LD Thompson – Several years ago, I went to see a friend in the hospital. He had survived surgery removing a massive brain tumor, but would not survive long after my visit. I walked in and although he was unable to formulate his thoughts into many words, he smiled and held out his hand, clearly wanting to say something.

“There is only love!” He pleaded for me to understand. “Only love. It’s all there is. Only love. Only love!”

Those were his last words to me. I will never forget the urgency with which he spoke. It was as though delivering this message was the most important thing he had ever had to do.

If I had only a few hours left to live and I wanted to sum up my life experience, it would be my message as well. But love as a word has become so adulterated, so confused with possessiveness, lust, jealousy and control that I feel it necessary to say a bit more about the love I mean.

When I experience the kind of love I refer to, I feel it emanates from my Soul – the part of me that is immortal, the part of me that survives bodily death, the part of me that has elected to come to this human experience for the opportunity to grow, to gather wisdom through the sensual experience of being human.

I have struggled for most of my life with the notion of love as an emotion – fickle, capricious, granted in one moment and withdrawn in the next. I have known the intoxicating experience of believing that another human being could grant me a reprieve from the pain of aloneness, only to eventually discover that even in a loving, committed relationship, I am alone.

But deepening into that realization is how I have come to know true love.

Loving another, an object, an experience, an animal, the earth – while remaining identified with one’s Soul – shifts the experience of love from an emotion to a state of being where boundaries and judgments fall away and where the recognition of your Soul’s divinity fills any outside need.

It’s very tempting to stick to the script we are given about love as an emotion, because we are thoroughly indoctrinated to look for love, to need it, and to keep looking outside of ourselves when we feel we lack the love we want. So we try to get others to be a source of the false comfort we think we need.

It takes courageous and determined steps for one who is committed to actually ‘be’ love, to migrate from conditional love to unconditional love, but that is the thing that I’m beginning to understand that my life’s journey is about.

So, if I only had 24 hours left in my life, I would want to tell everyone who longs to know greater peace, greater joy, greater happiness that there is only love! Only love. It’s all there is. Only love. Only love!

LD is the author of THE MESSAGE: A Guide To Being Human.

SF Source Inspire Me Today June 10 2012