There is a Love that transcends every experience that a human being can have of the sensation or the emotion that we call "love." It isn't the love we have for our family. It isn't the love we have for nature. It isn't even the love that we feel when we're thinking about a truth and we feel uplifted by it. It is a Love of a completely different order.
We would never even suspect the possibility of something like this unless there were already a similarity of it in us. It wouldn't even occur to us to hope for, have faith in, trust the existence or the possibility of an unconditional, perfect Love unless inside of us there were some similarity of it waiting there within us.
What is perfect Love? By imperfect love we can know something about the nature of perfect Love. In the name of love, imperfect love judges everything. "I love you, therefore you ought not be this way. You ought not do these things." Perfect Love opposes nothing. And do you know why perfect Love opposes nothing? Because perfect Love integrates everything. Can you push something away and at the same time embrace it with all your soul? It's impossible. Perfect Love opposes nothing because part of its very purpose is to unite everything that is brought into it.
When we say we love, we love as long as the one we love (or whatever we love) lines up with our love. But perfect Love doesn't demand conformity or confirmation from anything because it integrates whatever comes into it.
The timeless law of the observer is the observed is perfect Love -- not the understanding that I'm sitting here thinking "the observer is the observed," but the fact of it living in me so that there is nothing apart from what I see that is different from what is seen about myself. That which I give myself to, that I approach from a relationship through this world, is really an introduction to the world in myself, which is actually the beginning of the world that I see outside myself. So I actually draw closer to the source of things through this understanding that within me already exists the qualities and characters that I'm drawn to.
We know that we can be attracted to things such as art, music, nature. For example, what is the attraction to watching freshly falling snow? You open your eyes and there's this delicate frosting on all the trees. And if you're not instantly captured by what your mind tells you what that means, you are (for a second) transported into a world that, for being there, you experience the delicacy, the innocence, the purity of what you see. But the purity and the delicacy, the innocence of what you're looking at, the expression of its character, isn't because it's "out there," but because you suddenly have, inside of you, the recognition that this character of delicacy, this character of innocence, this subtlety, is what you love!
And so, what you love is not just that something in you is similar to what it sees, but that something about the nature of what it sees is inextricably united with, similar to that which perceives it. In that moment, you are experiencing the similarity of something outside of you to a character that, prior to that, you didn't know was within you. In other words, that character was asleep in you. The awareness of this beauty -- beauty in the eye of the beholder -- is preexistent in you.
You love that. Don't you love that? And so you're very happy in that moment of reunification. Because aren't you rejoined with something about yourself that you formerly didn't know was in there? You suspected it, you longed for it in some way, but you didn't know it was in there until something took place. The same is true with a spiritual insight. When you actually learn something and see something true, in that moment you know that this isn't something you've never heard before. An act of Love produces inside of you the realization that what seemed to be apart from you was always part of you.
In the beauty of the moment, something unites the observer (inside) and the observed (outside). But not for the purpose of "the observer is the observed," but for proving the fact that this is what Love does, and when it does so, this is what Love is. Love is the moment in which there is an integration that takes into account all qualities, all characteristics, and we love it when what we are is reunited with what is loving.
But what about those moments when suddenly before us is what we don't want to see? Instead of reunification, integration, our reaction is "No! This isn't how things are supposed to be; You're not supposed to be that way; They sure shouldn't be doing this: I ought not be this way." Where's the love in such moments? It's obviously not there, is it? "I sure shouldn't be like this. I shouldn't have this kind of violence in me. I shouldn't be someone who wishes harm on someone else." And yet there it is. Something in me has mechanically risen up instantaneously and is pushing it away. And inside of that resistance is an assumption that somehow, this moment is not supposed to be like that.
But the way things are in the moment can't be any other way. Why? Because this moment is the expressed convergence of all the energies that were ever brought into creation from that which is un-created, and they have all been brought together for each person, in each place, in the only way they can be, given what has produced that.
You are in the only moment that exists for you in that moment. And everything that has been brought into that moment has been brought into you, for you, by Love. But you say, "Oh no, that's impossible! Because I feel such anger. I'm so full of grief. I'm so anxious over what this moment has brought. How can you possibly say to me that this moment is a gift? I don't see any gift in it at all!" And because you see no gift, the only thing you know to do is to push back, lash out in pain, and do the best you can to ignore what you are shown in yourself by this moment. So you don't want similarity. You want to identify with what is dissimilar to this moment. You summarily refuse, reject that this instant (and every instant) is the convergence of the celestial forces whose sole purpose is the integration of everything they touch. Because to you, all there is in such a moment is an impossible condition that fills you with pain and anger.
And so inwardly begins the process by which the same denying nature that resists the similarity then begins to try to reconcile the pain produced by resistance to it. This is called "thinking through the problem." You have to figure out why you feel the way you do. And then life, with this mind, finds endless reasons: "Of course you're in pain; of course you're angry; of course you're depressed." But no matter how many times you have run through this gamut of reconciling the instant in which suddenly there is this pain, you have never done anything to change the nature that continues to present it to you. And up until now, the only thing that's taken place inside of you has been a process of instantaneous separation from the similarity that's been revealed. That separation is produced by resistance, and resistance guarantees repetition. And resistance guarantees that you will remain stuck to the thing that you resist.
What's the alternative? If there's an exercise inherent in this, it's that in the moment of that agitation, fear, or anxiety, learn to go as still as possible so that you can see that the only reason you know the quality of the moment is because of similarity, else you couldn't know it. And while in those moments it's so abundantly clear to you that "I'm not that," or "This shouldn't be that way," in reality there isn't dissimilarity. Rather, the moment has brought about the possibility of you recognizing perfect similarity, and in perfect similarity the observer and the observed disappear. Love unites. Choose in favor of that. The moment you agree to the similarity, and you are united, you take back possession of the thing that is similar inside of you that you never could do or understand before. And you know why it's okay? Because Love does it.
