Everything is love, man. Love is everywhere. But everything is nothing, too, so love is nothing. But nothing is everything. And nothing is the birthplace of creation. We are creators. God is us. I am God. Wait, no, I’m a stupid human.
Talking about love, non-duality or any “spiritual truth” with words seems silly to me. It seems impossible, and probably is. Anything that feels like a “spiritual truth” is beyond words to me, maybe better approached through fiction than non-fiction, maybe best approached through poetry.
So when the hippies parrot “everything is love,” it resonates with experiences I’ve had, yet it simultaneously feels like a tragic degradation those experiences into empty words. I’ve wrestled with the worthiness of words for a long time, loving them as a distillation of thought, but remaining skeptical about how much they can truly move human hearts. Here I am using them, and here I am questioning them. I’m using them to undermine them, and using them further to contemplate whether there’s any use in that. Probs not. For this post at least, words are all I have.
Much like I question words’ abilities to touch real love, I question humans’ abilities to love unconditionally. We either love our idea of someone, attaching love to the role that person plays in our lives — conditional love — or we unconditionally love that which proves constant in them — their “essence,” if you will. What does it really mean to love someone’s “essence,” though? I guess it means loving their higher self, their soul, or the core of them which is connected to the core of everyone and everything else. Hindus might call it loving Ātman, Christians might call it loving a reflection of Christ Consciousness and Buddhists might call it loving emptiness. Whether our cosmology has a bent of “no self” or of “True Self,” the recipient of our unconditional love seems to be something better apprehended in meditation than in anyone’s personality. To unconditionally love a person or a thing is to unconditionally love everything, and… here we are again. Everythingggggg is loveeeeeeeeeeee. Words only mean something in contrast to one another, which is why words annoy me in general and meaningless platitudes like “everything is love” annoy me in particular.
Of course, as individuals with different dispositions, we connect more readily to love through different routes. One might find love in Jesus and another in Krishna, one with a man and another with a woman. As a self, I certainly feel more love for some people than others, more love for some things than others. This doesn’t make my love untrue, but it does make it partial, and I’m not convinced any human’s heart can sustainably hold the ideal of perfect, impartial and unconditional love. Human love can touch those ideals in moments, but until one of these Vilcabamba hippies who claims to be pansexual goes into sexual heat at the sight of cow shit, I’m not convinced.
This all feels a bit cynical and dark so far, but believe it or not, I’m a huge, sappy romantic at heart. The sadness of human love’s imperfections actually makes me romanticize love even more. Insofar as we can learn real love, we can transcend our limitations and approach heaven’s gate. We can all be that pansexual girl straddling cow shit while fellating her hiking stick, and in this way we can come to know God. I kid, but I’m kind of serious, too. Whether you want to glimpse God’s face or sit on it, make love to one or make love to many, I do believe that we come to know peace as we come to expand our love. I also believe there’s space within a paradigm of ever-expanding love to still have that one special relationship — the person with whom you want to start a family, or just share the journey of life. A fear that breeds possessiveness often steers us into monogamous relationships, but a fear of truly going deep and expanding with one person can just as easily steer us (okay, those of us in places like Vilcabamba or San Francisco) into polyamorous relationships. A monogamous partner inevitably becomes a relentless mirror, reflecting our selves and showing where we need to grow.
A lot of why I value human love, and why I’m happy to be in a relationship now, is just this: I value growing alongside a person who reflects my light and my fears back to me. I value bringing clarity to fears and flaws, because I know that from the perspective of Love (“big love”), there’s nothing to be afraid of. Being in love with a human forces me to work on my deep-seated distrust of people, my deep-seated fear of inadequacy and my deep-seated arrogance. I’m also in it for the joy, the companionship and all the reasons you’d expect, but first and foremost, I’m in it for the growth — of me, of her and of whatever we co-create. I view my motivations as neither more noble nor more selfish than other motivations for being in a relationship; we’re all just following what our heart-minds label as “forward” in our development, or in our journey.
Real love is simply that walk forward, in my view, and that walk forward is simply the way of the heart. Love looks outwardly different for every person with a unique heart, but inwardly, it feels like the same thing we’re all seeking. We walk separate paths, yet we walk those paths to a universal destination. We walk each other home.
Whatever the conduit to the path — a human, lots of humans, a pet dog, a tree, a career, running a marathon, creating art — if it’s truly our path, our love and our issues will show up there. My trust issues have shown up with girlfriends, but girlfriends were just the channel through which those issues were easiest to observe. Trust issues were also always there in my working relationship with myself, in my relationships with parents, in my “love” for the manipulative and “trust no one” paradigm of Survivor, in my disposition toward society, in my seeking of wisdom from spiritual teachers.
