June 9, 2021 Wednesday Afternoon, Dharma Path Intensive, Excerpt
Love on Is Suffering Necessary?
Q: I have what I know is a redundant question. But somehow I want to hear your response once again. Why, pray tell, have we even considered the concept of suffering? We could, as you say, be completely without it. We’ve created it, engineered it in this planet, so we could have this experience with light and dark, with duality, and to have this experience of moving with free will into loving kindness. But why even conjure the notion of suffering in the first place?
Love: I am Love, and I greet you in love. You are love. There we were, at what might be called the dawn of creation, just this core light and energy choosing to express Itself.
There can be no duality. If this Essence, this Divinity, this Infinite Creator, was to create light, it needed also to create darkness—not so much to create as to give space for darkness. If it was to give space for love, it needed to give space for the absence of love.
Let us simplify and call unconditional love “service to all beings” and conditional love “service to self.”
At that point there became the whole image of self and other.
This heart of light and love—and this is not me; this is that from which I have expressed. So don’t think, “Oh, this is God speaking”; I am simply Love. This One who gave birth to us all, this Essence, it would not control that which it co-created. It did not create, it co-created. It gave birth to the essence out of which each being, each sentient life form could grow.
It felt that the purest, fullest expression of love could only come as mature expression when there was that which seemed to be absent of love to compare itself to, to evaluate itself against.
How would we know service to all beings if we had not first explored service to self and then allowed ourselves to break through and expand?
So, love limited to service to self, stops there, with separation and a sense of duality.
There was then the intention to explore through different kinds of life forms and different places in the universe to see how this duality could be—’shattered’ is not the best word—released, seen as illusion so there is no longer ground in which it can grow.
Then upon the earth plane came the opportunity to explore it in the ways you have explored it, some of you through many human lifetimes.
If there is going to be only service to self, yes, there will be suffering, but there will be trying to protect the self from that suffering and let others suffer. But that creates its own suffering, of course, because sometimes you are going to be the ‘other’ that suffers; the one who dies of thirst or starvation or cold or heat or disease.
The personal choice, free will choice to serve only the self or a slightly expanded, say, immediate family version of the self, or finally service to all, this is unique right now in this space/time, that beings can explore what it means to let go of the limited self of “me, only me,” or “only us,” and into this “all,” and in doing so, to enhance the energy of love, the power of love that touches all beings.
Is suffering necessary in this? It was not written into the scenario as a necessary component.
But when you suffer, it catches your attention. You begin to explore the suffering and what is causing it.
When you finally understand that what is causing it at heart is the sense of separation—me against them—and begin to include everything in the heart, the heart grows.
Aaron is saying to me, here, like that Grinch whose heart was two sizes too small! The heart grows. The heart finds its capacity to be inclusive of everything. And then there is no longer suffering.
Barbara: after reviewing this transcript I invited Love to speak to me, to respond to a few questions. I asked them and Love said, “Too many words.” Today is 9/11/21. Love asked me to focus on the experience of watching those planes hit, the buildings collapse, and my emotions at that time. Anger, wanting to push it all away, then great sadness. Love asked me then, to hold that sadness and literally find the heart of love in it. Eventually I felt waves of great compassion for all of us humans and other sentient beings, and enormous love and gratitude for this very tough school called earth, but which does teach us so well how to open the heart.