Dear friend,
I wish to share with you a pathway, which I hope will help you get closer to agape love.
Keep in mind that your process will contain your own adventures and internal encounters. In my case, I went through a “dark night of the soul”, which helped to refocus my thoughts and my journey. It is nearly guaranteed that your journey towards agape love will be filled with moments of brightness and sorrow, as you make your way to heal yourself and others with a new heart.
Your journey is your own. Let me tell you about a roadmap to agape love.
Cultivate love for those near
Begin by nurturing relationships with family, friends, and community members to foster empathy and understanding.
The focus on this step is to be more conscious of love as you interact with these individuals. This is to plant a seed. Ideally, you should already feel safe to love with these people. This emotional safety will allow you to open your heart in giving of love.
You don’t have to make a big show of this process. Quietly, in your heart, know that you are opening yourself to the experience of being with this person. You stop your thoughts, and listen to them and your own heart. How do you feel as they speak? Explore your feelings, and especially if they say something mean, stay in the feeling of love.
This consciousness of love should let you get deeper into empathy with the other person. Likewise, you should feel more love towards yourself. Your every actions and trivial thoughts, how you request help and offer yours are all part of the energetic and vibrational complex that is around you.
It is important to know and note that everyone around you has their own journey towards agape love. While some environments can be considered challenging or toxic, be aware that you, as a personal soul, are still responsible for the love that you emit.
These challenging environments and circumstances are often a way to fast track understanding of agape love, if the soul is capable of transmuting what looks and feels like endless darkness. Returning love when you are given hate is the most common stumbling block in progressing towards agape love.
Be always assured that you, yourself have and are love. Then use that force to see love in others, see how they are also wounded and hurt, and love them regardless of their progress or situation.
Nourish self-love
Embrace self-acceptance, acknowledging both strengths and weaknesses in order to fully appreciate yourself.
This step is likely one that you will revisit, over and over, like an old friend, because, after all, you should be a good friend to yourself.
You deserve love and care, in the same way that the world needs your love and your care. To genuinely love the world, you will need to revisit those places in your heart, in your history, where you didn’t love yourself, or you shut yourself down on purpose to avoid taking more damage to your psyche. Words others have said, or silent glances of hatred, wounds come in a variety of forms and most often settle in our unconscious minds.
Very often, these old wounds will haunt you in your present life.
You could find yourself struggling against your own tendencies. Addictions are often manifestations of this inner turmoil. Finding relief in actions or substances never can truly cover the gap in your own heart.
Likewise, some objective or goal could be logical for you, but you inject your drive with self-hatred, telling yourself you can’t do it. Or you could silently sabotage your future goal, a book to write, by going dancing or shopping, or watching one more silly video.
This is obviously not to say you should not dance, or shop, but that those deeper goals of yours which you struggle to achieve often come from wounds you can’t see but feel about yourself. Accept that part of you that needs that love.
Love is like a light, that shines into your heart. The ego uses these older wounds to prevent this shining process. The more time you spend not loving yourself, the easier it is for the ego to continue to lead you astray.
The ego ‘loves’ to make you feel bad, and so will create both pains in getting (called desire) and in not getting (rejection). The mechanisms of action for the ego are complicated, but we can see how this subtle control over our deep pains and desire can shift our present attention and guide us away from our soul and spirit by reflecting on love.
Instead, the ego will want to waste your time, on TV, on the internet, but really, on any activity that isn’t love. This both strengthen the ego and the shadows grip on your heart, and prevents you from developing love.
You cannot fight the ego. Fight is the domain of the ego. Therefore, willpower and personal suppression can only win in the short term, as your ego flatters you, only to betray your confidence.
Instead, you must love the ego, and your shadows. They cannot fight back effectively against this, and further, as you do, your own love and gentleness comes over them. Shadows then cease to be your enemies, and in place, you can have effective, real control over them, as this control is based on you loving yourself entirely.
As you progress, you should see your addictions fall away, being replaced by more genuine moments of love. By yourself, you’ll think and act in the present and future. With others, your heart filled with more light will help to see them as they are, with their own shadows and struggles.
Seek divine connection
Connect with God or the universe to recognize the infinite nature of love and its ability to transcend boundaries.
There are countless ways you can let yourself be impressed by creation, and the nature of all things around you. These objects are ways to fix your attention, but if you turn the same attention inwardly, you can start to see the part of you that is of God.
Prayer, fasting, meditation, yoga, walking in nature, or simply spending time in solitude are all potential ways to seek God. Further, even when out and about, in a train or a plane, you can seek this state of love worship, and deep gratitude to God in all your activities.
The deeper journeys into the nature of God, and a personal relationship with all is a key moment by which you can grow your path towards agape love. God is very much the role model of this endless agape love that he has towards all of creation.
More than the other points on this journey, your relation with God will be unique to you. Initially, it might feel like God is distant, but as you continue these practices, you should feel your feelings align closer to His.
Many, including myself, use music to advance our minds, souls and spirits to the very highest vibrations we can sustain now. Through history, including numerous times in the Bible, stories and songs of love and devotion have helped those on the journey to agape love. Even far along in this journey, would you love to have delightful music that reminds you of heaven?
Music is also unique in ability to connect people from all around the world. Music is also an ability that resist cognitive decline, which suggest that it is a very meaningful and important characteristic of the human mind. In view of some of the esoteric teachings about music, word and vibrations, this is not surprising.
Equally unsurprising is the greatness of God. It is difficult for me to fully express all that God is, since there is always more to know and discover, to feel and understand. I hope your own journey into the greatness of God will be filled with thrilling discoveries and moments of amazement.
Cultivate forgiveness
Understand the importance of forgiveness in genuinely loving oneself and others, promoting a compassionate heart that extends Agape love to all.
