Love is the Nature of Reality

Over the millennia, all the great saints and sages have pointed to the same fundamental truth—that love is the nature of reality, and you are that.

Dear friend,

There is something within me, asking to be said. This quiet conception has not yet been birthed, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life giving birth to it, again and again.

In a sentence, it’s this: love is the nature of reality, and you are that.

This seems so obvious to my heart that putting it into words feels laughable. Yet the mind hungers for words, and so today I will appease it, sharing a story that might begin to illumine what the heart already knows.

I once saw a beautiful woman hand-washing garments on a hillside. The sun was setting behind her, filling the entire scene with light. I watched as she finished washing a red garment, slowly lifting it out of the water and into the light. As she did, the thin, wet fabric caught the rays of the sun, which penetrated it from behind.

Suddenly, it was no longer a piece of fabric. It was a glowing blaze of light, tinted red, delicately held between this woman’s hands. She gently hung it on a clothesline behind her, and there it shone: a piece of the sun, captured in cloth and blowing gently in the breeze. Water droplets fell from the cloth, each one catching and amplifying the light, a waterfall of tiny suns.

Love is like that. Just as the sun penetrated these colorful fabrics, love illumines every moment in time. As it does, it dissolves the illusion of separation into the reality that we are: a single, infinite being that is the source of all things beautiful and just.

Like these colorful fabrics, our experience includes a few different elements: our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, identity, will and society, to name a few. When the light of love touches each of these elements, it shines as our most cherished values, namely, truth, happiness, beauty, freedom, power and justice.

When love shines in the mind, we refer to it as truth or understanding.

When love touches a moment of suffering, we call it happiness or peace.

When love enters our senses—when we witness a sunset or enjoy a beautiful piece of music—it dissolves the sense of separation into the reality of unity. This, we refer to as beauty.

When love ignites our identity—and dissolves the belief in separation into the unity of being—this has traditionally been referred to as liberation or awakening.

When love dominates our will, we discover true power. We see the performance of separation for what it is: a mirage in the desert that can never quench our thirst.

When love transforms society, the ideology of separation—and its oppressive policies and practices—will give way to the reality of our shared being. Thus, justice is how love looks at the level of human society.

Truth, happiness, peace, beauty, freedom, power, justice—these are the many luminous colors of love, as she shines through the fabric of space and time. Just as the sun shone through the colorful fabrics on the clothesline, so too does love illumine the seemingly separate moments we call ‘beauty’ or ‘truth’.

The origin of all values is love, just as the origin of all colors is light.

Ultimately, these seemingly separate events—beauty, justice and so on—are all the same timeless moment. Like the light of the sun, love is pure, without a specific size, shape or color. Within space and time, love shines through particular moments and seems to take the shape of that specific scene, just as the sunlight appeared ‘in’ the colored fabrics on the clothesline.

Yet all these seemingly separate events are, in essence, the same timeless moment. There is only the pure light of love, shining impeccably through all minds and forms.

With love,

Kyra