Summary: right-click here to download As revealed to Marshall Vian Summers on November 23, 2007 in Boulder, Colorado Around the world love is held to be in the highest esteem, as a pinnacle of human experience. Love is sung about in songs, written about in poetry. It is exalted in great literature. It is bandied about in normal conversation. People claim they are in love, that love is the ultimate, that all you need in the world is love and everything will work out just fine. But very few people understand what love really is. And very few people have experienced love at a deeper level—beyond fascination, beyond infatuation and attachment. Few people have experienced the real power and current of love. In addition, many people associate certain kinds of behaviors, beliefs and attitudes with love—gentleness, passivity are associated with love. Peace and harmony are associated with love. But really what is this deeper love, not a love that is simply a fixation, an infatuation or an attachment, but a deeper kind of love that is redemptive, that emanates from a deeper place within the individual. And beyond this, what is God’s love, the love of God? Is this merely an infatuation, a fixation or an attachment? Most people will say no, but they are unclear what the love of God really means and how this love is expressed and how it can be translated into the world effectively. So today we will speak on Love, the greater love that lives within each individual and the greater love of God, that is the sum of all love in the Universe, and is the source of all real love everywhere—in this world and in the Greater Community of worlds. And we shall speak about what God’s New Message for the world teaches about love, for there is a New Message from God in the world, and love is part of its message. It is necessary here to begin by saying what love is not. Love is not fascination. Love is not fixation. Love is not attachment. Love is not romance where you are infatuated or taken with someone else’s appearance or some aspect of their personality. It is not idolatry, where you idolize someone, you worship someone, even a Deity, even a Messenger, even God. But these do not represent a real relationship, a working relationship, a relationship of united wills. Love is not a behavior, an attitude, a mannerism. It is not etiquette. It is not convention. Love may express itself in many different ways—softly or forcibly. Love can appear meek. Love can appear strong. Love can challenge you. Love can criticize you. Love can expose your illusions, your fantasies and your self-deception. Love is not what people really mean when they talk about love, in nearly all circumstances. Love is a deeper power that moves people to do things that are different from their ideas, their beliefs and their sense of obligation. Love is something beyond the love you hear about in conversations. In fact, it is better to demonstrate love than to talk about it, for real love is demonstrated. It is what moves people to change their lives, to refocus their priorities, to associate with something deeper and more profound within themselves. It is something that has the power to override human ambition, human selfishness, human grievance and all partisan beliefs and attitudes, religious ideology. For love is not bound by these things. It is only restrained, held back or hidden by these things. But love moves on its own accord, being associated with the deeper Knowledge that God has placed within each person. For you see, you were born with two minds—a mind to think with and a mind to know. The mind that you think with is a product of all of your social conditioning. It is a product of being in the world. It is an accumulation of ideas, associations and patterns of thinking that you have been learning since the day you were born. Much of this is useful, and some of it is hazardous and dangerous to you. Certainly,
