Everyone of us has a place, in our hearts there's a space, that is home to the greatest love of all.
This love transcends everything we think we know about the world of form, the realm of thought, ideas, beliefs and dogma.
It transcends all sense of "myself", "my life", "my story", everything that we conventionally think of as "me", in fact it transcends everything that seems to us so real.
This love is the energy of all life, this love is consciousness, the ground of all being, it is not out there, it is in you, it is part of you, it is you.
But, and here's the kicker, you probably don't know it, and you can't feel it.
Please re-read the first 5 paragraphs above and then take a moment, and observe your inner response to these first few sentences of this article.
When I say "inner response" I mean what did you feel? [With respect, what you think is unimportant.]
If your felt inner response is one of indifference, and you felt nothing, then this article is most likely not for you, and I sincerely recommend you don't waste your time reading further.
If you felt hostility, or attraction, or if you felt a twinge of something you can't articulate, then please read on.
Everything I have written in this article is based on my own direct experience.
I am not asking you to believe me. I am not asking you to have faith in what I say. I am not asking you to believe in nor have faith in anything.
I am writing this for the one in a thousand readers for whom this resonates, and to encourage you to act on your inner response to this article.
We live in an energetic universe.
The highest and most powerful energy in our universe is love.
You can experience it and connect with it in your heart.
'The greatest love' is:
The short answer to "how" you find the greatest love is that you don't find it, it finds you.
The "where" is in your heart.
If you are motivated to create the conditions where this can happen, here are 2 simple guidelines:
[1] Still your mind
The practise of mindfulness will facilitate this. You will start to notice the space between your thoughts. It is from this space that you will become aware of consciousness.
[2] Just ask
The fast track to aligning with consciousness is to shift your focus away from your self and your present circumstances and onto your higher self or your spiritual self.
If that is difficult just place a hand on your heart and ask the simple but powerful question: "I can't do this on my own, please help me find the greatest love?"
To paraphrase stanza 70 in the Tao Te Ching:
The context of relationship
The majority of my experience with the major world religions has been with Buddhism and Christianity.
Based on this, it is my view that Buddhism in general and Zen practise specifically offers the most direct route to learning how to stop thinking, quieten your mind, transcend duality and allow space for the world of consciousness to emerge.
As we noted above, this transcends words and form and the everyday realm of duality and is experienced in meditation and contemplation, but - and this is a very big "but" - it can also be experienced, within the everyday realm of duality, in relationship.
I have found that Christianity - which functions almost exclusively within the world of duality - offers us relationship with consciousness and the experience of it within your heart.
The Christian insight on relationship is framed in the language and context of a relationship with God and, through the revelation of Jesus, this is presented as relationship with God as father.
This is of course distinctly patriarchical and masculine and reflects the long standing bias of traditional Christian teaching. However, and without getting sidetracked into a theological cul-de-sac, the Holy Spirit does represent the feminine aspect of God.
We really do not need to get hung up on the baggage surrounding Christian theology and teachings, the key point here is that the Christian insight is relational.
The characteristics of relationship
If you are fortunate enough to enjoy a close loving relationship with someone, you want to spend time with them. You want to understand them and share things with them.
The conditions for a relationship
with consciousness are similar to ordinary human relationships, but this is rather more than making
friends with the girl or guy who lives next door or your relationship
with your partner.
We are talking here about a relationship with Consciousness, God, Emptiness, The Ground of All Being - The Greatest Love.
This
is the most important relationship you can ever have.
Heads and not hearts
One of the biggest reasons why so many people miss this is because most people live in their heads and not their hearts.
In
my experience, so very many Christians' and Buddhists' understanding
and experience of their spirituality is cerebral, it is all about the
realm of ideas, concepts, doctrines and dogmas. I am not close enough to
the other major world religions but I sense that human nature being
what it is they will be no different.
And yet in ordinary human relationships we relate mainly at the heart level.
The key charactistic of your relationship with consciousness, manifesting as the greatest love, is a heart based relationship.
