We have been conditioned to believe that love is all about “acting lovingly” toward one another and have specific ideas of what we think Love looks like.  What we neglect to realize is that Love is everything and we can not confine it to a certain expression of how we think it should look. 

Ever since my encounter with the Maharishi, and my realization that I had to fully claim my SELF as Master, I had felt a real agitation, especially with a friend of mine who walks a similar path to my own.  My leanings are toward non-duality as I feel that all spiritual teachings at the highest levels are non-dualistic in nature.  I have a friend who is also on the non-duality path and we sort of bounce off of each other and explore things at the same times.  For the past week or so, this person has been my perfect agitator and this past week, I just wanted to rip his head off. 

As time went by, I kept getting more and more annoyed with him and was not too shy about telling him exactly how I felt.  I didn’t necessarily want to even deal with this creation because he was pressing buttons I didn’t necessarily want to look at.  I have another friend who is a very calming influence on me and has a gentle way of helping me to see the error of my ways without my getting all defensive.  I wanted to talk to this gentle friend but he conveniently was not around when I was experiencing my agitation and drama.

Something I have learned though is that Love is not confined to any certain expression.  All is Love, even the really crappy stuff.  With that in mind, and knowing that Love is acceptance of myself and how I feel in any given moment, I let my friend who was agitating me know that I wanted to rip his head off, to which I added that I also realized that it meant that I wanted to rip my own head off.  As soon as I acknowledged that thought, embraced it and let it out, a shift started to happen. 

Over and over again, over the past couple weeks; my conceptual awareness has been clouding what I know to be true.  When people have called me on my conceptual explanations and tell me they are not in full alignment with what I know, I have been having little fits of frustration.  I know what I know, and I know we are One Mind but I still have perceptions of separate individuals so my perceptual awareness tends to muck up my expressions sometimes. 

Something else I have noticed is that when I think I need a specific person to talk to and sort of help me thorough whatever I may be going through, that person seems to be absent either as a result of technical issues or they are just away.  This seems to be a pattern that I noticed so I thought it was worth a bit of exploration.  When I start feeling needy, this is the best time for me to take stock and look at why I think I need anyone for anything.   

When I started to explore this, immediately I had a thought of a friend I had in school who I always felt was a bit needy and demanding of my time and energy.  We hit it off pretty quickly but after a while, I sort of developed an aversion to spending time with this person because the neediness was too much for me.  The mere perception that this person thought they needed me was enough to keep me from wanting to spend too much time with her.  I feel like this is no different spiritually.  If I feel I need someone to be there for me, it is a perfect opportunity to look at my illusions of separation and see what co-dependency issues might be surfacing. 

It seems that this aversion to co-dependent patterns is one of the ways Self pushes each of us toward liberation.  Exploring this now, it seems that this is why the only constant is change.  We are always testing our limits of Self-Love and providing ourselves with opportunities to test our fear boundaries.  It also seems at this moment that all fear is a form of co-dependency.   It is a notion that we need something or someone external to ourselves to be safe.  If there is nothing external to me and everything I perceive is me, then what is that “something else” I could possibly need?  

Anyway, back to the story.  After I told my friend I wanted to rip his head off, whatever blocks to my own awareness I was dealing with at the time started lifting.  The next day, I went to a spin class and while I was in the class, I had the distinct awareness that I was the spin class and my point of view was merely a perceptual point of view in a body of one.  I was the class, I was the music, the people, the bikes, the smells, everything, only the class was being experienced from a perceptual point of view which we call Kerri. 

These oneness experiences have happened before, only they seem to be happening with increased frequency.  Something that is also shifting is my awareness that when I talk to another, I am talking to myself.  I have known this intellectually, but it is creeping into awareness more frequently.  If I don’t like what is being said, it is a good indication that I am not listening to myself.  As long as I identify with the perceptual point of view known as Kerri, it is much harder to hear myself.  When I can cast the identification with the individual ego aside, there is nothing to defend or fear, because it is all happening as it happens and there needs not be any attachment to any certain expression.  It is what it is.

When we do anything to get another to accept us or do things because we want to act lovingly, we do it because we perceive separation of “another” outside of ourselves.  When we allow the Self to be what it is and we act in an authentic manner in any moment, we are acting in alignment with our true nature, whether we perceive that to be loving or not.  Love is not fixed on any expression.  It is the moving force of the universe and is what creates change.  Love is always pushing one to know the Self, and will do this in any and all ways so that one may know the truth of one’s being.  It will push us to test our perceptual boundaries and free ourselves from our illusions until the concept of “us” no longer exists and we know the Self as One.