OPERATIONALIZING LOVE

We can do it. The problem is that we don't.

Starvation in Somalia. Photo: Andrew Holbrooke

I heard someone ask recently, “Is it possible to operationalize love?” I think every time we feed a hungry child, we operationalize love. Every time we act with kindness, we operationalize love. Every time we give help where needed, we operationalize love.

The problem isn’t that we can’t operationalize love; the problem is that we don’t. How many hungry children we do not feed, how much kindness we do not express, and how much help we’re not willing to offer. When we’re as serious, strategic, andy committed to operationalizing love as some people are to operationalizing hate, our world will drastically change.

Until such time, the momentum, energy, and speed of occurrence will continue on the side of all that’s not-love. And what is not-love is not neutral, for there is no such thing as a neutral thought. All energy manifests, either as a creative or a destructive force. Every thought we think adds to the manifestation of a world that is light, or a world that is dark. Today more than ever, enlightenment or dystopia are our only two choices for the future that lies ahead.

In the 2020 Presidential primary campaign, I stood on the Democratic debate stage and told President Trump he had harnessed hate for political purposes. I told him I would harness love, which clearly I wasn’t able to do; but that doesn’t mean the effort should end there. Turning love into what Martin Luther King Jr. called “a broad scale social force for good” is still the task of our generation. It was never anything that one person could do alone. It’s our collective mission. If we want a new and better world, each one of us can and must take part.

Such change does not begin with what we do, but with what we think. It’s the quality of our personhood more than the quantity of our actions that will ultimately turn the tide. Everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it, and even the “right” thing done without love will only have temporary effects within a world still under the sway of a fear-based thought system. Waking up each morning dedicating our lives to love, to being agents of healing, to loving everyone to the best of our ability, is the most radical and ultimately most efficacious way to contribute to the world’s repair.

Without such change within us, we are limited in our ability to produce change in the world. As long as we are still imprisoned by the thought system that dominates the world, we remain at its effect and lack the power to create fundamental change. Our enlightenment is not a parallel track to the goings on of the world; it’s our key to transforming them. The dismantling of a thought system based on fear, and its replacement by a thought system based on love, makes us the people we need to be to exert miraculous power. Why? Because it purifies our hearts, diminishes our neuroses, heals our wounds, decreases our anxiety, and releases us from the fear that binds us. Nature’s intelligence takes over when our fear stops blocking it. In the words of A Course in Miracles, “Miracles are everyone’s right but purification is necessary first.” To recognize and surrender our non-loving thoughts, to be willing to see things differently, is our most important work. It is the work of self-purification. And as we do it, the mind expands. As our minds expand, the world transforms because the world is nothing other than a reflection of our thoughts.

The reason psychedelics are experiencing a resurgence today is because of a collective yearning to break free of those mental confines. As someone of the boomer generation, I well understand; we were into such drugs ourselves. I remember as though it were yesterday, being a seventeen-year-old tripping on LSD and saying to my boyfriend, “If Nixon did this, there would be no war!”

I was probably right.

On the other hand, a trip to the top of the mountain is not itself a ticket to remain there. It’s a glimpse we’re shown, before being placed back at the bottom of the mountain and made to climb up by ourselves. In my case that glimpse was important, however, and when I later read books like The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts and A Course in Miracles, the idea that the problems as well as the solutions are all in my mind was already part of my mental framework. I knew that, though I didn’t yet know how to apply what it means to my practical circumstances. The journey of enlightenment is the gritty work of learning how to do that.

Drugs can’t do it for you. You have to do it for yourself.

None of this is theoretical. It’s practical. And it’s a collective as well as individual journey.

For instance, the roughly $100 Billion we’ve spent on the Iran war in 120 days could finance lifesaving malnutrition treatment for hundreds of millions of children and cover the current child severe-wasting caseload many times over.

But the mindset that dominates our global functioning is fear-based, immoral, and insane.

The problem is not a lack of food, or even a lack of money. The problem is what in worldly terms is called “a lack of political will.” Yet what is behind that? Why do we embrace, or at least acquiesce to the thought that our security lies more in our capacity to kill one another than to make peace with one another? What is the mental contagion that would persuade us to say yes to such a preposterous notion, that would lure us into agreement with such a dark and self-destructive idea, even aligning in mockery toward those who point out the obvious fallacy in seeing death as the path to greater life and greater life as the path to death?

The idea of changing our social paradigm from an economic to humanitarian bottom line is essential if we’re to free ourselves from the mental prison into which we have been cast and which we continue to maintain. Like elephants who are no longer fenced yet often remain within the confines of the space that previously held them, we refuse to think beyond the walls that surround us. But the walls themselves are nothing but thoughts, with no power beyond the power we give them. Nothing but our attachment to fear-based thinking now constrains us, and only our willingness to change our thinking will free us now. Love is to fear what light is to darkness; choose one, and the other disappears.

The thinking of the world is upside down. It is 180 degrees away from the thinking of a loving God. Learning to change our thinking, to psychologically and emotionally discipline ourselves to think love where we might have thought fear, is our greatest power to change the world. The change itself is not difficult so much as it is different. What is difficult is getting over our resistance to doing it; it’s amazing how attached we are to remaining in the hell of our own making. In A Course in Miracles it says “some people would rather die than change their mind.” How true that is apparently, of us. We are slow-walking — not so sure it’s even slow right now — to the brink of extinction while we fiddle with our smart phones. We know this, and yet we still keep walking.

But all this can change, and the urgency of this moment is propelling that change. Only in the material realm are there huge political and economic forces that would stop us. In the material realm, yes, they have power over us. But in the spiritual realm, we have power over them. Only Love, or the Mind of God, has ultimate existence; the rest is a mortal hallucination we have manufactured and we can choose to let go. Spirit has power over the material because in the realm of the ultimate it exists, and illusions do not.

The spiritual meaning of this moment is that it’s a chance to choose again. Each of us is assigned by nature the relationships and circumstances that provide, should we wish to inhabit it, the portal to a better world. We either activate or de-activate the portal with a single decision: do I choose love, or do I choose fear? It isn’t always easy, and only enlightened masters have made it to 24/7. But we can try. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity to get it right, to expand our hearts beyond where we might have been the last time such a situation presented itself. But we will be tempted by every situation, as well, to constrict instead of expand… to fall into the ego’s default patterns of littleness or grandiosity. We will be tempted to do the victim thing, the judgmental thing, the dishonest thing, the inauthentic thing, the arrogant thing, the whatever it is with which we have blocked our love, blinding both ourselves and others to the light that lies within us.

Your light, my light, everyone’s light is needed now. It’s not just your own life you’re transforming when you choose love instead of fear. We are all a part of a gigantic sun, its rays so powerful it can cast out all the darkness of the world. But only if we do this together. If someone asks you, “Who do you think you are, God’s gift to the world?” please say yes. You, and everyone else on the planet. We have a job to do and it’s urgent now. Fear is on a roll these days, backed by huge material, technological and economic forces. But where there is love, there cannot be fear. Be the change. Hack the system. Choose love.