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The Kennebec River - Bath, ME
I'm confused. I want to love everyone, but I'm unable.
What do you mean by unable?
I feel love for a few people, and some I try to love and can't, especially those I think have wronged me or someone close to me.
To love does not mean to feel love. The intent to love is love. Feeling called loving, as do all feelings, comes and goes. They're like ripples on the surface of a body of water. And you will experience a decrease in these loving feelings, in the sense of emotion, as you sink more into the heart, the seat of presence. This is because you're drawn away from relying on the surface we call "person," with its thoughts, sensations, and emotions arising in the body-and-mind. Hence, less identity with feelings called loving indicates more intimacy. So, don't try to feel love... just love.
How can I just love them?
A start is simply to be mindful of their presence. Looking at someone with mindfulness is to love. You can go somewhere and not have any feeling or thought of love, yet love everyone there in this mindful looking, which is present in the form of your body-and-mind.
What's this that loves in this way?
One can call it by different words; I like "presence." If two hundred persons sat with us, and all dropped the mental story of who we have been told we are, presence would shine. There would be awareness of only one presence in this room. The awareness would be presence aware of itself. Only the story of a self, a mental illusion, keeps us from seeing this one presence. When you love anyone or anything, presence is loving presence.
But this sounds like being a robot - no feeling?
Presence has its own feeling. Yet, it's not an emotion. It doesn't come and go. In the absence of the story of self, this taste of presence arises into the body-mind experience. When you get acquainted with this, you realize how fleeting and insubstantial emotions are in contrast to this presence, whose feeling is itself. Presence doesn't feel, it is feeling. Of course, the word "feeling" does not fit what I'm indicating, but it's the best word I've found to point to this.
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
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*©Brian K. Wilcox, 2022.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox, and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
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