Waking Up To Love

I can so clearly remember the day that ‘I woke up to Love.’ I was 28 years old and had just returned from a two-week water fast in California with Dr. Evarts Loomis. I was living in a tiny cottage on Spanaway Lake in Tacoma, Washington. It was early fall and everything was starting to turn gold. As I quietly sat by the lake, suddenly everything opened up into Love. I could see and feel Love pouring out of the sky, pouring out of the trees, pouring out of the water. It was so brilliant that at times I had to close my eyes, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was seeing the truth that everything was Love, including me. I can remember that day like it was yesterday.

I am not the only person who has experienced it. Many, down through the eons, have experienced the truth that right outside of our struggling self is a world of Love. There are four people you may know of who had a similar experience. Although our experiences are all a little different, we essentially experienced the same thing and it is called ‘Love.’

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, was 29 years old when he had his transformative experience. He was in deep despair and his mind kept on repeating, “I can’t live with myself anymore.” All of a sudden his awareness and curiosity kicked in and he realized if he can’t live with himself anymore, “maybe there are two of me and maybe one is not real.”  He was so stunned by this realization that the voice in his head just stopped. He said he was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then he said he felt gripped by intense fear and heard the words resist nothing as if they were being spoken inside of his chest. He woke up the next morning and said, “I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself…”

Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven, had a near-death experience while he was in a seven-day coma caused by spinal meningitis. When he woke up, he was asked to describe what he saw when he was out of his mind-body system, and he said, “Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything…..This is the real­ity of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or will ever exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.”

Anita Moorjani, author of Dying to Be Me, had been fighting end-stage cancer for four years. As she was dying in the hospital with organ failure, she said she started feeling herself expand and said “What I can only describe as superb and glorious unconditional love surrounded me, wrapping me tight as I continued to let go…..Love, joy, ecstasy and awe poured into me, through me and engulfed me. I was swallowed up and enveloped in more love than I ever knew existed. I felt more free and alive than I ever had.”

Adyashanti, author of Falling into Grace, was a rigorous Zen student. He was living with his parents and had built a tiny meditation hut in the back yard. During a meditation, he feel into devastation. He truly felt he was defeated and would never find out what enlightenment is. As he was feeling absolutely crushed, right in the middle of that moment he reports, “My heart just began to flower.  It was like a golden love was being poured right into my being. It was as if I could hear everything and it was just singing this love. I went out of the hut and everything I looked at was an expression of this love. The whole universe was nothing but this immense, infinite love which I was being bathed in.”

Many of us are now on the journey of waking up out of the dream of separation and into the truth that Love Is! And because you are reading this, you are on that journey too. Don’t try to find it. That is just more struggle. Simply be willing to show up for your life and know that Life loves you enough to give you the exact set of experiences you need to see and see through the world of struggle so that you can come home to Love. Know that Life is trustable. It is not always likable. But it is trustable.

Image of Awakening Heart by Flora Aube  www.floraaube.com