Forgiveness is a key practice to agape love. While working towards the future of humanity, on the way there, you’ll need to heal yourself, over and over, for your mistakes and that of others. In either case, forgiveness is critical for your development on the path to agape.
Forgiveness, and deep acts of compassion (and small kindness also!) are all very practical tools to strengthen your soul in the light of love. Instead of carrying emotional dead weight, your future journeys are made lighter. Further, by practicing forgiveness, as people are rude or uncaring around you, or to you, you can fully negate their thoughtless attitude, and return them gentle and kind love.
You’d be surprised at the impact that being genuinely kind to people who are rude (or annoyed) can make them feel better. After all, the purpose of forgiveness is to feel better yourself. Once that is done, why not share with them the relief?
Forgiveness is also important, simply because we live in a physical world. Everything decays and falls apart. This means we must constantly renew the world. Don’t blame yourself or others when things break or fail, because that is simply the natural tendency of the physical.
If your child or a friend breaks something of value, you still have them. Preserve the life, and then fix the world. Forgive them, and work together to improve the situation. There is nothing complicated here.
Forgiveness works on all aspects of the soul and spirit. Perhaps you should work on forgiving yourself. Perhaps you feel the need of forgiveness from God. (About this point, do know that God is always willing, no, eager to hear your pleas, and respond favorably.)
Forgiveness is also something you should build into all of your relations, allowing all to be as they are, with their traditions and understandings, and exchange freely of thoughts to one another. And if feelings are hurt in sharing knowledge, information, tradition or thought, always return to forgiveness to each other and perfect the communication.
Forgiveness is the capstone of all human interaction and diplomacy. It is inevitable that others will act in a way that does not match your thinking. By forgiving, you are making sure that you are in control, and not the shadows or your misleading ego.
Countless groups have splintered over lack of forgiveness in any number of affairs.
Be patient and certain that your forgiving heart is changing others perception.
It could well be that people remember how much pain you caused them, and wish to now hurt you intentionally. Forgive them. When they see your forgiveness, they could well escalate, to test you; have you really forgiven? Deeper psychological or karmic trauma could continue to emerge in them. Forgive them. Do not take it personally, but instead, see the pain they are trying to put on you as the real suffering they have.
Practice agape love toward enemies
Recognize the humanity of those who may be considered enemies and choose to promote peace over hatred. This act of unconditional love contributes to one’s own inner healing, as it requires a strong sense of self-love and compassion.
Loving your enemies is the strongest indication that you are progressing on your path to agape love. Enemies highlight areas within yourself that make you uncomfortable. There are treasures of growth within these lessons.
As you grow in agape love, the truth of your enemies will become plain to you.
You have no enemies. Those you thought were against you are simply under illusions of their ego and separation-thinking, or, in a round about way, working to push you in your development.
Agape love and unity love are strongly related. Loving your enemies is the best way that you can grow your consciousness of unity by practical actions. In this unity, how can there be enemies?
It will feel strange, at first, to try this mindset. Often, we have decades of learning to hate ‘the other side’, in politics, in gender or in race, and even more tragically, in religious dogma that justify non-loving actions.
Overcoming these barriers is a challenging process, but yet again, love’s light and effective dissolution means that the smallest of effort in this direction will overlap miles of division quickly. It is up to you to change the direction of your heart towards your enemies, and the healing is available.
If active love is challenging, try a visualization that you imagine them doing very ordinary actions, like shopping, watching a movie or getting dressed. Are they evil as they do this? What about if they get a coffee with a friend?
Alternatively, you can try ‘active neutrality’, where you try to imagine that they are in a mental and spiritual Switzerland, from where they become peaceful and no longer act against you. The point is not so much attempting to change them, but to embrace the chance that they could change, allowing you to make the first step in love’s forgiveness.
Embrace ongoing learning
Recognize that love is a continuous process that requires constant learning and growth; repeat these steps as needed for continuous refinement.
While these steps have been put in this order, do not think that the process you will go through will be linear.
Love’s expansion of your heart, when it begins, is likely to be quite bumpy. It’s also very likely that your own journey in agape love is meant by sudden and dramatic changes in your circumstances. It’s up to you to handle yourself as people around you change, or their own shadows awaken to hinder you.
It’s also quite possible for you to make good progress on this path, only to slowly fall back to ‘bad habits’ or lose track of your journey. Then, months or years later, another deep whisper from your spirit will reawaken you.
Your journey will be like you, unique.
I could tell you all that I studied, learned, forgotten, but more then likely, you’d start looking there instead of following your own footpath on your journey to agape love.
Which brings us to the final point…
Recognize the immortality of your spirit
Understand that as a spiritual being, there are no time limits on learning about agape love. Embrace this understanding and approach the journey with a sense of timelessness, knowing that self-discovery and growth are infinite processes.
There are no limits or tests that can vouch for your understanding of agape love. As an immortal spirit, there is also no limit to your loving capacity, and the lessons that you can learn and teach in the matters of love.
While our spirits are immortal, it is often the fear of the body’s death that agitates people to act in the spirit of injustice towards one another. Thinking ourselves separate, we can pretend that our selfish acts are beneficial, and the pain of others does not matter.
Inversely, the view of humans as eternal spirits gives us tremendous courage to change our inner compass, pointing it towards true hope in our ability to change and that power of us coming together to solve the larger problems of today.
We accept the dire situation we are in, but as immortal spirits, we understand that nothing can harm us. This, therefore allows us to take on ‘impossible’ or ‘irrational’ goals, without frustration at any setbacks. Like erosion, our immortality and love can defeat any obstacle.
Who can defeat love, when love is immortal?
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