Emanating Love

In Times of Horror

“These people know full well their careers are over, but they do it anyway.” And possibly worse than losing their careers; seeing old bonds of family and friendship reduced to antipathy. For this true courage they are called “selfish”, “egotistical”, etc. That this calibre of attack finds fertile soil in the general population is an unequivocal sign of mass hysteria magicked to fever pitch by people who know what they do, but lack the wisdom and compassion to really KNOW what they do. Should they ‘succeed’, what world do they imagine their children will inherit? They cannot succeed. Love and Life are the stronger forces. This is a global object lesson in hubris, loveless ambition, the bitterness of cowardly compliance and valuing mere social status above all other things. It is Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice writ large, become a conflagration of the vanities. I am shocked, too often to count, by how violently invested people are in hateful fear, in wilful ignorance. Finding my way to a loving response is extremely difficult, especially because there’s very little one can do with it but wait. And watch on in (seemingly) impotent horror. The hysterical mob has to exhaust itself, spend its fury, run its course. I suppose it was always going to go this way; how else can humanity learn what it needs to learn? And yet this mob has been deliberately coaxed into being: a crime against humanity. Or is it a crime of humanity against itself? Free will is sacred. Knowing this is one part of what can be the sorrow of love. And even though free will has been manipulated and deceived by those few who seek to impose theirs over everyone else’s – at the expense of the innocent! – even though righteous anger feels so strongly like the right response, when we love we emanate love, and that is vital. For whatever reason, it dawned on me sometime during my early thirties that love must be unconditional to be love. Something about that realisation put me on a particularly moral path that has, it seems, triggered all manner of personal object lessons as fate relentlessly, lovingly, disavowed me of my delusions of grandeur, my vanities, insecurities, and much else besides. It is a continuing process. One truth that has been almost crow-barred into me is that love has no object. “I love you” is not, strictly speaking, a logically tenable utterance. “I am love”, though grand, is closer, or perhaps simply, “I love”. Love opens loving connections between self and others that give rise to the “I love you” feeling, which is so wonderful to speak. Love arises naturally when we clear ourselves of our emotional-psychological muck. If we think of the soul as a tuning fork, it cannot sing unless it is naked, uncluttered, clean. When it sings, it just sings. Its song has no object; it is an emanation, the natural state of a truly healthy soul. That state is the way out of this horror, because this horror is the natural consequence of turning away from love, away from God, and pursuing vanities, greeds, selfish appetites. Every one of us can dedicate ourselves humbly to this extraordinary undoing towards love. It is exactly as painful as our resistance to its lessons is fierce. As Pema Chodron put it: “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”

By Toby Russell

(Submitted as Comment)