XII. From Love to Enlightenment

Love

In the first seven years we have created our ideas and beliefs within us. Of course we become mature and grow up, but we are basically during our life ruled by a small child that lives in our subconscious and does not know its true Self. This little child is called the Inner Child. It takes everything for granted, it can not judge and does not think. But it can love. It wants to love – if it was not so scared. This fear is stuck within our Inner Child through old recurring patterns.

We create our own reality. Before we have not understood and internalised this fact, we remain the victims of our personal circumstances. We remain the victims of fate, remain dependent on our parents, teachers, pastors, partners and even our children. We remain powerless and afraid. We live in a constant state of deficiency. We lack Love and joy, money and labour, we lack the right house and the better car. Once we have achieved one of these items, we create within ourselves a new lack. These are our patterns, and like attracts like.

 

How do we get out of this cycle? Once we raise up and take responsibility for ourselves, we start to become aware of ourselves and then have the choice to change something. This responsibility for ourselves and our dilemmas is: Love. We are the Love, because we are children of God, because God is Love. Everything else is an illusion, a misconception, reasoning on the myth to not meet the demands of others. Love becomes our salvation. Our true freedom and ultimately our salvation will be the result, if we love ourselves, beginning with our Inner Child. First we have to take on the responsibility for our reality around us and then we have no choice left but to love.

 

The opposite polarity of Love is fear. Any emotional reaction that is not done out of Love is an expression of fear. We have given it different names: anger, envy, greed, abuse, frustration, stress, etc. All these come out of our fears. And these fears are the only reason for the suppressing Love.

 

How do we suppress the Love? We cover it up and whitewash it. We appear to be strong, we manage to carry it off quite well, we don't even admit that to ourselves. We talk it away, drink it away, smoke it away, work it away. We even pray it away, and even this is happening at a superficial level, because the prayer does not flow through the heart, but only through the mind. We are like drowning men, whose forces become less and less.

 

How can we reverse our fears through Love? By accepting them and above all taking responsibility. What is not ours, we can not change. We cannot change the outside, but only our inner Self. So we go where the fear resides, meaning going into our subconscious, where our Inner Child has this fear lurking! Let's talk with our Inner Child, let's embrace it. Yes, you must embrace yourself and sense yourself! Your Inner Child is sensing your presence, so you must speak to it as a Mother, a Father.

 

Only now will the energies flow, and the chemistry of your body will start to change. The neurotransmitters flow that message throughout the body from your brain: We love you, we are happy! The muscles relax, the heart expands, you begin to feel a rising sensation of heat, the eyes glisten, the mind becomes calm ... – It is purely and solely the feeling of Love that you need to change within everything around yourself. Our mirrors on the outside will show us how we have greatly changed.

 

Now you will say. “Yes, but that does not last forever”. – Why not? Because you may have a relapse. Well, then just embrace yourself again. You are continually doing it with your children, or even with your dog or your cat. Since we find it works, we stroke our children and pets and animals again and again and offer them friendly and comforting praise. We are not that different from them within our deeper Inner Self, our Soul. We are our own Inner Child.

 

I hear yet another argument from you: “Yes, but this world around me, I can not only love everything and everybody, I must define and defend my own self, I have to show who I am.” Okay, just show it! Show that you have a big heart! Show the people of the world around you that it can only work with the giving of Love. Do you think that a single man in this “evil world” is really so bad? Or is he just a victim of his poor, abused Inner Child? Do you not think that the biggest villains out there could not improve themselves if only they could only learn to love themselves and thereby become respected by their friends and many others?

 

Of course you have the right to defend and define yourself. Just stay calm and retire. You have nothing to do but love yourself, love your Inner Child, love your partner, your children, your friends. This Love will radiate into your environment, and you contribute to a transformation of the world.

 

Unfortunately, I have to admit that this does not work everywhere. We cannot always save the world, we can only contribute to a better world. But we can at least save ourselves. Once we have chosen to love, everything negative becomes our past, and it all will be forgiven and forgotten. You can try to bring forth many counter arguments, as many as you wish, but I can refute every argument brought up with just a single sentence: “It is only working through Love.”

