By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness

If you read my work, you probably know that I think love is the most important and powerful force in existence. Love connects us with our higher consciousness in a way that nothing else really can, but as we’ll learn here, we have to step out of our mental conditioning to rediscover it in its pure, untainted form.

It’s available to everyone who calls on it, but its purity depends on our state of consciousness and the extent to which we can untangle the mind’s conditioning and use the mind as an open, clear, unbiased portal into our higher consciousness.

I’ve struggled to understand what love truly is, and until recently, I was convinced that the limited mind is supposed to be a part of it. If we can bring the mind with all its conditioning under the direction and guidance of the heart, I figured it’d be just as effective or enlightening.

Now, I’m learning that the mind’s conditioning – not the mind itself, which we could never leave or escape like some spiritual seekers think – forms a cloud or barrier over our true spiritual awareness, which is our understanding of ourselves as God. Once we understand we’re our own creator, all of the pain, sadness and limitation we’ve convinced ourselves are real will be understood as illusions of the clouded mind.

Our struggles will longer bring us down, because we’ll have love (and the understanding that we created all of this) and we’ll know that love and our unclouded, undistorted presence are all we need. To reach this point requires us to clear away the aspects of the mind that keep us from receiving or understanding true love, and once we get past these obstacles, we can access it and reap its many creative and spiritual fruits.

I might resume writing reports with guidance from spiritual teachers like Jiddu Krishnamurti, who we’ll hear from here, because now more than ever, they’re enlightening me about our true nature and the mind games we create that keep us from understanding our godhood.

Understanding the tricks of the limited, conditioned mind will help us get past them and access the wisdom of the heart, and from my experience, clearing the mind and subsequently filling the heart with love (without letting the mind become rigid again) is one of the best things we can do. The best thing we can do is realize that we don’t actually need to do anything at all.

Our existence is enough, and we created this reality to roam around, have adventures and create even more things while we’re here. We’re supposed to have fun, and some of us choose creative outlets like writing to have our fun. We don’t need to seek or strive for anything, and the moment we stop seeking is the moment everything falls back into place. We just have to understand this so we can get the most out of our organic connection with ourselves and the Most High.

I’d like to share some words from Jiddu Krishnamurti about love. He spoke about true love – not the conditioned love the mind has convinced us to embrace – and the best (and really only) way to access it is to stop trying and let it naturally express itself. When we do, we’ll be awash in higher vibrations and spiritual insights that’ll not only amaze us, but enhance our creativity and help us awaken the world.

First, Krishnamurti compares love to a burning flame.

“Love is so rare in this world, that flame without smoke; the smoke is overpowering, all-suffocating, bringing anguish and tears. Through the smoke, the flame is rarely seen; and when the smoke becomes all-important, the flame dies. Without that flame of love, life has no meaning, it becomes dull and weary; but the flame cannot be in the darkening smoke.

“The two cannot exist together; the smoke must cease for the clear flame to be. The flame is not a rival of the smoke; it has no rival. The smoke is not the flame, it cannot contain the flame; nor does the smoke indicate the presence of the flame, for the flame is free of smoke.” (1)

He uses the same comparison to tell us that love exists independently of ideas (namely, ideas of what it should be like).

“Love is not related to idea, and so idea cannot commune with love. Love is a flame without smoke.” (2)

When we fill the mind with ‘smoke’, he tells us, we cover up true love and slowly become unhappy.

“Love is a strange thing, and how easily we lose the warm flame of it! The flame is lost, and the smoke remains. The smoke fills our hearts and minds, and our days are spent in tears and bitterness. … We never know how to keep the flame clear of smoke, and the smoke always smothers the flame. But love is not of the mind, it is not in the net of thought, it cannot be sought out, cultivated, cherished; it is there when the mind is silent and the heart is empty of the things of the mind.” (3)

I’m just starting to grasp what Krishnamurti and so many other teachers have tried to tell us, which is that it’s time to stop searching for love and spiritual awareness and let them flow naturally, with no effort or mental ‘smoke’ involved. It’s time to stop trying so hard, because we’ve blocked ourselves from the spiritual reality we crave by creating all of these philosophies, disciplines and organized belief systems around something that can only be felt and witnessed, not known by the limited mind.

