emphasis on that last word! Personally, I have found that once I accepted the fact that I myself had designed into my life all my problems of this lifetime, and then I added the forgiveness-balls routine, automatic forgiveness became a snap.

So my mind goes back to that scrawny boy searching a battlefield for people to save. I don’t know what Jesus remembers of His final earth-lifetime before He ascended to the Godhead level. I never have presumed to ask Him that question. And Thomas recalls very little about it, but on the rare occasions when he has been willing to discuss it, he has dredged up and shared vague bits of memories that I find tantalizing for what they tell us about the titanic spirit that was Jesus in the making. Thomas has told me that some six thousand years ago in the fertile crescent there was some kind of blood-feud between two primitive walled cities, and he himself as the chieftain’s oldest son in one of them led an attack that breached the other side’s defenses. But he stresses to me that it was all primitive, mud walls and hovels, knives and spears. His younger brother should not have been there at all. In his vague memories, the princeling who would much later be born as Jesus was a sickly boy, and under orders never to leave their home city. Still, that boy snuck out to follow the army, and even while they still were fighting, he ventured into the enemy’s breached city that was littered with the dead and dying to try to rescue some woman, some child, some innocent victim from out of the carnage. But, who does something like that?

I try to put myself into that boy’s mind. All I can think is that he could not bear to sit safe at home, while knowing that there was even a chance that maybe there was someone in that city that his brother’s army was attacking that he might possibly save. He would have observed his side’s preparations after witnessing this battling between the two walled cities. First we attack them and then they attack us. Lots of yelling and throwing of stones and spears. But now he was hearing that his brother had a plan to breach the other city’s walls and obliterate it? Oh no! But what about the women and children? He had to get himself over there, so he snuck out and followed the army. The great danger to himself didn’t matter at all beside his thought that there might be someone he could save.

Thomas is looking over my shoulder at this point. He has a vague memory of receiving a report that his brother had been spotted in the ravaged city, so he had to assign soldiers to protect him while there still were enemy soldiers alive. But the boy kept slipping away from them. Brat. And how is this helping us to define love?

Jesus’s teaching that we must love our neighbors as ourselves might perhaps be one key. It is clear that Jesus saw things quite differently from His contemporaries, and surely the boy that He had been in His previouus earthly incarnation also had a unique perspective on things. All of us together are parts of a single consciousness; and amazingly, that means all nearly eight billion of us now. Even in this more sophisticated twenty-first century, that fact can feel difficult to get our minds around. And it is flat incredible that two thousand years ago, clearly Jesus already understood this concept! Love your neighbor as yourself. Because your neighbor is yourself. And even four thousand years before that, a sickly teenage princeling in the fertile crescent at the dawn of civilization seems also to have had some clue that the separations that are apparent between people are illusory. I can think of no other explanation for his behavior.  

But can it really be so simple? Ultimately, love is a recognition that we are all one being? Some forty or fifty years ago there was a major famine in Africa, and a photographer was sent to document it for National Geographic. I recall this story only vaguely now, but I can never get this man and his photograph entirely out of my mind. The story was that he was allowed inside the famine zone to take pictures, but he must not intervene. Which was a rule that likely made sense to the authorities running the relief effort, since with a mass feeding program underway they could not have random do-gooders running around and getting in their way. So this fellow took an award-winning photograph of a toddler crawling alone across a gigantic African plain, while within the frame there were vultures waiting nearby. He did his job and took his photographs and won his award. But he never was able to learn the fate of that one particular child, and he gradually became inconsolable. He quit his photography job. Then he killed himself.

There is nowhere else that we can go but this: love is the recognition that all of us are one being. Love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. Jesus uses the analogy of the good shepherd who leaves his flock and searches until he finds the one he has lost. Humankind is unique among living creatures for the fact that we are all eternal aspects of the one consciousness which is all that exists, and which at its highest is the High God, and therefore we all are encompassed in the singular love that Jesus taught. The special loves and hates don’t matter. And learning to completely forgive is just a necessary step along the way toward achieving this fundamental realization. All those other details are just side-issues.

Love is the recognition that we are all one in God. All almost eight billion of us. And that is the true and eternal love that Jesus taught. It is steadfast, fundamental, and eternal, and whatever else is going on, it underlies and unites us all. It is the love that motivated Martin Luther King, Jr. and so very many others who could not turn away from evil, but in fighting that evil they loved the perpetrators as well as the victims. But how do we form this into a definition for the word? “Love is the irresistible certainty that I am eternally one with every human being on the face of the earth.” Perhaps for now that might do as a definition for the word. It is more complex than Jesus’s “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But for now, perhaps it is enough.

“Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will fail.
If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away with.
For now we know in part and prophesy in part;
but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I gave up all childish things.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face;
now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three;
but the greatest of these is love. “
– Jesus, as channeled through the Apostle Paul, from 1 Corinthians 13