 

How do I know that, you ask? Because God is made up of pure Love! So Love is the only way forward. I have fully experienced the anxiety, the fear of loss, too. But – I have discovered the power of Love! The more I talk about Love, the more passionate I become about the subject. And I will be watching with joy as you blow yourself up out of your ego and gradually collapse into your Inner Self again.

 

Your heart may open out only slowly, because usually you are stuck within your power of intellect, that which was really only created to serve the purposes of your heart. Only if your mental “Yes, but”, has become a more heart-oriented “Well, maybe”, can we thank the good Lord that He again has converted another person to Love, and that could be you!

 

For this would be the true conversion to Love. Not just quoting the Bible from beginning to end and forever praying! You just need to love! Everything else will come by itself. “These things I command you: to love one another” (John 15, 17). Even if those who talk professionally about the power of Love show in various life situations, where clarity and truth has at last come to light, that they have barely opened out their hearts, and this due to their fear of confrontation with their own Inner Self, their Soul, I know, it may be lonely in Paradise. There are many people standing in line to enter Paradise, but they do not know how to open out their hearts in order to gain entry.

 

Even with the Love of God we behave with our long acquired and adopted patterns. Active Christians may display a Christian piety of doing “good deeds” (that means, I must fulfil the need to do something good): “I must pray three Rosaries every day.” – “I have to go to Communion every day.” These are our targets to ourselves, so that God may love us. Why do we not believe that God loves us always? That He loves us even before we do something for Him? God IS pure Love, pure Light. He not only Loves, He IS the Love.

 

Please do not get me wrong: Of course it's wonderful to pray to God every day and to join regularly in Communion with Jesus. Thus we show God that WE indeed love Him and praise Him. With our Rosary prayers, we ask Mother Mary for Her intercession. We ask for Her assistance in our development. We ask for Her help in humility, in the care and Love to others. But even if we are not doing this, God loves us anyway because we are His Children. We may even be doing ourselves a favour if we do good unto Him, because by doing that we can give calmness to ourselves and even give us the feeling that we are uniting with Him.

 

Uniting ourselves with God, our heart opens automatically; this in turn makes us healthy, calms us, takes away our worries and fears. Even if we cannot do it sometimes, for whatever reason – God still loves us! He has created us and He is our Loving Father forever. Just as you love your children as a Mother and Father. Of course you do not like everything they do, but you still love them. It should ideally be all-embracing and unconditional. The capacity for Love among mankind depends very strongly on the ability to love God. I love God happily, freely and with a pure heart, so I can love the people in the same way: all-embracing and unconditionally. Love is the natural expression of our own Being.

 

Our ultimate goal is to unite ourselves with God and merge with Him. It is a development, a steady increase in our consciousness. We achieve this increase only through our Love, which in turn creates a higher vibrational Light Body within us. We cannot rise up from zero to a hundred per cent overnight. We need to rise slowly. With only a small heart, we cannot receive Jesus, we would burn up. I have mentioned this in several chapters. This consciousness is perceptible, it is felt in our hearts through the emotion of Love, and can be a very painful experience if we are not prepared for it. We should not hope to obtain all the pleasures in the “Hereafter” that we deny ourselves in this world. We need in the afterlife waiting for our descendants to take pity on us for our healing, that we may heal ourselves through their healing.

 

Why do we trample life on Earth under foot and hope for something we will never have, if we do not in this life prepare for it? We may not be able to receive all the pleasures in life, because we simply are unable to access all our emotions of Love, but nevertheless have to develop it. Every person goes up to the Afterlife with the amount of heart opening gained on Earth. They cannot jump from being an emotionally cold egoist to becoming an exuberant loving person. This would be pure utopia for those who want to escape desperately from Love.

 

This means that we must as a Human Being on Earth learn to love. We must first know what Love means. It is the Love that develops in the heart. It is the Love with which we learn to love ourselves first, and then our partner and at the same time all the people around us. It is the Love with which we can give each other the strength to be capable for the all-embracing Unconditional Love.

