No Greater Love

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (Jesus)

Would you take a bullet for someone?  Would you go to jail for someone?  Would you die for someone?  What would be your motivation?  What might inspire you to do such a thing?  Is that what Jesus was talking about?

The physical is a manifestation of the spiritual.  Are you confused?  Even the table under my keyboard is not really what I think it is based on what I see.  It is really a bundle of energy that holds together a few tiny particles of matter that when you look even deeper are just energy themselves.  So my desk isn’t really solid but is manifest as solid in my limited reality so I perceive it as solid.  Is that too philosophical?  It’s actually science.

Likewise the divine permeates all things.  What we see with our eyes are objects that may exist outside our site but our seeing them gives them a substance within our reality.  The divine love that holds all things together gives my brain the power to have the thought that came from the image that was illuminated by light that came from a sun that is held together by divine love.  Yeah, all of that.

Jesus said the greatest expression of love, what true love looks like, is to give ones life for another.  That literally happened with Jesus.  He died at the hands of people who rejected love in human form.  We rejected the divine God-man who revealed truth, divine reality and our true nature as the divine manifestation on this Earth.  But there is something more than just meets the eye.

The Greek word for life that Jesus used in this opening statement, He also used here:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life (Jesus)

The last word that is translated “life” in this statement is a different word.  It is Zoe life.  The full, divine life.  It is the divine reality life.  It is our eternal self.  It is our Trudy life (check out this page about Trudy Judy and Lena).  Now you might be asking, “what is the point?”  So I’ll get to it.

We all have a false self.  I call this false self our broken Lena.  This false self is a product of our experience, our survival instinct projected into our false reality trying to manipulate our circumstance to achieve a desired outcome.  Some have called this the ego-centric self. This self isn’t real.  This self needs to “die” or be healed by divine love.

We all also have our true self.  We have at the deepest part of us our Trudy self.  This is our divine self that is God as us and us as God.  This is the self that Jesus refers to when He says “I and the Father are one.”  He is describing our identity in our divine reality.  This true self is love.  Our true self is the divine manifestation of us as Him.

If we don’t lose the false self, we don’t find the true self.  We don’t find love.  We don’t embrace our identity as the divine.  So when Jesus says love looks like loosing our “life,” He is talking about giving up our false self.  It isn’t a ego-centric expression.  We don’t see someone literally die for another and declare “they must have loved.”  That would be ego-cetered.  No, Love looks like complete and total other-centeredness.  The ego (the false one) dies to itself to love another.

So I was thinking about how God is all of us.  He looks into the mirror and sees 107 billion faces.  His is discovering Himself as us and we are discovering ourselves as Him.  He is in this dream we call “us” waking up to His true self while we find our true self.  Then I thought how crazy that really is.

Jesus died at the hands of humanity who was unwilling to embrace His truth about our nature and divine love that holds all this together.  What if His death was a shadow of something bigger?  I thought about how we all get to choose our false self or embrace our true self.  If we never identify with our divine nature, we never find God.  If we never find God then God never sees Himself.  If we don’t know ourselves, our true self, we never know the divine.  The divine is known through us.  Too complicated?

If all I know is the false self, then it is as if God is not.  My unreality of the false self doesn’t include the divine reality of our divine nature.  Think about it.  God took an awful risk in us.  We could all chose to never embrace our true self and in doing so God would never see Himself.  Is it possible that God could be no more if we never embraced our true self?

At the same time it is wonderful the way He loves us all.  Only one person needs to see for Him to be real.  Only one.

So Love is other-centered.  It isn’t that “other-centered is love.”  No, love is other-centered.  God is love.  God’s expression of love is that He would lose Himself in us so that we might discover Him in us.  I hope you see how powerful that really is.  This divine love we call God is so perfect in Love that the only expression of Love that would really be Love is to lose Himself for us.  He did it literally on a cross.  He did it spiritually in His manifestation as Himself as us.

Is there a greater Love?

Yay God!

Lance