Relationship guidelines
[1] Making space and giving time
As in any ordinary human relationship you have to make time every day to spend with consciousness.
Christians call this their prayer time and Buddhists meditate.
[2] Communication
One hallmark of a healthy relationship is the ability of those involved to communicate openly with each other about how they’re feeling.
There is quite a lot of baggage surrounding the idea and practice of prayer and in my experience this is all about how it is framed.
I prefer to see prayer as communion, which means 'together in oneness'
I see prayer as a communing with consciousness.
It also includes communing with the natural world in all of its multitude of various and wonderful manifestations.
One of the most powerful ways of communing with consciousness is just to be present. As with any close human relationship sometimes a companionable silence is sufficient.
Other
times when you feel the need to say something, share something or ask
something - just say it and simply direct your communication to your heart or if you prefer to your higher self. There
is no set formula, there are no magic words.
As with all good ordinary human communication between friends, the best communication is spontaneous, authentic and spoken from the heart.
[3] Listening
Back in the days when I was a regular church goer, I would quite often hear people saying: 'How can I know when God is speaking to me....how can I hear the voice of God...?'
Some years later when I started practicing mindfulness I found a significant key to answering that question, and it is called mindful listening.
In my experience the best way to hear the voice of consciousness is with a quiet mind.
Over time, and with consistent practice, I have found that you become attuned to listening to [and sometimes seeing] what consciousness is saying to you.
I have also found that the regular reading of spiritually inspirational books, articles, texts and sutras is another powerful way of hearing the voice of consciousness. I regularly read material from Christian, Buddhist and Tao sources, I also find material from people like Eckhart Tolle who are non aligned to any major belief system can have the same effect.
On occasions I have heard the voice of consciousness through the words of spiritual teachers.
There are other infrequent occasions when I have heard words in my head that speak a profound and sometimes urgent truth into a situation.
There have also been other even more infrequent occasions when I have felt profoundly spoken to by what I can only describe as transcendent experiences. I rarely talk about this but I did recount one experience I had in the events surrounding the death of my father.
The voice of consciousness may speak through your intuition. When this is the case, it is important not to confuse the voice of intuition with the voice of your anxiety.
The voice of consciousness may also speak through circumstances and you may detect a clear indication or intimation of a direction to take. However, you need to be especially vigilant that you are not falling prey to one or more cognitive biases or many other causes of unintentional human stupidity
[4] Intimacy & Total Honesty
As in normal every day human relationships, intimacy and total honesty is extremely important in your relationship with consciousness.
There should be no barriers and no holding back when you reveal your deepest inner feelings to consciousness.
This is especially true when it comes to negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, despair, anger and aggression.
If you were fortunate enough to have enjoyed a happy childhood remember how as a child you shared your feelings, fears and joys with a parent [or other primary care giver]. Then try to imagine a relationship that is a hundred times deeper and more all embracing than that childhood relationship you enjoyed.
Consciousness is referred to as the greatest love because that is exactly what it is. There is no love in the universe that surpasses this love.
[5] Trust
Consciousness loves you and invites a relationship with you.
The greatest love is always seeking relationship with every human being on this planet and who has ever been on this planet.
Most of the time this will be an unconsummated relationship in the sense that there is no reciprocation.
For many of us trust is hard. We carry wounds from our past. I certainly have, and yet I have found that it is our wounds, our vulnerabilities, that are the key to our relationship with consciousness, the greatest love.
"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." [Sayings of Jesus. Matt 18.2-5]
Without disappearing down a psychobabble
rabbit hole, I would say that based on my personal experience, the best way to develop your relationship with the greatest love is from your inner child - open, vulnerable and trusting.
If you do this you will find, as I have done, a love that will not let you go.
1. The Greatest Love invites a relationship with you.
If you pause for a moment and reflect on that statement it is fairly mind-blowing but also unsettling because, as we noted above, many of us carry trust wounds from our past. So, enter and build your relationship in steps and stages, and allow trust to develop and grow.
