Given that boundless, divine love is our nature, why is it so hard for us to rest in and realize the truth of boundless love? What disrupts our experience of our nature as love, separates us from it?
From the perspective of the Diamond Approach, Hameed Ali (A.H. Almaas) writes:
“Divine love contains the body; it holds it. It’s like the body sits in this light that I am…When you exist in the dimension of divine love, your form exists, and the body is still there, but your recognition of yourself is different…you won’t exist as something separate from other things.”
—Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality, page 64
There are many veils that limit our perception of this reality, but none as pervasive or convincing as our sense of identity and our conviction in being a separate entity.
This belief begins in childhood and it is rooted in our identification with our physical bodies. This identity formation, based on our bodily experience, is a natural developmental process. Our earliest days and life experiences occur through and with the body. Our bodies, our mother’s bodies…holding, soothing, feeding, washing, learning to walk, talk, relate, etc. These early impressions over time shape and define our sense of self and how we experience the world.
It’s helpful to understand that everyone has this issue, and that nothing has really gone “wrong.” This is a perfectly normal and important part of ego/personality development. The experience of physical boundaries of the body becomes the very basis of our separateness, with what “I” am and what “you” are.
Yet the body is really only a surface manifestation of the larger reality of what we are. If we define ourselves primarily as a physical body, it follows that our consciousness or soul ends at our skin, and we find ourselves separated from the deeper, larger truth of our divine nature.
Over time, and with the aid of meditation, inquiry and other practices, we begin to see through the sense of separateness and understand it as a human construct, which opens us to the truth of divine love. We can enter a realm of experience where there is no separation, no duality, between what is physical and what is divine. Physical sensations of pain and pleasure are both then understood as intensifications of sensation within a field of pure consciousness, a world of spirit in which everything—all reality, including our body—is made of boundless, divine, universal love. We understand that divine love is our true nature.
Our sense of being a separate entity cannot exist in the dimension of divine love because we realize that our individual consciousness is a particularization of the cosmic consciousness that is the nature of everything.
“[Divine love] is where the expanse of love is inseparable from everything—it is, in fact, arising from the nature of everything…divine love is the basis of the universe, of all manifestation and experience.”
—A.H. Almaas
Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality, Introduction, xviii)
Join us as Diamond Approach teacher, Zarina Maiwandi, and special guest, A.H. Almaas, lead a 3-part exploration of what love really is, the different ways it shows up in our human experience, and how we can move through inner obstacles to realize its full expression.
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