 

*
“I think it is impossible
that Love can constantly be stepping
on to the spot unrequited.”
(St. Teresa of Àvila)
*

 

 

The Dolorism

Unfortunately, many Christians fall prey to the principle of Dolorism, that of self-punishment. The ban to experience something exhilarating is a common form of self-punishment. They want to suffer. They think they have to suffer because Jesus suffered. It is a form of fiction or thought-blocking, as I previously described in another chapter. We think we have to suffer.

 

As long as we are thinking we do not love, as also St. Teresa of Àvila expressed it: “It is important not to think much, but to love much” (from “The Inner Castle”), I repeat this: God is pure Love, God is Joy. His Son died for us on the Cross so that we can be redeemed and illuminated by the Light of God, the Divine Light. He took us to His Cross so that we can converge with God, so that we too can experience the Love and Joy.

 

Suffering cannot always be avoided. Our salvation is paved with crises, suffering and misery. We suffer through the loss of a loved one or a loved pet, we suffer because of unfulfilled Love, we suffer because of an illness. The suffering has a purpose: it makes us grow. Accept every sorrow, every crisis and every disease as an opportunity for growth! Thus the greatest distress can make sense.

 

Many people believe they must suffer in order to save their family members. How can a child be healthy if the mother is always unhappy? Suffering produces sorrow – joy produces joy! If the suffering prevails in your family and pushes down everyone, you must first accept it, in order to release it. Take responsibility for it and you realize that you do not need the grief, because Jesus Christ took upon Himself the suffering. He is risen, and therefore we are risen, mature, and happy Christians, having the right and duty to share this joy in the form of Love.

 

Practice the forgiveness for your family members, as I have explained in the chapter 'Forgiveness and Liberation'. You will see: You too can stand up again and live with joy!

 

*
“Pray not for lighter loads,
but for a stronger back.“
(St. Teresa of Àvila)
*

 

 

The Ego

If our heart is aflame with the Love for God and Man, it will feel the need to pour out this Love and send it out to everyone. This Love is an all encompassing force, it relates to Heaven and Earth and all living creatures and is unconditional, no if’s and but’s; and it is creative, because with this Love we are creating new Love, healing and well-being. This Love works by itself, it renders impossible the judging and condemning of others. And it is endless, because out of its glow arises always another new flame – our Mind with its reason and its will are powerless against that.

 

However, our Ego behaves in a contrary way. It denies Love and sows jealousy, hatred, violence and war. Because of our ego-centeredness, we remain small and stuck in our development. It prevents our progress on the path to God. Our Ego lives solely by reason, the will and the Mind. It is as so to speak the “superfluous” Mind. Dualistically thinking, it wants to attract everything to itself, it needs the appreciation and praise of others, from all and at all times; it is sorting out everything for its own benefit and it sets conditions. It is always looking for the mistakes of others in order to correct them, thus is placing itself above them. It knows only black and white, good and evil, it insists on reward and punishment, in the recognition of the injustice of fate and of unhappy coincidences. It drives us to the eternal spiral of competitive thinking, being better than others and winning in games and sports.

 

The Ego is the desperate attempt by the evil within us, keeping us away from our happiness. Why? Because it suspects that it will become ignored through our stronger Love for God and all of His Creation. Because it knows that it can do nothing against the force of our heart and that it will eventually be destroyed. The true force of evil within us is not that of the Devil! Apart from mental disorders caused by disease and abuse, it is not the Devil, but the Ego, which we have needed in the early stages of our evolution, to prevail over our competitors. Reason and Love were not yet developed in the early stages, there was only the “Law of the Jungle”, and this was based within our Subconscious, in the form of our instincts and natural violence in a primitive world..

 

Our progress towards becoming a rational creature with a loving heart has since accelerated. Now our last step is still missing, which is to banish our Ego. What we may keep instead is our self-esteem and our Self-Love, which may prevent us from being overwhelmed by others. Do not be afraid of this development, it will go very quickly and almost automatically, because as large as our Ego may be, it can achieve nothing against Love. Just as the Darkness is powerless against the Light, so the Ego becomes weak, when the Light of Love shines forth.

 

Live mindfully and consciously in the present, because the Ego hates the present. It can only feed from thoughts that deal with the past: “How beautiful it was then, so it is not today!” And the future: “It will again soon be as beautiful as it was before!”

