Love and Democracy….

The only thing I really teach and talk about is Love. I may go to Love from this angle or that angle, but the truth is I only am talking about Love. One could say my profession is that of an internal sanitation engineer: I remove garbage, facilitate the removal of garbage, and encourage everyone to take out their garbage so that it can be incinerated. Once that is done, Love informs everything we are and do. The garbage is our wrong identification with who we are not.

To that end, we have to consciously choose Love and let go of who we are not. We have to accept that all this hate and injustice we see is also in us. As we face ourselves, we are able to empty the garbage and discern how we are to act. God is making us choose: are we going for Love or hate? Who we think we are is more bound by hate than Love. Who we are in truth is the Love that is not the mere opposite of hate. The great task is to continually choose Love. Baba said this is a great time to practice, because the good and evil are so well defined. We have to be able to discern in order to choose Love.

Right now, we have an opportunity to go beyond the tired dialectic of hate and love that keeps us trapped in conflict, and choose Love. We must remove our superficial understanding and see the unity in the diversity. Recently I was surprised to find that there are people who, without knowing it, have been resisting Love because they believed that if we choose Love we will no longer have a voice. If we all Love, do we still have a voice? Of course we do.

Swami Nityananda was an avadoot. He Loved and lived in the understanding of Absolute Reality. He wore only a lungoti, a loincloth. Swami Muktananda was his disciple. He also Loved and lived in the understanding of Absolute Reality. He wore orange robes made of exquisite silk and the finest cotton. He wore malas and watches and the Guru stone. He gave talks all over the world to hundreds of thousands of people. He lived a very different life and lifestyle than his Guru. And yet their Source was the same. Though they were the same, their voices were very different. Their vehicles were different, so Love flowing through them was expressed differently.

Love should consciously express ItSelf. But when we forget who we are by covering up that Love with our shrunken sense of self, we begin down a road to entropy.

History, both the big picture and our individual lives, shows us countless examples of people who convinced themselves there was no way hate could win. I was married once to someone that had the ability to detect a person’s weakness. He then went about exploiting it. Trump has that ability. He has shown us all the weakness of our country right now. Though Trump is taking advantage of that weakness, many people around the country can’t see that; they think he’s empowering them so that they have a voice. He thinks he can trust his instincts, and his supporters think they are going with the flow toward some idea of greatness—but the flow they’re going with leads only to entropy. Growth and renewal will be, at this point, an uphill battle. If we as a nation want to learn from this, we must see this exposure of our weakness as a good thing, and set about resolving our issues.

The only answer for me is to return to the groundwater and contribute the Love that is not the opposite of hate. In Truth, all is and will be fine, but the drama being played out will cause great suffering.

Democracy is messy. But it allows for dissent, respectful dissent. We are not to be homogeneous in our lifestyles or philosophies or ways of expressing ourselves. Love always allows for difference, for freedom of expression—even the expression of hate. We must remember, only Love is embedded in Love; embedded in hate is its own destruction.