Love Is Not a Noun (3). To Love Is To Be Curious

[4 minute read]

What might we *do* to nurture lovingness?

Be curious.

Humbly curious. Not comparatively curious. We think that’s hard because it’s impossible not to filter through our own experience that which another person shares. So don’t resist that. Curiosity about another also yields self knowledge.

“Humbly” curious means not judging. As you take in what another does or says, don’t *judge* it. Judgment is terminal. It stops the receiving and the loving. Don’t compare what you are hearing or feeling against any artificial ideal or standard of goodness, right, or wrong. Just receive.

Listen with exquisite attention. It is an act of loving. And it is a unique act. In that moment, a condition never to happen again, and which has never happened before. That moment is sacred. Be in it with intense curiosity.

When the beloved gives a seeming conclusive answer, don’t accept it easily as terminal. Let your loving curiosity continue to flow in, through, and around that answer. Ask more. More curiosity. This is a sacred moment, and sacred means deep, tense, dense, heavy. The fullness of who and what we are.

If/when you are being humbly curious and loving, it won’t feel comfortable for you and the beloved, but it won’t be resented or regretted either. Trust your heart to know when your beloved needs you to stop your curious inquiry. If/when you are being curious and loving with enough humility, your heart will do that calculus without requiring your conscious mind. It is our nature. More than anything else is our nature.

Curiosity is what the best of therapists practice. When we think of the phrase “Divine Physician,” we think of Yeshua healing physical maladies. Those kinds of dis-eases are easiest for us to grasp by our conscious minds. They are a sort of first step into the invisible and mysterious. They are sacramental—visible signs of reality unseeable. Inside the body. Surgery. Medicine that acts on our insides. Mysterious.
[If you believe that we understand how most medicines work, you are largely mistaken. We don’t. We can explain some bits of that, but I would contend that in no case do we understand all the bits. If we did, designer drugs would be everywhere.]

The Divine Physician heals the least visible parts of a person. The most mysterious. Be most curious about that. That’s how you can be a healer too. In the image and likeness. The mind of Christ.

Combat and shed any notions of God as omniscient and omnipotent. Those notions speak to your ego, not to your soul. You may think they are notions of glory and praise to God. I don’t. They terminate curiosity. Our curiosity about how God loves us, and our curiosity about how we can love God. They terminate those curious possibilities.

If we are made in God’s image and likeness, then we should look inside for what fuels loving. Curiosity and mystery. Not conclusions. Being. Not having-been.

If you want to ascribe some infinite attributes to God, I suggest infinite curiosity.

How could an all-knowing God be infinitely curious about us?

Well, to me, that answer lies in why we are created in God’s image and likeness.

I believe God to be furiously and passionately and INFINITELY curious about every single one of God’s creatures. I believe God revels in the mystery of every thing that God creates.

Curiosity and mystery always come with some disruptive, disturbing tension that is also a liberating excitement about being. To be disturbed is to be awakened from sleep.

I don’t think God ever sleeps.

Rise up and walk.

Awaken to your intrinsic curiosity.

Be. And you can love.

Walk, and you will love.
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Neil D. 2020-05-20

Related: Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love?

Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love?

[3 minute read]

Love is not a noun. Nor a goal. Love is creating. Uniquely.

Simple does not mean easy.

If the Law seems complicated to you, is it because you cannot achieve it?

It is not our nature.

Perhaps the Law stands merely to remind us of that. Our ego and mind are reMINDers of our abject inability to achieve love by commandment.

If you want a simple “rule” to live by, it has been given. It has been shown. It has been revealed. But, not only does simple not mean easy; simple means virtually impossible. Virtually.

The “law” written on the human heart is not written for the mind. You cannot think your way to love. You cannot measure your achievement of love by the mind. We all know this, but we don’t know this.
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If you would like a simple rule for living most fully according to your nature, it has been given. But we don’t like it. And we *won’t* like it. Not at first, because we are not living the fullness of our nature at first:

In every action, in every thought, ask, “Is this love?”

It is that simple. Very simple. Too simple.

Too simple for our mind to accept as any answer.

Too simple for our ego, which thinks we (and life) are complicated.

Our egos like a challenge, but do not like failure. The simpler a challenge, the more probable its failure.

Simple is the opposite of easy.
For the ego.
Not for the heart.
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In this world, we think our nature flows toward love. We think we are drawn toward love. Our feelings, hormones, minds, and neurochemistry all tell us that.

We have it wrong. Partly. Those impulses tell us what we value. Not *how* to manifest that core value. Our fullest nature flows FROM love.

We feel most complete when we act out of (from) love. And we sense dishonesty in acts that *imitate* acts of love.

We experience no greater shame than when we become aware that we are imitating love, not acting from it. That is the biggest gap between what we are and what we can be. That is fundamental dishonesty. Fundamental withoutness. Fundamental separation from our nature. Fundamental unreality. Fundamental hypocrisy, the only real sin.

So many of the behaviors we have learned are behaviors we have learned by imitation. When someone else’s actions touch us deeply, we experience love. We want to give that experience to others, so we attempt imitation. No bueno. That is like acting to comply with literally written laws. Attempts to act as others did.

Love and acts of love are so profound because they are utterly original. They arise from a purely unique creator. YOU are unique. YOU are a creator. You do not need to imitate other creators or creations. That is not authentic. They are not who you are. That’s the futility of comparison and judgment, which yield shame.

YOU are a unique engine of love.

When you act out of love, no one else can ever imitate it.

It is exclusively and uniquely your gift.

That’s love.
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Neil D. 2020-05-19

Related:

Love Is Not a Noun (1), like Judgment

Eating ice cream IS a Divine Experience. Soul and Ego. “Love” and “Like”
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Tug at my heart

A friend told me I tug at their heart. Good. I hope friends try to rip mine to shreds. They will fail. And tugging at another’s heart, I think, should be done with reckless abandon.

No one’s heart can be tugged to a bad place. That heart is the heart of who we are. When it gets tugged at, it only gets bigger. When someone tugs at my heart, it is because they are touching the deepest of who I am.

I’m not so sure I think any more that hearts get broken, ultimately; just enlarged. Breaking them open might be an earlier step in the enlargement, so it hurts like hell. Hearts are not such an easy thing to enlarge or expand; I can’t imagine how it could happen without being painful. Until I think of love.

When someone grabs my heart and rips at it, that is probably love. And how couldn’t love sometimes hurt like hell? It sure hurt Yeshua. Is that the form by which He is in me? Us? Do you think?

Is the heart the soul? We have an expression, “Heart and soul.” I don’t think that was meant in dual terms. I think it’s an expression that means they are one and the same. Tug at my heart and you tug at my soul. Something that can be tugged, stretched, and expanded infinitely. Don’t you think?

Do you think we mistake a broken ego for a broken heart?

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