 

Today it is beautiful! The present is your life. In the present you render yourself completely to life. It is impossible to live or to love in the past or the future. Try it: Can you love something in the past? How does it work? Once you feel that sense of Love in your heart, you're back in the present. There is no avoiding it. These past and future tenses are constructs of pure thought and belong at the best as words in a book, but not in your life in the here and now.

 

“Oh, how I loved her/him!” Did you love, or do you love now? If you love the person now, means you are living in the present. Did you love that person and no longer love her/him anymore, it is in the past, so it is completed. Lick your wounds, and turn back to living. Become humble and ask God to stand by your side. It is your purification of the Ego-fixation, it is a part of your vocation to release it and get rid of it.

 

Teresa of Àvila, too, had far more faith in God than the fear of evil. She took care to let it die back by contemplative prayers and ascetic practices, the deep-rooted selfishness of the “old man” in the footsteps of the Crucified Christ, in order to become a “new” and internally free and selfless loving Being. For her it was not only about liberating people from their attachment to their possessions and to other persons, but also to achieve a detachment from their own self-centeredness.

 

The easiest way to free yourself from anything is – as well as the suffering and all the negativity that you do not want anymore – is to first of all acknowledge and accept it as yours. Then let it go little by little, by depriving it of your attention. You do no longer support it, and it will die off. This is the meaning of the “withering away”, which the Mystics used in their writings. It is the letting go of the Ego and the old habits, in short, the old primitive Human Being within yourself.

 

Start watching your language: There are words that come only from the Ego: 'But'; 'however'; 'but yet'; and many more. Start with the word 'but'. “But, that was always so!!” This is the expression of defiance of the Ego. Banishing these words from the language will take quite a while.

 

You'll see it is possible. I like to bring my favourite sentence into my mind: “Be still, know, I am God!” The Ego cannot harm that thought! This sentance simply wipes everything away: “Leave it alone, get out of your mind, enjoy life.” Through these thoughts I can open my heart automatically and I find I am connected with God who then guides me on His path. No Ego can withstand it for any length of time!

 

*
“Perfect Love is giving no consideration to selfish interests”
(St. Teresa of Àvila)
*

 

 

Awareness

Awareness can be done only in the present, it is a state of being. When are we really ourselves? Usually we find ourselves with our thoughts somewhere in the past: “What did I do at that time?” – Or in the future: “What will I be doing?” We like to judge, which is the specialty of our Ego. We try to rise above others, we attempt to segregate others. Hurt no one, neither in thought, word or deed. And do not hurt yourself. This would suffice as the one single Commandment. We have enough difficulty in keeping it ...

 

All you need for awareness, God has already given you. So you are already perfect. Look into yourself, open your heart. Let it be open wide, let it radiate. Establish a relationship with everything. Pay attention to the smallest things, nothing has come by chance in your life, everything you are watching, is important to you at this time, although it might seem so insignificant. Behind all this lies a deeper meaning.

 

Love your work, work calmly and deliberately, give it value. You did not simply come to do this work. There is a reason for it, even if you are unemployed or dissatisfied with your work. The time of unemployment is to be the time of silence, the time of collection and reflection. Recognize who or what you are. Experience your own value, that which God has given you. Be careful with yourself. Be aware of the reactions of your family members. Do they lack awareness, are they mindful? Do people change around you, as you change yourself?

 

Use your senses, feel your sensuality. Feel as things feel. Are they smooth, rough, warm, cold? Go into Nature, look at every small thing. Have you ever admired the immense richness of colours and the variety of leaf shapes? Have you ever felt how the leaf of an oak, a horse chestnut tree, a linden tree feels? How does the bark on the trunk feel? How do the flowers look, what colours do they have and what scent? Close your eyes and pay attention to the colours and images that show up in your mind's eye.

