Zac looked at me skeptically. "Are you saying that love can be reduced to math?"
"Of course," I grinned. "Many people believe that science and spirituality aren't compatible because love can't be reduced to a mathematical equation. This is logically wrong when you reason from first principles. If everything is math, and we experience love, then love is math. Listen to this passage from Conversations With God…"
Love is the ultimate reality. It is the only. The all. The feeling of love is your experience of God.
In highest Truth, love is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be. When you move into the absolute, you move into love. The realm of the relative was created in order that I might experience My Self. This has already been explained to you. This does not make the realm of the relative real. It is a created reality you and I have devised and continue to devise — in order that we may know ourselves experientially. Yet the creation can seem very real. Its purpose is to seem so real, we accept it as truly existing. In this way, God has contrived to create “something else” other than Itself (though in strictest terms this is impossible, since God is — I AM — All That Is).
In creating “something else” — namely, the realm of the relative — I have produced an environment in which you may choose to be God, rather than simply be told that you are God; in which you may experience Godhead as an act of creation, rather than a conceptualization; in which the little candle in the sun — the littlest soul — can know itself as the light.
Fear is the other end of love. It is the primal polarity. In creating the realm of the relative, I first created the opposite of My Self. Now, in the realm in which you live on the physical plane, there are only two places of being: fear and love. Thoughts rooted in fear will produce one kind of manifestation on the physical plane. Thoughts rooted in love will produce another.
The Masters who have walked the planet are those who have discovered the secret of the relative world — and refused to acknowledge its reality. In short, Masters are those who have chosen only love. In every instance. In every moment. In every circumstance. Even as they were being killed, they loved their murderers. Even as they were being persecuted, they loved their oppressors.
This is very difficult for you to understand, much less emulate. Nevertheless, it is what every Master has ever done. It doesn’t matter what the philosophy, it doesn’t matter what the tradition, it doesn’t matter what the religion — it is what every Master has done.
This example and this lesson has been laid out so clearly for you. Time and time again, over and over has it been shown to you. Through all the ages and in every place. Through all your lifetimes and in every moment. The universe has used every contrivance to place this Truth before you. In song and story, in poetry and dance, in words and in motion — in pictures of motion, which you call motion pictures, and in collections of words, which you call books.
From the highest mountain it has been shouted, in the lowest place its whisper has been heard. Through the corridors of all human experience has this Truth been echoed: Love is the answer. Yet you have not listened.
Now come you to this book, asking God again what God has told you countless times in countless ways. Yet I will tell you again — here — in the context of this book. Will you listen now? Will you truly hear?
What do you think brought you to this material? How does it come to pass that you are holding it in your hands? Do you think I know not what I am doing?
There are no coincidences in the universe.
Neale Donald Walsch
"This is a fascinating idea," I said. "Again, love and fear can be reduced to a polarity: something, and that which it is not. I'm going to read another passage, and then we'll break this down."
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions — fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions — only two words in the language of the soul. These are the opposite ends of the great polarity which I created when I produced the universe, and your world, as you know it today.
These are the two points — the Alpha and the Omega — which allow the system you call “relativity” to be. Without these two points, without these two ideas about things, no other idea could exist.
Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation, and all other ideas are but derivatives of these two. They are simply different versions — different twists on the same theme.
Think on this deeply and you will see that it is true. This is what I have called the Sponsoring Thought. It is either a thought of love or fear. This is the thought behind the thought behind the thought. It is the first thought. It is prime force. It is the raw energy that drives the engine of human experience.
And here is how human behavior produces repeat experience after repeat experience; it is why humans love, then destroy, then love again: always there is the swing from one emotion to the other. Love sponsors fear sponsors love sponsors fear…
… And the reason is found in the first lie — the lie which you hold as the truth about God — that God cannot be trusted; that God’s love cannot be depended upon; that God’s acceptance of you is conditional; that the ultimate outcome is thus in doubt. For if you cannot depend on God’s love to always be there, on whose love can you depend? If God retreats and withdraws when you do not perform properly, will not mere mortals also?
… And so it is that in the moment you pledge your highest love, you greet your greatest fear.
For the first thing you worry about after saying “I love you” is whether you’ll hear it back. And if you hear it back, then you begin immediately to worry that the love you have just found, you will lose. And so all action becomes a reaction — defense against loss — even as you seek to defend yourself against the loss of God.
Yet if you knew Who You Are — that you are the most magnificent, the most remarkable, the most splendid being God has ever created — you would never fear. For who could reject such wondrous magnificence? Not even God could find fault in such a being.
But you do not know Who You Are, and you think you are a great deal less. And where did you get the idea of how much less than magnificent you are? From the only people whose word you would take on everything. From your mother and your father.
These are the people who love you the most. Why would they lie to you? Yet have they not told you that you are too much of this, and not enough of that? Have they not reminded you that you are to be seen and not heard?
Have they not scolded you in some of the moments of your greatest exuberance? And, did they not encourage you to set aside some of your wildest imagining?
