Truly spiritual people are not seeking a spiritual experience. They are having a spiritual experience and they are embodying that experience as fully as possible in their lives. They are building a body of love. Our human soul cries out for the spirit to enter consciousness fully and express through thought, feeling, word and action. The divine reality that is the truth of who you are longs to enter your soul and to enter the world in which you live.
It takes courage to come to the place of recognition that you are not just the soul who is looking for a spiritual experience. You are universal love, looking for a body, looking for the opportunity to express yourself in the most accurate and the most powerful way for this circumstance.
The body of love is a stone cut out without hands. Think of the way love is embodied in your own life—the love you share with those closest to you, or the love you share with the community of people that is around you. If you truly experience a body of love with other people, it was not created out of any kind of manipulation. A body of real love shared by people is built in one way, and one way only—through the clear expression of love over time. The magic of love creates it. It is like a stone cut out without hands.
A stone has solidity and gravity. When the body of love is known among people, it is like that. They are solid as individuals and they have solidarity as a group. They possess the quality of gravity—gravitas! What they bring to the world has significance and weight.
Who wouldn’t want to have these qualities in their human experience? People have looked for the instruction manual. Leaders of all kinds have looked for the gravitas that would bring a group of people together to have the solidarity that would let them accomplish something. Parents try to hold families together. Business leaders try to bring the people of their organization together. Political leaders attempt to galvanize a political party. While there might be some level of seeming success in any of these endeavors, it is only the real body of love known in the human experience that has the true gravity that holds people together. And the only way the body of love is created is by love itself, expressing clearly and consistently over time through individuals.
The expression of love is a fluid. It is like water poured from a pitcher into a glass, taking the shape of that glass. The circumstance is the glass. When a person lets love pour through them accurately, it takes just the right shape for that circumstance. Love wants to find just what is needed. It wants to find the optimal action. It wants to engage with what is present right now in the most loving, the most creative, the most effective and powerful way.
Assurance is the knowing that you are not just a human soul looking for a spiritual experience. You are divine being, seeking to embody the love that you are in the world. An assured person is allowing the flow of love to occur all the time. They are letting their love conform exactly to the shape of the circumstance. Without assurance, a person worries that if they did this, they would not be themselves. They might be two-faced if they said just what someone needed to hear. They might be inauthentic if they did not act in the same way they had always acted in a similar circumstance. They might be a doormat if they did not get what they wanted from other people.
What an assured person knows is they could not stop being themselves if they wanted to. When it comes to being who they are, they have nothing to prove. They are free to let their love flow as accurately and as clearly as possible into the circumstance. They are building a body of love in the world.
It seems like a paradox. Love is both the fluid expression in every moment and it is also a reality that has the solidity and weight of a stone. Both these elements—solidity and fluidity—are essential factors in our physical body. Our bodies are mostly water and the fluids are a necessary part of the function of the body. However, we need the structure of our skeletal system to hold us upright, to protect our internal organs and to keep us from flopping all over the place. The minerals necessary for the building of the skeletal system are carried through blood that flows in the circulatory system. Altogether, the appearance on the outside of our human bodies is of something solid, while we are mostly liquid inside.
These realities in our physical body are a manifestation of what is happening at other levels of our being. At a spiritual level, the fluid expression of love over time is what builds the solidity of the body of love that is present in any moment. Inside, there is the flow of love, embodied on the outside in the solid embodiment of love in form.
In our human life there has to be fluidity so that we can assume whatever structure and whatever shape is right for us to assume in any moment, so that we can show up as we need to be in that situation, filling just the need that is present. If we are with another person, there is something that that other person needs from us. And yes, we have to be ourselves with that other person if we are to be authentic and real, if we are to embody the love that is within us. But when we are embodying love, and we are doing so masterfully in our life, we are past the point of wondering if we are going to be ourselves. We know we could not help but be ourselves.
Then you can ask, how do I serve this person? How do I provide exactly what is needed for them? Something they could accept and receive from me, which would be of true service? I may need to be a rock for another person. There is the paradox: I have the fluidity to be that rock. I have the fluidity to show up and be the body of love that is exactly right in this circumstance.
You often hear people use the metaphor of a duck swimming across the water: oh, so graceful, with the ripples extending out beyond it. But under the water there is the rapid paddling of little webbed feet! That is a metaphor for us in showing up as love in our world and providing just the right thing. It takes internal work to be fluid enough to show up as who you need to be for another person or for a circumstance. Sometimes it takes some kind of melting inside to allow the love that is within you to be liquid and to flow to another in just the right way. It can take internal heat to transform what may have become stony inside, so that it becomes fluid. And then you offer something solid outside to the people around you. You can embody love as the stone cut out without hands.
So many people who lack true assurance confuse what is meant to be solid and what is meant to be fluid. Instead of being fluid on the inside, so that their love can take exactly the right shape in the circumstance at hand, they let themselves become hard on the inside. They think they know how other people should be, how the circumstance should be, or even how they themselves should be. They are not pouring out their love. They are attempting to make the circumstance conform to their idea about how it should be. They are trying to create a stone cut out by the use of their hands. So instead of creating the solid body of love around them, they are creating a world of shifting, vacillating attitude and intention.
Let us build the body of love. That body is created in ways that can seem inglorious. It is a building, one step at a time, one relationship built on universal love at a time. We have to begin for it to occur. So often, so-called spiritual people are “all dressed up with noplace to go.” No beginning. No understanding that the body of love is built step-by-step. It is built through the discipline of embodying love in every little thing: stone on stone, brick on brick. It begins as all true things begin, as something so small it can hardly be seen, something that seems inglorious. But when you humble yourself to the discipline of the true building process, it becomes the stone cut out without hands that turns into a great mountain.
So how open are you to be just what this circumstance needs? To be as hard and as strong as this circumstance requires, as big and as powerful, as enduring, as tenacious, as decisive as this circumstance requires, willing to say yes and willing to say no—and, at the same time, as soft and as sweet, as fluid and as loving, and as compassionate as is needed right here and now. Whatever it is, I am here for this. I am not here for me. I am not here to prove who I am. I am already me. I am here for this moment, this person, this circumstance, and to pour my love into it. Whatever your circumstance, you are here to pour your love into it.
The body of love comes together because there is a reality within that body that is replicated throughout it. The very being of love, Universal Being, is being replicated throughout that body. That reality is the very core of what humanity is. Within all seven billion of us there is one Being of Love that’s being replicated throughout.
Most people are largely unconscious of what is going on. But the body comes together because it is being replicated out of that one reality, out of that one Being of Love that is the most real thing about who you are. Yes, there are all the individual aspects of us as human beings, and love expresses differently through each of us. There are unique colors of spirit that we each bring. But at the core of who we are, we are that one Being of Love, that one focus of white light that, in the magic of being, is refracted into the rainbow of all light.