 

Take the plug of your MP3 player out of your ears, and listen to the sounds of nature and the animals. Listen to the sound of water, enjoy the ringing laughter of children. Recognize the emotions of animals: a bird expresses its courtship quite differently than its cry of alarm over an enemy. You suddenly hear sounds, whose origin you do not recognize. Do not be surprised if some day you will hear bells ringing, and you know: “Now cannot be the time for peal of bells!” These instead are the spherical tones in your higher consciousness, which is a good sign of your connection to Heaven.

 

Do you realize that you can only use all your senses in the presence? Awareness means presence. All the past fades away, and everything becomes good.

 

As a sport, I recommend Tai Chi and Chi Gong in order to centre yourself, and you feel that your inner strength comes out of silence. Muscle strength is finite, the inner power is endless, because it comes from God and is constantly flowing through you. You will never get tired, in fact to the contrary. Your body forms a reservoir of energy, therein the oxygen you breathe is stored as energetic power. If you fill your body with the right technique regularly every morning, a good storage of oxygen needs only eight deep breaths before an open window, then you will always have enough energy available to allow you in case of emergency to mobilize your reserve tank of energy, and along with sending a quick prayer to Heaven, this can save you from any situation.

 

Always include Nature’s elements in your life, each element is reflected on the spiritual plane: Air = thoughts, water = emotions, fire = will, earth = consciousness, ether = God. We have to train our thoughts, we have to master our emotions, strengthen our will and recognize our consciousness – the mastery of those elements leads to our awakening, to the true transformation of our primal qualities into our own strength. These elements bind our own consciousness to the Earth.

 

Be aware of the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. The Sun warms us, without it we could not exist. Experience the course of the Sun, its rising and setting and the passage in the morning, midday, evening. Each part of the day has its own dynamics, its own charm. The Moon and the Stars will lead us into the hidden areas. They too can we experience through being attentive.

 

The darkness of night is to us mysterious, surrounding us with silence. Many fear the night and its darkness. This is largely because they do not want to accept the dark within themselves. Discover the light in the darkness of the night. The objects appear to us differently in the light of the night, even though they be the same ones during the day. Even the noises of the night change in our perception. It's just a question of our own assessment of their qualities.

 

Forget the questions arising from the mental mind: “Why, how come, wherefore?” “Why is something as it is?” Do not worry. The knowledge arises from within yourself, from your deepest inside. Your questions originate from a fear of not being good enough or of losing something or someone. You may not realise that you have everything you need! What you lose and will not be coming back, you in fact do not need. If you really love it, you will keep it forever in your heart, with loving thoughts and with no pain.

 

What you need the most is God, He is always with you. Accept it: Life is like that. Take responsibility for the life that God is giving you every day. Be grateful and humble, and deal carefully with yourself.

 

It is important what you feel and how you feel about yourself. You can of course only find out the correct answer if you are fully aware as of now. If you are living in the present. Pay attention to your Inner Child. This Being in your deepest inner self. This Inner Child, which can be hurt so much and at the same time is able to love so much.

 

Do you feel good now? Take a deep breath, be quiet and open your heart. “Be still, know, I am God”. Water, the element of emotions, comes from God and flows through you into every cell of your body, to the depths of your Soul. Love God, thank God that He was always with you, still is and always will be. Immerse yourself in prayer, in contemplation. You will immediately feel the Love in your heart. It gets warm, it expands, you become calm, and are doing well.

 

You will become accustomed to performing your steps and actions carefully and with awareness. You will become inwardly silent and radiate this peace. It gives you access to your higher consciousness. You feel God's presence. Then you feel yourself again, you feel a deep peace. And you come to realize that God is within you, you have found Him – He has found you! The search is over, your longing is satisfied. And suddenly you know: He was always with you, at birth, your first day at school, your first Love, within all the large and small events of your life. You were never separated from each other, you have only forgotten it temporarily.

 

Let this Love flow through your heart. You now feel a sense of happiness, satisfaction and beauty. You become completely in the here and now. You feel your aliveness in every fibre of your body and are yet very calm and relaxed. You are in motion and in silence simultaneously.

