The Sufi and Eastern mystics say that the key to realizing God is to empty yourself and they’re right. Once you empty out all the things of this world, the wantings and longings driven by ego and directed at fulfilling needs of this shell, all you’re left with is what Rumi called the soul of the soul. What is in the soul of the soul?
In a sense, God is all that’s left. This doesn’t mean that we can become gods or become totally at union with God—as in no longer being a human soul. What it does mean is that we can become like God.
How?
Because God is love. When He created the universe, all that existed prior to His shooting forth of light was love. And all that’s left between the particles our scientists can identify via empirical observation and experimental proof is love. Between each particle is love, or God.
When God forms each one of our souls he uses this same ingredient: he uses love. We consist of energy and inside each one of our souls is a bit of God’s DNA—a bit of Him and what He is, along with energy and light, is love. Inside each human soul, no matter how young or how primitive that soul is—exists a small light and that light is God’s love. Stripped of everything else, of all the stuff that extinguishes our light, remains love.
Photo Credit: USFWS / BJ Baker, National Elk Refuge volunteer
So when a mystic is said to realize God or Self, what this means is that they have emptied their souls of all things that are of the individual or related to the physical or even the spiritual world. All that’s left, if you’re empty of your self is that little piece of love that God used to make you. That’s it. And once you have just that love, once you focus all of your soul on the love that made you, that love will take hold, it will ignite, it will catch fire and burn brighter until it expands within your soul . . .
And then you will be more like God. You will be able to love more and in loving more all you will care about will be feeling more of that love. And the more love you feel inside the more you will need to give that love to others and of course in giving it to others you will be helping them find their own love. And you will be feeling love for yourself as well—because of course that’s all you will be. Love.
This is not quite the same as becoming god or being a god. It’s more like having a part of God inside of you and simply becoming aware of it. Jesus spoke of how this works in the Gospel of John. Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven lies within you.
Jesus also says that just as He is in the Father, “you are in me and I am in you.” What He means by this is the same thing, I think, that other mystics have been getting at: if you empty your soul of everything but its core, you will find the essence of what you are. And that’s God’s love.
Rumi explains that God is inside all matter. He says:
You are in my eyes.
Montrebei Gorge, Spain
How else could I see light?
You are in my brain.
This wild joy.
If love did not live in matter,
how would any place
have any hold on anyone?
Rumi had an insight that all lovers and perhaps even all quantum physicists from the modern era would agree with: love is a real energy that exists in everything and everyone. Love is at the essence of all particles and all matter.
To put it a different way, consider for a moment what it feels like to be in love. The lips of your lover, the kisses, the pained and insane longing . . . or consider the love you feel for your son or daughter, or if you’ve served in the military, the love you feel for your band of brothers. Is that love real? Does it exist?
Of course it’s real. Of course it exists. No one challenges this notion.
Love is both a great mystery and a great certainty, for though no human eye has seen ever seen it nor experiment proven it, not a single soul doubts its power or questions its existence.
Love. It’s all that really matters once you strip all that doesn’t matter away. And in truth, nothing but love really does matter. Not really. For love is the essence that makes all other essences possible—love is the essence that is God, that God used to create all other souls and all other particles and all other energy. Love is the first cause. Love is what existed before anything existed.
And that’s when we need to remember what God is: God is the greatest, most pure of all love . . . He too is a soul, but it is out of love’s vast beauty that His soul, just as our souls, became separate from and yet always connected to the One. Before God existed as a soul, he existed as love . . . and He uses love to create all our souls. Love was used to create the entire fabric of both the physical and the spiritual worlds as well . . . so if you reduce everything else in the universe to its fundamental truth, its thing that is inside all other things and inside all souls, what you’re left with is love.
Love. Love is in you. It’s around you . . . it’s of you and it is you. Don’t ever doubt its power. Don’t ever doubt its existence. And don’t ever forget that God, like love, is a power that can never be seen or proven but which exists within us all the same.
Love comes from God.
Photo Credit Natureworks
God is love and so are we.
God is in us.
Love.
Take everything else and that’s what’s left. And if you’re left with love you will find God. The love will ignite and burn brighter and brighter until your inner light shines with the love that was used to make you. Until you shine.
That’s love.
And that’s the great mystery. The secret piece of all of us is love. God’s love.
News
On a separate note, you may have noticed my website has changed. I am rebuilding, both as single mom and as an author. My mission is to write funny and romantic epics that help call souls Home. I am forming a ministry that I will be calling Strays Welcome, which reflects the radical nature of my message–that all souls truly are welcome in God’s house. Please look around and also please be patient with the mess.
In further news, I will be releasing Strays Welcome in August. Anyone who wants to receive a free advance reviewer copy is welcome to one–just please drop me a line at [email protected] To learn more about Strays, please look under the Works tab, or click here: http://elainephoenix.com/works/strays-welcome/.
I will be blogging occasionally from here on out on spiritual issues.
Photo Credit: To see the license for the Morning at Miller Ranch photo, please go here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmtnprairie/9152434997/in/album-72157633084631801/
