Chapter 17
LOVE
Charles Fillmore
Dynamics For Living
LOVE, in Divine Mind, is the idea of universal unity. In expression, love is the power that joins and binds in divine harmony the universe and everything in it. Among the faculties of the mind, love is pivotal. Its center of mentation in the body is the cardiac plexus. The physical representative of love is the heart, the office of which is to equalize the circulation of the blood in the body. As the heart equalizes the life flow in the body, so love harmonizes the thought of the mind.
We connect our soul forces with whatever we center our love upon. If we love the things of sense or materiality, we are joined or attached to them through a fixed law of being. In the divine order of being, the soul, or thinking part, of man is joined to its spiritual ego. If it allows itself to become joined to the outer or sense consciousness, it makes personal images that are limitations.
Regeneration
In the regeneration, our love goes through a transformation, which broadens, strengthens, and deepens it. We no longer confine love to family, friends, and personal relations, but expand it to include all things. The denial of human relationships seems at first glance to be a repudiation of the family group, but it is merely a cleansing of the mind from limited beliefs of love when this faculty would satisfy itself solely by means of human kinship.
Meditate on Love
One should make it a practice to meditate regularly on the love idea in universal Mind, with the prayer, “Divine love, manifest thyself in me.” There should be periods of mental concentration on love. Think about love, and all the ideas that go to make up love will be set into motion. This produces a positive love current which, when sent forth with power, will break up opposing thoughts of hate, and render them null and void.
The thought of hate will be dissolved, not only in the mind of the thinker but in the minds of those with whom he comes in contact in mind or in body.
The love current is not a projection of the will. It is a setting free of a natural, equalizing, harmonizing force that in most persons has been dammed up by human limitations.
The ordinary man is not aware that he possesses this mighty power, which will turn away every shaft of hate that is aimed at him. Here is a faculty native to man, existent in every soul, which may be used at all times to bring about harmony and unity among those who have been disunited through misunderstanding, contentions, or selfishness.
Love is more than mere affection, and all our words protesting our love are not of value unless we have this inner current, which is real substance. Though we have the eloquence of men and of angels, and have not this deeper feeling, it profits us nothing. We should deny the mere conventional, surface affection, and should set our mind on the substance of love.
Phases
Charity is not love. You may be kindhearted, and give to the poor and needy until you are impoverished, yet not acquire love. You may be a martyr to the cause of Truth and consume your vitality in good works, yet be far from love. Love is a force that runs in the mind and body like molten gold in a furnace. It does not mix with the baser metals. It has no affinity for anything less than itself. Love is patient. It never gets weary or discouraged. Love is always kind and gentle. It does not envy. Jealousy has no place in its world. Love never becomes puffed up with human pride, and does not brag about itself. It is love that makes the refinement of the natural gentleman or lady, although he or she may be ignorant of the world’s standards of culture. Love does not seek its own. Its own comes to it without being sought.
Jesus came proclaiming the spiritual interrelationship of the human family. His teaching was always of gentleness, nonresistance, love. To do this, one must be established in the consciousness of divine love, and there must be discipline of the mental nature to preserve such a high standard. The divine law is founded in the eternal unity of all things.
Fearlessness
Divine love in the heart establishes one in fearlessness and indomitable courage. A woman who understands this law was waylaid by a tramp. She looked him steadily in the eye and said, “God loves you.” He released his hold upon her and slunk away. Another woman saw a man beating a horse that could not pull a load up a hill. She silently said to the man, “The love of God fills your heart and you are tender and kind.” He unhitched the horse; the grateful animal walked directly over to the house where the woman was, and put his nose against the window behind which she stood. A young girl sang “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” to a calloused criminal; the man’s heart was softened, and he was reformed.
The new heaven and the new earth that are now being established among men and nations the world over are based on love. When men understand each other, love increases. This is true not only among men, but between men and the animal world, and even between man and the vegetable world.