 

*
“I cannot accept how one can have or could have
humility without Love
or Love without humility.”
(St. Teresa of Àvila)
*

 

 

Enlightenment

Living as a whole and accepting Love, taking every facet of one's being and loving it, and making the Soul a temple to God, that is the way to enlightenment. Then God will reward you for your efforts, what in Christianity would be called the Vision of God, Enlightenment or Salvation – and I speak only for Christianity in this book. It is God's grace, His thanks for your prayers, the louder outward prayers and the inner quiet ones, and for opening your heart, which might be very painful and cause many tears. It is His appreciation of your courage in walking through your own inner desert areas, transforming your pride into humility, and casting off on the way your last bastion, your Ego. Finally you will become a permeable channel, surrendering completely to Him.

 

Then the time has come, God will transform your Soul into an immortal Light-body. This will be your spiritual rebirth. God's Light shines through you and brightens all the darkness around you. The Heaven in you, your access to God, has fully opened. So the salvation for which Jesus Christ died on the cross for can be finalised and turned into your own enlightenment. Even in this life on Earth, your Soul comes from God and is therefore immortal. It was, and it is, and always will be – in Heaven, as well as on Earth.

 

So also here on Earth it is already feasible, what is otherwise commonly held to be possible only in the “Afterlife”, within the limitations of space and time. Even being in our physical body, we can expand our consciousness and accommodate ourselves down here entirely to God. To accommodate to Him means to love Him, to surrender to Him. It requires neither wisdom nor any special skills – the ability to open one’s heart to an all-embracing Love is the greatest that a Human Being is capable of – providing all that which is not needed within oneself has been allowed to die away.

 

By increasing consciousness all barriers between Souls will fall down. As in the Hereafter, so we can connect even in this world with a single thought with every other Soul, regardless of whether or not it is embodied. Perhaps even now you may have noticed that you only have to think of a person and then he is already within your heart. You are invisibly connected with all the people around you – and of course with all the animals, too – and with everything in Creation. That which is usually associated with parapsychology, can prove to be the ultimate way of communicating.

 

I have to admit that it is not like everything is perfect. The ups and downs of life can be exhausting. The mystical experiences resemble the near-death experiences. St. Teresa also compares her mystical experiences with death. We are experiencing something that can set our own little world on fire, our heart can be torn and cries out for healing – and our Soul desires nothing more than to return to her peaceful state again. Until we finally know what really happened to us, we constantly experience the everyday madness of physical life. Questions upon questions are driven between God and the World, Heaven and Earth, between our longing for death and at the same time clinging to Mother Earth, always looking for someone who is able to understand us, advise us, and perhaps even save us.

 

Even in Church, especially before and after the services, which can bring us, at least in the short term, to the spiritual spheres longed-for, we have to protect ourselves from those who do not give us the respect of another and through their insensitivity and ignorance neither feel for nor care what happens to us or allow us our inner silence.

 

Like Saint Teresa of Àvila, we have to perfect our growing process of contemplation and our transformation up to enlightenment. “The Soul perceives that it is united with God,” she says. “And it remains such a certainty that it cannot quite ever drop this belief. I was not initially aware that God is indeed within all things, and it seemed to me so impossible that He was so present within me, and how that was to feel.”

 

We are leaving the Earthly duality; we are mergeing with God, become at-one with Him, and we are experiencing the ultimate mystery of Creation. The Veil is falling, we know everything, we discern everything – these are the “Waters of Life” of which Jesus spoke of.

 

Then the previously unimaginable happens: Time goes backwards! From the Unio Mystica back to the 'You' to God and the 'We' with all people. We can truly live again! Of course, no longer behind the Veil as before. Life now means: to love and to be loved. To love God and to be loved by Him. To love all Human Beings and in return to be loved by them, or at least by those who are on the same level. There is nothing in between, and there are no more secrets.

 

We are united in our Soul in different bodies, until we will eventually pass even this limit and live free from time and space in the true Paradise. So far, I have always smiled at our priests who spoke of Paradise, and thought: “Yes, you are obliged to talk this way ...” Now I know that these are not just empty words. It is true; Paradise does exist, and indeed exists for all those who decide for it. It already begins on this beautiful Earth!

 

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“The idea that we could go to Heaven,
without going within ourselves
and without recognizing our true Self,
is stupid and absurd. “
(St. Teresa of Àvila)
*