2. The Greatest Love has your best interests at heart.
If you trust it, it will never let you down. It will always watch your
back and give you what you need. It may not always be what you want, but it is always what you need.
3. The Greatest Love is personal.
The expression of this love is deeply and intensely personal to you and in ways that you may not yet be able to imagine, and this includes: guidance, fulfilment, deep joy, lasting peace and eternal life.
All love requires sacrifice.
The greatest love requires your greatest sacrifice - your ego!
The more you engage with consciousness you will find that your relationship with your ego changes.
You increasingly become aware of how it gets things horribly wrong because of:
This leads to the inescapable realisation that you need to drop your ego.
Over time it becomes painfully apparent that dropping the ego is not a one-time experience but a frequent activity that should be undertaken at least daily and often many times throughout the day.
Then you discover that as you take your higher self seriously it engages and starts to take you seriously, and everything changes.
This is about a 180 degree shift from living MY life to a life that is lived by consciousness and at last, the realisation that you have come home.
Next Article:
Everything Is Connected And Why You Don't Feel It
Further Reading:
Living The Awakened Heart [Buddhism]
Discovering the Inner Mystery [Christianity]
Resources and Further Reading On This Site:
Like A Prayer - Life Is A Mystery
Intuition Or Anxiety - Are There Angels Or Devils Crawling Here?
Dance Into The Light - How To Stop Chasing Your Tail
Your Ebenezer Stone Of Help - Remembering Your True Source Of Power
What It Means To Live In A Participatory Universe
Return from: "The Greatest Love" to: Walking The Talk
Or Return to: What Is Spirituality?
- What if everything we think…
LATEST ARTICLES
The Balanced Brain - The Ultimate Route To Personal Transformation
How To Experience The Benefits Of A Balanced Brain. Underpinning all of the belief systems and practices that offer routes to personal change, transformation and spiritual growth is the balanced brain…
How To Make Better Decisions - By Avoiding The Narrative Trap
To Understand The Truth We Have To See The Whole Picture. One of the best ways to make better decisions is to have a deeper understanding of the many things that might stop that happening. To understa…
The Greatest Love - The Most Important Relationship You Will Ever Have
Yet Most Will Never Know It Everyone of us has a place, in our hearts there's a space, that is home to the greatest love of all. This love transcends everything we think we know about the world of for…
Everything Is Connected And Why You Don't Feel It
...And Why It Matters
As human beings we are skating on very thin ice with our sense of self and certainty about "how things are" and what we like to think of as reality:
Who Is In Charge Of Your Brain?
How Not To Be Stupid. Who is in charge of your brain? This is not a silly questions. It matters because the outcomes that you experience in your life are determined by how you respond to the events th…
How To Be A Winner On A Very Large Scale
The Incredible Benefits Of Selective Attention. This is not a typical article about how to be a winner. We are not going to talk about goal setting, the importance of habits, the power of focus and al…
The Metagame Approach To Life
How To Achieve Your Biggest Objectives.
The metagame approach to life is all about winning and achieving your biggest objectives by:
- Understanding the bigger picture
- Being better by doing things d…Shantideva - The Way Of The Bodhisattva
Walking The Path Of Compassion. Shantideva the 8th century Indian Buddhist sage is famous for his treatise "The Way of the Bodhisattva" delivered as an extended teaching to the monks of Nalanda monast…
Reframing History - Deconstruction And Discussion Not Destruction
History is always about context, not imposing our own moral values on the past. For those of us fortunate enough to live within western democracies, we are living in an age where a vociferous and into…
Tao Te Ching - Connecting To Your True Source Of Power.
How To Be Lived By The Tao. The Tao Te Ching is one of those books that many people read, few understand, and even fewer put into practice. The only way to know the Tao is to experience it, and it is…
How Things Really Are - The Inbuilt Design Flaws
Chaos, Disorder And Decay Is The Natural Order Of Things. Nobody has the perfect life. We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness. Yet these three big areas: our health…
Intuition Or Anxiety - Are There Angels Or Devils Crawling Here?