During the plant medicine retreat from which I’m now nine days removed, I realized that even after drinking Ayahuasca forty-three times now, I still don’t wholeheartedly trust Ayahuasca. I trust that Ayahuasca has an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than my own, which is why when she told me last November to keep living in Ecuador, I listened, eating the flight I’d booked back to the U.S. and not looking back (too much). I trust that Ayahuasca has woken me up to my real nature, and I trust that Ayahuasca has healed my body, but deep down, I can’t know what Ayahuasca’s intentions are for sure. She could be a hyper-intelligent plant that simply enjoys trolling humans and fucking with their lives. Maybe she likes helping them a bit, but then leaving them to flounder in unearned wisdom and lose their minds. I don’t know. I can’t know, and so in the absolute sense, I can’t trust. I’m extremely grateful for the direction in which Aya has guided my life, and I trust that direction enough to keep listening, but truly, there is no absolute sense in which I know that she’s helped me in the big picture. I don’t even really know that she’s a she, or that it’s a conscious plant spirit rather than just a particularly effective form of imbibing DMT. I like believing in great spirit more than I like believing in materialism or simulation theory, but those are just beliefs, and in any belief, I could be wrong.
In any belief about anyone or anything, I could be wrong. How, then, can I have absolute trust in anyone or in anything? The conclusion I’ve come to is that I can’t. And I don’t.
In the final sharing circle of this last plant medicine retreat, I decided to express these trust issues, more or less just as I’ve expressed them in this post. It wasn’t easy to say, because it meant telling the couple running the retreat, to their faces and very explicitly, that I didn’t trust them. They responded beautifully, though; it didn’t seem like news to them, nor did it seem like a problem. One of them immediately answered with advice that I’d felt to be true for a long time, but never had the courage or clarity to vocalize:
“You don’t need to trust us, or to trust the medicine or to trust anyone, as long as you trust yourself.”
I view the external as a reflection, a projection and an interpretation of my own heart-mind. These “issues” I see externally actually reside within me, and so too resides the remedy. Others might abuse the trust I give in this relative world, and that’s fine; that’s a great way to learn discernment and trust myself even more. Trust must grow from within, and if trust is something I have within regardless, what do I care if others “betray” my trust? What do I care if my dad “lied” when he told me he’d stop being an alcoholic, or if my mom was dishonest with me in my formative years? These challenges were blessings leading me within, leading me to true trust and to true love. Love, too, grows from within, and to give love we must have love. If we have no love within us, and we’re looking for love in a human form or anything external, then the “love” we give is actually just the neediness that drives our seeking. Real love can only begin with self-love, and it can only be given without an agenda, as the sun gives life to everything on our planet, expecting nothing in return.
Sun-tier love — now that’s a love I trust. Real love. I trust real love, and I trust myself. I trust myself to keep journeying toward that limitless love, confronting my all-too-limited humanity and my all-too-partial human love at every turn. I’m learning to love even that limitation and partiality, to trust my experience and to trust myself as I am. I’ve given my trust to my human partner and allowed myself to fall in love with her, because I believe in love as a path toward awakening, and because I believe my philosophizing here means little compared to my actions.
So that’s it. No more words trying to wrap minds around God, or Love, or the fabric of the cosmos. If “everything is love” sounds better to you than my personal manifesto, stick with “everything is love.” If manifesto and platitude alike sound like bullshit, maybe they are. Words.
Higher intelligence might laugh at my attempts to use words, but they’re what I’ve got at my disposal, so I do my best. Higher love might laugh at our human love, but we love in the ways we can, we learn and we grow. What else is there to do?
Loved this meditation! Ayahuasca has certainly made me think about love, too. I love the possibility that love is written in or whatever to nature or existence, and yet, as you sort of hint at, the more we make it a default the less it can come to mean. And so, I think our best bet is to move toward the maturation of a kind of spiritual transformation, which sometimes feels a bit like death. The growth or awakening that you write beautifully about here.
This quote has been highly helpful this week: “Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.” ~Eckhart Tolle
Beautiful, meaningful writing. The impression I got reading this is that you’re more comfortable striving for expressing unconditional love (which is to say Love), persisting beyond conditions that we impose or have walked into; but not comfortable expressing unconditional trust (which is to say Trust) without the intellectual need to ‘know’. (Highly recommend A Course In Miracles for this syntactic wavelength).
In my experience (as with your lovely paragraph about Self-Trust after the ceremony) Trust is in the Knowing you might feel being in meditation. It is in Knowing that All is Well. That you are eternal; that your essential nature is not at stake — being unchangeable. (“Nothing real can be threatened, Nothing unreal exists, herein lies the peace of God.” ~ACIM)
The inner mystery of Self: it cannot be infinite and eternal if I can *fully* “know” or comprehend it and put it into words. Leave space for the mysterious peace “that passeth all understanding”. Be infinite.
— The temporal is a dreamy gift to help us begin experiencing this in multitudes (special relationships, fulfilling passionate joys, using feeble language to connect & awaken humankind).
This Self-Knowing is the same as when you Know a decision is the ‘right’ one for the outer realm. Why is it right? Because you Know it; it feels that way. Sometimes one is told, or sees signs (whether it is affirmation-manifestation or if it is confirmation bias). Truth is, one is never threatened. Partial trust be gone!
Enjoy your journey in Ecuador! My spiritual sojourn was to Guatemala. Presently from Virginia, I send you light and clarity.