Feelings
We may talk about the wisdom of God, but the love of God must be felt in the heart. It cannot be described, and one who has not felt it can have no concept of it from the descriptions of others. The more we talk about love, the stronger it grows in the consciousness. If we persist in thinking loving thoughts and speaking loving words, we are sure to bring into our experience the feeling of that great love that is beyond description–the very love of God.
Purity
It is popularly taught and believed that there is but one love; that God is love and that all love is from Him, hence that all love is God’s love. Love is a divine principle and man can know it in its purity by touching it at its fountainhead. There it is not tinged in any way by man’s formative thought, but flows forth a pure, pellucid stream of infinite ecstasy. It has no consciousness of good or evil, pure or impure, but pours itself out in great oceans of living magnetic power, to be used by whosoever will.
Thinking gives color, tone, shape, character to all creation. Error thought has put greed into love. Wherever love is tainted with selfishness, we may know that error thought has made muddy its clear stream, so that it no longer represents the purity of its source.
A Magnet
Love is the drawing power of mind. It is the magnet of the universe, and about it may be clustered all the attributes of Being, by one who thinks in divine order. Many who have found the law of true thinking and its effect wonder why supply does not come to them after months and years of holding thoughts of bounty. It is because they have not developed love. They have formed the right image in mind, but the magnet that draws the substance from the storehouse of Being has not been set into action.
To demonstrate supply, we must think supply, and thus form it in the consciousness. We must conserve all the ideas of substance in the mind. We must vibrate with love in thought, word, and act. Then will come to us on the wings of invisibility that which will satisfy every need. This is the secret of demonstrating plenty.
Love never sees anything wrong in that which it loves. If it did, it would not be pure love. Pure love is without discriminating power. It simply pours itself out upon the object of its affection, and takes no account of the result. By so doing, love sometimes casts its pearls before swine, but its power is so great that it transforms all that it touches.
Evil
Do not be afraid to pour out your love upon all the so-called evil in the world. Deny the appearance of evil, and affirm the omnipotence and omnipresence of love and goodness. Take no account of the evil that appears in your life and your affairs. Refuse to see it as evil. Declare that what seems evil has somewhere a good side, which shall through your persistent affirmation of its presence be made visible. By using this creative power of your own thought you will change that which seemed evil into good, and divine love will pour its healing balm over all.
Always remember that love is the great magnet of God. It is, of itself, neither good nor evil. These are qualities given to it by the thinking faculty in man. Whatever you see for your love, that it will draw to you, because as a magnet it attracts whatever you set your desire upon.
To focus your love about self and selfish aims will cause it to draw around you the limited things of personality and the hollow shams of sense life. To focus your love upon money and the possessions of the material world will make you the slave of it, and will make your life a failure and a disappointment.
Difficulties
You may trust love to get you out of your difficulties. There is nothing too hard for it to accomplish for you, if you put your confidence in it and act without dissimulation. Do not talk love and in your heart feel resentment. This will bring discord to your body. Love is candor and frankness. Deception is no part of love. He who tries to use it in that sort of company will prove itself a liar, and love will desert him in the end.
Love is satisfaction in itself–not that satisfaction with personal self, its possessions and its attractions, which is vanity, but an inner satisfaction that sees good everywhere and in everybody. It insists that all is good, and by refusing to see anything but good it causes that quality to appear uppermost in itself and in all things. When only good is seen and felt, how can there be anything but satisfaction?
Universal Goal
When love, the universal magnet, is brought into action in the consciousness of our race, it will change all our methods of supplying human wants. It will harmonize all the forces of nature and will dissolve the discords that now infest earth and air. It will control the elements until they obey man and bring forth that which will supply all his needs without the labor that is called the sweat of his face. The earth shall yet be made paradise by the power of love. That condition will begin to set in for each one just as soon as he develops the love nature in himself.
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Dynamics For Living by Charles Fillmore
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