These are the messages you’ve received, and though they do not meet the criteria, and are thus not messages from God, they might as well have been, for they have come from the gods of your universe surely enough.
It was your parents who taught you that love is conditional — you have felt their conditions many times — and that is the experience you take into your own love relationships.
It is also the experience you bring to Me.
From this experience you draw your conclusions about Me. Within this framework you speak your truth. “God is a loving God,” you say, “but if you break His commandments, He will punish you with eternal banishment and everlasting damnation.”
For have you not experienced the banishment of your own parents? Do you not know the pain of their damnation? How, then, could you imagine it to be any different with Me?
You have forgotten what it was like to be loved without condition. You do not remember the experience of the love of God. And so you try to imagine what God’s love must be like, based on what you see of love in the world.
You have projected the role of “parent” onto God, and have thus come up with a God Who judges and rewards or punishes, based on how good He feels about what you’ve been up to. But this is a simplistic view of God, based on your mythology. It has nothing to do with Who I Am.
Having thus created an entire thought system about God based on human experience rather than spiritual truths, you then create an entire reality around love. It is a fear-based reality, rooted in the idea of a fearful, vengeful God. Its Sponsoring Thought is wrong, but to deny that thought would be to disrupt your whole theology. And though the new theology which would replace it would truly be your salvation, you cannot accept it, because the idea of a God Who is not to be feared, Who will not judge, and Who has no cause to punish is simply too magnificent to be embraced within even your grandest notion of Who and What God is.
This fear-based love reality dominates your experience of love; indeed, actually creates it. For not only do you see yourself receiving love which is conditional, you also watch yourself giving it in the same way. And even while you withhold and retreat and set your conditions, a part of you knows this is not what love really is. Still, you seem powerless to change the way you dispense it. You've learned the hard way, you tell yourself, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to leave yourself vulnerable again. Yet the truth is, you’ll be damned if you don’t.
[By your own (mistaken) thoughts about love do you damn yourself never to experience it purely. So, too, do you damn yourself never to know Me as I really am. Until you do. For you shall not be able to deny Me forever, and the moment will come for our Reconciliation.]
Every action taken by human beings is based in love or fear, not simply those dealing with relationships. Decisions affecting business, industry, politics, religion, the education of your young, the social agenda of your nations, the economic goals of your society, choices involving war, peace, attack, defense, aggression, submission; determinations to covet or give away, to save or to share, to unite or to divide — every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear.
Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.
Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.
Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select.
You make it sound so easy, and yet in the moment of decision fear wins more often than not. Why is that?
You have been taught to live in fear. You have been told about the survival of the fittest and the victory of the strongest and the success of the cleverest. Precious little is said about the glory of the most loving. And so you strive to be the fittest, the strongest, the cleverest — in one way or another — and if you see yourself as something less than this in any situation, you fear loss, for you have been told that to be less is to lose.
And so of course you choose the action fear sponsors, for that is what you have been taught. Yet I teach you this: when you choose the action love sponsors, then will you do more than survive, then will you do more than win, then will you do more than succeed. Then will you experience the full glory of Who You Really Are, and who you can be.
To do this you must turn aside the teachings of your well-meaning, but misinformed, worldly tutors, and hear the teachings of those whose wisdom comes from another source.
There are many such teachers among you, as always there have been, for I will not leave you without those who would show you, teach you, guide you, and remind you of these truths. Yet the greatest reminder is not anyone outside you, but the voice within you. This is the first tool that I use, because it is the most accessible.
The voice within is the loudest voice with which I speak, because it is the closest to you. It is the voice which tells you whether everything else is true or false, right or wrong, good or bad as you have defined it. It is the radar that sets the course, steers the ship, guides the journey if you but let it.
It is the voice which tells you right now whether the very words you are reading are words of love or words of fear. By this measure can you determine whether they are words to heed or words to ignore.
You said that when I always choose the action that love sponsors, then I will experience the full glory of who I am and who I can be. Will you expand on this please?
There is only one purpose for all of life, and that is for you and all that lives to experience fullest glory.
Everything else you say, think, or do is attendant to that function. There is nothing else for your soul to do, and nothing else your soul wants to do. The wonder of this purpose is that it is never-ending. An ending is a limitation, and God’s purpose is without such a boundary. Should there come a moment in which you experience yourself in your fullest glory, you will in that instant imagine an ever greater glory to fulfill. The more you are, the more you can become, and the more you can become, the more you can yet be.
The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation.
You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek, therefore, not to find out Who You Are. Seek to determine Who You Want to Be.
Neale Donald Walsch
"Is that like abundance and scarcity mindset?" Zac asked. "Like, people with an abundance mindset believe the world is abundant and there is more than enough to go around, so they aren't afraid to share and help others. People with a scarcity mindset believe that resources are scarce, so they fight and hoard and hold onto their share."
"Yes," I said. "That's love and fear in a nutshell. Love is expansive, fear is contractive. And I mean that literally."
"What do you mean, literally?"
