The Path of Attunement

Let love radiate without concern for results. This is the purpose for our being. That purpose includes many other things but, in the end, all those other things come to focus in this one thing: letting love radiate without concern for results. That is a picture of unconditional love, which is the foundation and the basis for every true spiritual teaching that ever was. We call it unconditional love because it means nothing if it is conditional. If love is conditional, it is buying and selling.

Unconditional love through a human being brings the presence of the divine. And where there are friends who accept for themselves the attitude of love itself, which is unconditional, there is an attractive force that draws to itself everything that resonates with that spirit, and sets aside everything that does not.

As that is our choice, we have the privilege of being friends who know the bonds of love between us and among us. Love is no respecter of persons. It is an honoring of the beingness that comes through people, but that’s a different matter. It is not personal, ultimately. And ultimately our love and our friendships with each other are not to be taken personally—not when they go well and not when they go poorly. Love is no respecter of persons. Love is a transcendent, universal presence. It is a cosmic presence to be found in the smallest dimensions of being and in the farthest galaxy. And it is present in a very special way through a human being when that human being accepts the attitude of unconditional love.

Unconditional love is an acceptance of our oneness with all of being. All of being is love. And then in our own life that we live day to day, we have the opportunity to walk the path of love. That path of love has us move in the world of form—the people, the events and all the realities of our life every day. And while we are one with the power of love that’s behind all those forms, in fact we are directly in touch with a small minutia of the totality of what is available on Planet Earth. We are present in a place that is a minute fraction of all the places on Planet Earth. We meet a minute fraction of the seven billion people on our planet. By choosing to be where you are, you have chosen not to be anyplace else. And in meeting the relatively small number of people you will meet in your life, you are choosing not to meet all the other people on the planet.

As we walk through life, there is the way that opens up before us. It is the way of love, and in that way there is a big yes. There is a big light that greets us. We could call it our future—our future is coming to us. Our future is bright, and it is always so when we are walking in the way of love. That future is opening up before us as we keep walking, as we keep stepping toward it.

While we are taking those steps towards what is opening up before us, we are walking past a thousand-thousand noes. And that is what it’s like to live a human life. You and I have the world around us saying no to us all the time: “No, you can’t do this. No, you can’t go there; that’s not open to you. No, you can’t have this. You might have it tomorrow, but you cannot have it now. It’s not yours now.”

There is something that is yours. It may be another person; it may be a whole community of people. That is the true love. It is what’s opening up for you to be embraced. As David Whyte so beautifully said in his poem The Truelove, “…and you’ll walk across any territory, any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand”—and the one life—“you know belongs in yours.” There is a life that belongs to us and that is coming to us, which is rightly ours. It is what is right before you and coming to you to be embraced.

And there is that which is not yours and is not opening to you. That is a shut door. If you try to go in that door, you’ll be in a place you do not belong. You’ll be with someone or someones that you don’t belong with. You’ll be in a situation that is not yours to be in, that does not belong to you. You have no business being there on the other side of all those shut doors. And it’s a waste of your time and mine to be banging at the doors that are not meant to open, fussing about that door and then, in the process, neglecting to walk down our path of love and greeting what does belong to us, and that to which we belong—failing to walk across the territory before us and take the one hand and the one life you know belongs in yours.

Why should we fret about the noes in our life? Why should we park outside a closed door, when there’s an open path in front of us that leads to goodness, to fulfillment, to wonder and beauty and the knowing of love? We have to stop being ourselves to bang on a door that is not meant to open for us. We have to lose our integrity to do that, the integrity of unconditional love.

That unconditional love unfolds something in our experience step-by-step. Our life is a process of unfoldment. Things open up. We spiral higher and higher. We touch higher and higher essences of love in the living of a life if we keep walking that path. We enter into a fuller knowing of light.

This path is the path of attunement. Attunement can’t be reduced to something that one person offers to another, although it is applicable in the interchange between two people. The path of attunement is this unfoldment of unconditional love in a person who welcomes their life and accepts the noes that come to them. Such a person is in fuller and deeper attunement with the source of their own being as they continue on that path. And because they are on that path, they implicitly invite other people to have the same experience.

When we find that future and that reality that we belong to and that belongs to us, we are in position to invite others to know that for themselves. We are in position to invite another person to walk the path of attunement, the path of unfolding unconditional love. That is the true path for any person, and it is individual and unique to each one of us. And yet, in the magic of love, in the magic of life, we have the privilege of finding that we are together and that we belong to one another, that you belong to me and I to you, as we walk that path. There could be no deeper joy, no greater fulfillment, than this.