Love is Who You Really Are
by Neale Walsch
In Conversations with God, God says that Love is all there is. God also says that God is All That Is. Therefore, God is Love. Everything in our heart tells us this, too, by the way, and the heart is never wrong.
What is love? Does love have to be learned, or is it a thing that we are born with? Where does it come from? These are the questions that have engaged philosophers and theologians from the beginning of time. These are the Eternal Questions. The questions to which we have been seeking our personal answers since the day we were born.
When someone is talking about love or a feeling of love, we pretend like we understand it, and we don’t take time to think about the real meaning of love. I do not know if my answers will solve the mystery for you, but I can tell you that they have for me. So, from the For What Its Worth Dept.: Love is Who You Really Are. I believe that Love is what God Is. To me, the words God and Love are interchangeable. Likewise, the words God and You, and God and Me, are interchangeable. Therefore, the words Love and You, and Love and Me, are synonyms as well, describing exactly the same thing. And what do these words – God, Love, You, Me – describe? Life. This is all our way of describing what life is. So to me, Life is Love. The energy that Life is, Love is. Life-Love-God-You-Me – it’s all the same thing. In my dialogue with God I was told that love is all there is. This means that everything is a form of love. Now that may be difficult to accept, difficult to comprehend, but God says it is true.
In CwG Book 2 this principle is again restated, this time as it relates to all human beings. Said God about people: I have sent you nothing but angels. Again, this is hard to understand, particularly the way some people act. Yet it is directly in alignment with Gods statement in the dialogue that Hitler went to heaven.
Mysteries such as these are not easily grasped, particularly if we look only at the shallow end of things. We have to dive into that pool of wisdom and plunge to the very depths in order to find the meaning here. When we discover (or, to use a word I like to substitute here, recover) the Truth of these statements, then we understand at last what Love is. And What God is. And what we are.
Now when you say that we have the world as it is just because we do not have enough love for others and the things around us what I hear in my heart is that the world is the way it is because we do not have enough of an awareness of our Oneness with God and the Life which is around us. You see, what I have been trying to say here is that God and We are One. Life and We are One. You and I are One. Everyone – you, me, God, life – is all the same stuff.
When we get clear on that, all of the problems we have created in our lives will go away. Every single life problem of which I am aware is based in the thought that there is a thing called separation. As soon as the thought of Separation disappears, all of the problems of life disappear as well. They automatically resolve themselves. They go away. And we don’t create them anew, because we would never do that to ourselves. We would never allow thousands of people to starve to death every day because we would never do that to ourselves. We would never allow millions to be killed in wars because we would never do that to ourselves. We would not allow masses of people to be ravaged by poverty and disease because we would never do that to ourselves.
And, on a smaller scale, we would never allow our personal behaviors to be unkind or damaging to others, because we would know and understand that there are no others, and we would never do that to ourselves.
As soon as we realize that we are all One, we stop immediately our destructive behaviors, because we realize that those behaviors are Self-destructive. (As long as we think of them as merely other destructive, we don’t seem to care.)
So, love is realizing we are One. Love is understanding that. Living that.
Love does not have to be learned, but it does have to be remembered. That is, we have to remember what we have always known. This act of re-membering – that is, becoming once again a member of the One Body of God – can take a lifetime. Or many lifetimes. But sooner or later, all of us re-member.
Yes, love is something you are born with, because love is Who You Really Are. Since you are born with you, you are born with love. You cannot separate you and love You only think you can.
Now you ask, How can I know the deeds of love? And the answer is found wonderfully articulated on Page 19 of Conversations with God – Book 1, when God explains the difference between Love and 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.
And to this, I would add another CwG description: Love never says no.
In other words, love says my will for you is your will for you. This is exactly what God says to each of us. And there is yet one more way you can know the deeds of love. They are the deeds that are undertaken without expectation and without condition. True love is unconditional. There is no such thing as I love you if.
We have been living with an idea of an I love you if kind of God for many centuries now. From the start, that kind of idea about God has been inaccurate.
And I guess if I had to settle on one single characteristic of love, some defining quality that was always there, it would be that loves always unites, and creates or honors Oneness. If, therefore, a decision or choice is made by individuals or a government which tends to divide, which creates or honors Separation, it is not a decision or choice based in love. Anything that creates a them and us mentality is not love.