What is Love?

the opposite of what you think

Here is the romance novel version: there is one girl—ordinary on the outside, adorably imperfect—and two men (at least) vying for her attention. She is special, like no one else. The men compete for how much they’re willing to sacrifice for her—wealth, high-powered career, ego, pleasure, their own safety, and all other women, obvi. Yet the woman makes the ultimate sacrifice by choosing one.

For the long analysis of this formula, see Twilight by ContraPoints:

Romance is exclusivity—The One. The Soul Mate. The Star-Destined Lover.

Love is inclusivity. Indiscriminate. A Spiritual Slut.

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Here are the topics covered in my video:

• Love is a passive state, not active, it’s the default

  • Love is non-judgment, beginner’s mind, newborn mind

  • It requires you to give what you can give to everyone:

  • Ideas, a wish for well-being, the benefit of the doubt

• Self-sacrifice is the opposite of love, it’s a barter-gain for specialness

• Guilt, fear and blame are the unwholly trinity

  • Blame creates guilt for the judgment of someone else

  • Guilt creates fear of retaliation

  • Fear displaces the guilt by projecting blame on someone else

• There is only fear and love. Everything that is not love comes from fear

• Guard your loneliness like a dragon’s treasure

  • The internet is a repository of loneliness, and that’s good

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From A Course in Miracles, Ch 15 The Wholly Instant: Special Relationships (small edits in spelling and phrasing)

1. The wholly instant is the Wholly Spirit’s most useful learning device for teaching you love’s meaning, for its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for without it you do not understand anything.

You would make no attempt to judge, because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not understand what anything means. You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.

3. You cannot love parts of reality and understand what love means. If you would love unlike to God, Who knows no special love, how can you understand it? To believe that special relationships, with special love, can offer you salvation is the belief that separation is salvation. But it is the complete equality of the atOnement in which salvation lies.

How can you decide that special aspects of the Oneship can give you more than others? The past has taught you this. Yet the wholly instant teaches you it is not so.

8. Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and although this is not so in Heaven, the Wholly Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here. In the wholly instant no one is special, for your personal needs intrude on no one to make your other selves seem different. In the wholly instant, you see in each relationship what it will be when you perceive only the present.

10. The meaning of love is the meaning God gave to it. Give to it any meaning apart from His, and it is impossible to understand it. God loves every other Self as He loves you; neither less nor more. He needs them all equally, and so do you. In time, you have been told to offer miracles as I direct, and let the Wholly Spirit bring to you those who are seeking you. Yet in the wholly instant you unite directly with God, and all your other Selves join as Christ with you.

Those who are joined as Christ are in no way separate. For Christ is the Self the atOnement shares, as God shares His Self with Christ.

11. Think you that you can judge the Self of God? God had created It beyond judgment, out of His need to extend His Love. With love in you, you have no need except to extend it. In the wholly instant there is no conflict of needs, for there is only One. For the wholly instant reaches to eternity and to the Mind of God. And it is only there love has meaning, and only there can it be understood.

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Citing the Greek trivium, Rudolf Steiner, and A Course in Miracles, I look at the nature of reality and—the most important question—my true relationship to you. I examine male superiority and female specialness as ways that keep us from recognizing our Oneness.

Explains A Course in Miracles, which Marianne Williamson has studied for 45 years while I have for 20. Looks at the rules for discerning whether any scripture, aka channeled text, could be considered as the word of God. Reads Caitlin Johnstone's poem, Sources Say, and the introduction to my book, A House for the Soul in the Land Beyond Faith. Asks what spiritual optimism is and why it's so important.

Happy Birthday! (recorded Dec 25th) I look at the Christ as a movement, not a person, that's coming into being after 2000 years of dormancy. I read "How Will the World End?" from the teacher's manual of A Course in Miracle. And I end with a poem I wrote called The Holy Dark.