LOOKING FOR LOVE

I have a new friend who is heavy into a different brand of spirituality that I am unfamiliar with but it has all the same bells and whistles that mine has so I'm cool with it. It reminds me, though, why I'm so attached to the Sermon on the Mound.

The Sermon says, in effect, if someone slaps you upside your head, turn the other cheek. How you going to claim you don't understand what that says? You can think it's not right, or you don't agree with it, or you plain don't like it...but it ain't like it's too deep, too esoteric for your poor brain to glom onto.

I think that's why so many people pass the Sermon by...its directions are down and dirty and specific: If someone steals your coat, run after them and give them your cloak. Or its bottom line: Resist not evil.

Actually, to my mind, that's what all truly spiritual teachings are about...they just make it so pretty that you don't realize up front what you've gotten into.

I knew going in with the Sermon that this was going to be really hard...and, who's kidding whom, I RESISTED. Cried like a baby, cursed like a sailor...and did it anyway. And am still doing...the difference now being, I joy in the paradox of the seemingly impossible being the easier way.

The gift is in realizing that it's all about consciousness. Take, for instance, someone slapping your face. In our walking-around world, someone is most likely not going to slap you, more like they're going to badmouth you (or tell the truth about you, which sometimes hurts worse). That's when you can appreciate that a slap upside the head would be preferable to the hurt of the feeling of betrayal.

You reread your directions and there's your answer. It is...let them. It is your mental resistance to your own feeling of betrayal that causes your pain.

Hug them and kiss them and let them go. "Them" being every part of the perceived problem...the person, the words, the betrayal, the hurt, the anger...each are a part of God's gift that drives you deeper into a higher consciousness. A consciousness of nonresistance. Love...that for which you seek daily. You've been "looking for love in all the wrong places" as the great old country song says.

The miracle is that you may never have found this love you seek if you had not been gifted with the betrayal you hated but did not resist.

Love. That's all ego reduction in depth is. That's all the Sermon is about. And I may joy in the paradox, but it's still hard.

Thank You.