This is all the work of the mind, which always feels the need to organize, categorize, number, and keep things in order. The true Mind, which I capitalized for added pizazz, is freedom, creativity, and passion that isn’t controlled or contained by the monkey mind. The true mind is united with the heart and does its ‘work’ out of love for all creation, and this work is more like play. Again, it all comes down to the fact that we’re here – on earth and in every higher dimension, where we live simultaneous lives – to play, have fun, and show the beings around us love and compassion.

We aren’t here to be miserable, but misery is all the limited mind has for us.

As Krishnamurti tells us, sensations, which are products of the limited mind, give the false appearance of love. True love exists independently of sensations or anything the mind can grasp, and it amazes us and fills us with transcendent bliss when we tap into it.

“Love is not sensation. Sensations give birth to thought through words and symbols. Sensations and thought replace love; they become the substitute for love. Sensations are of the mind, as sexual appetites are. The mind breeds the appetite, the passion, through remembrance, from which it derives gratifying sensations. …

“Love is not of the mind; but when the mind takes over there is sensation, which it then calls love. It is this love of the mind that can be thought about, that can be clothed and identified. … Within the field of the mind, love cannot be. Mind is the area of fear and calculation, envy and domination, comparison and denial, and so love is not. … Love and the processes of the mind cannot be bridged over, cannot be made one. When sensations predominate, there is no space for love; so the things of the mind fill the heart.

“Thus love becomes the unknown, to be pursued and worshipped; it is made into an ideal, to be used and believed in, and the ideals are always self-projected. So the mind takes over completely, and love becomes a word, a sensation. Then love is made comparative, ‘I love you more and you love less.’ But love is neither personal nor impersonal; love is a state of being in which sensation as thought is wholly absent.” (4)

Keep in mind that when Krishnamurti refers to the ‘mind’ (i.e. when saying “love is not of the mind”), he refers to what I call the limited mind.

The limited mind is the one he ceaselessly encouraged the world to understand and clear away so the true Mind could make itself known, and some of you might not think I have any reason make the distinction in the first place. You might be right, but I feel like it’s important for those of you who believe the mind goes on in higher states of consciousness. I think it does, but it’s much different from the dense mind we’re used to.

I’ll wrap our report up here for now, but I might have more to share from Krishnamurti about love in future reports.

Like I mentioned, I’m opening back up to spiritual teachers after a hiatus that was caused because I realized that independent thought and a personal connection with the divine are more important than listening to a spiritual teacher. However, I’m remembering that the most genuine teachers (like Krishnamurti) tried to help people escape the limited, mind-dominated reality that I still get stuck in despite my best non-effort.

This is rekindling some of my trust, and while I’m still approaching spiritual teachers cautiously, I know most of them have something helpful to offer. I still think maintaining our own spiritual and intuitive connection without the need for external guidance should be a top priority, but there’s nothing wrong with getting some spiritual help. In fact, it might allow us to find that missing link between where we are now in terms of spirituality and where we want to be.

I can say with a fair amount of certainty that love and open-mindedness will reintroduce us to the higher consciousness we’ve unknowingly covered up. We just have to move beyond our thoughts, which requires us to understand them and accept their presence rather than renouncing them, and everything we thought we’d find in scriptures and strict religious practices (or even habits or indulgences we use spirituality to justify) will be right here, ready to enlighten us about our true nature as God.

Footnotes:

1. J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. First Series. Bombay, etc.: B.I. Publications, 1972; c1974, 131.
2. Ibid,. 133.
3. J. Krishnamurti,Commentaries on Living. Second Series. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1967; c1958, 38.
4. J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. First Series. Ibid., 102.