How To Tell The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety. How do you know whether the voice of your intuition is real or just the product of your inner anxiety? Several months ago I was having a drink…
What Is Truth - How To Tell A Partial Truth From The Whole Truth?
How the truth and nothing but the truth is often not the whole truth. My great aunty Flo broke her arm and died. It is true that she broke her arm in 1923. It is also true that she died in 1949. But t…
Duality And Life Beyond Your Thinking Mind
Duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuses on the limitations of time, foreground and background, duality and "stuckness". The first aspect of duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuse…
The Conscious Mind Is Limited - Be Aware And Be Prepared
Being aware is the first stage of being prepared. The conscious mind is limited in so many ways. There are some who would argue that there is no such thing as conscious thought and that it is represen…
Your Inner Map Of Reality - Here's Why You Think The Way You Do
The big picture of how your inner map of reality creates your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Your inner map of reality is based on the filters of your own ethnic, national, social, family and rel…
The Failure Of Cancel Culture - Suppression Not Engagement
Why we need to wear our beliefs lightly and develop negative capability. Throughout history people have campaigned to fight beliefs, ideologies, and injustices that they perceived to be oppressive, di…
4 Big Reasons Why We Get Stuck In Our Attempts At Personal Change
Most People Spend Their Entire Life Imprisoned Within The Confines Of Their Own Thoughts. This first of the 4 big reasons why we get stuck is, in my view, the most important. The "self-help industry…
How Do I Change And Why Is It So Hard?
We Would Rather Die Than Change, And We Usually Do In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don’t change. Most people reading this won’t change because they don’t real…
The Illusion Of A Separate Self - Windows 11 With Self Awareness!
Beyond the content of your mind you are so much more than you think you are. When we talk of "myself" this is the conventional way of referring to our self image which is in fact the ego's constructio…
Finite And Infinite Games - Dazed, Confused & Ultimately Transcendent
This is not an instruction manual, it is a wake up call!
Over this past week I have read Professor James Carse's highly regarded "Finite And Infinite Games - A Vision Of Life As Play And Possibility"…
The Gap And The Gain - How Your Brain Sabotages Your Happiness
How Your Lizard Brain Sabotages Your Happiness We are hardwired to measure our progress in any and all areas of life where we have goals and aspirations. We can't not do it. But what we measure and ho…
How To Wake Up - 4 Simple Practices To Help You Wake Up Now
So What Exactly Does It Mean to Wake Up - What Is "Enlightenment"? There is nothing magical, mystical or mysterious about waking up we’re actually having glimpses of enlightenment all the time. Enligh…
Situational Communication - Different Strokes For Different Folks
Situational communication is about taking account of 3 often ignored factors about the other person. You are a situational communicator when you recognise that effective communication is not an event…
How To Influence Without Authority - 6 Key Tips
The secret to how to influence without authority is that you get what you really want by giving other people what they really want. We live in an interconnected world and knowing how to influence with…
Change Questions To Change Your Outcomes
Asking The Right Questions Is Critical For A Successful Change. Every time we initiate a significant change - whether in our personal life or in an organisation - we will most likely over-estimate our…
Group Culture - The Invisible Software That Rules Your Life
Group culture is: "How we do things round here". We like to see ourselves as free agents making our own choices and living authentically but the reality is that The Matrix has many layers and we are u…
Why Getting From A to B Is Not Aways A Straight Line
In circumstances of significant change, the progress from A to B will not be in a straight line. We run our lives largely on auto-pilot. In most circumstances your experience of getting from A to B is…
The Art Of Persuasion Planning For Success - Here's How To Do It!
To be successful in the art of persuasion you must ensure that certain things happen. To be successful in the art of persuasion you must establish a framework of what has to happen to get you to that…
The Art Of Persuasion Advanced Communication Skills - Gaining Buyin
Create The Environment Where They Want To Buyin to Your Proposal In order to build the win-win you have to uncover what it is that the other person really wants or needs, and to do that you have to as…