What I Believe
I believe there is nothing more important than love.
Years ago, I studied consciousness through the Monroe Institute, a research institute in Virginia that based its work on the exploration of consciousness by Robert Monroe. I was intrigued with Robert Monroe’s life work which was inspired by his out-of-body experiences. His three books, Journeys Out of the Body, Far Journeys, and Ultimate Journey, catalogue his thousands of out-of-body experiences which led him through a process of discovery into a deeper understanding of life beyond our physical reality. At the end of all his research and explorations he pretty much concluded that we are all in it for love, and nothing else matters. For all his explorations into non-physical realities, it comes down to love. Love is ultimately what we desire, what we strive for, and what fuels us. We do it for love, although most of us don’t realize this. If we did, we might actually work a bit harder to create more love in our lives, right?
I think the closest many of us get to truly understanding this idea is in pursuit of romantic love, or perhaps the love we have for a child or a family member. It’s a huge driver of human behavior, to love and be loved by another, however I believe there is a much deeper role that love plays in our lives, that we are not fully aware of.
Here's how I see it. Love is the vehicle or fuel that moves us through the universe, like an invisible plasma that feeds us. It might be said that it is the essence of consciousness itself, what we tap into when we attend to our spiritual practices, or when we have an experience that expands our awareness. Our state of consciousness, meaning our level of understanding and awareness of who we are in the context of reality, is influenced by this fuel of love. For example, when we practice meditation or prayer, we are often left with feelings that we could interpret as aspects of love, whether it be peace, or joy, or bliss. This is the result of the field of consciousness responding to our state of being in that moment.
David Hawkins, the renowned researcher and practitioner, developed a Map of Consciousness, which is based on the frequency of emotions. Frequency is a term used in physics to understand the nature of energy. Energy is emitted in waves and waves of energy are both sent and received. Hawkins was interested in the energy of emotions. What has this to do with love? Hawkins’ map develops a continuum of emotions from lowest frequency to highest, the lowest being the energy of shame, and the highest being the energy of enlightenment. As I see it, what determines the level of frequency (and thus defines the emotion) is the presence, or lack of, love. At the lowest levels it is hardly there, and at the highest levels it is all that exists. So, the lowest emotion he was able to measure, shame, has very little feeling of love, while enlightenment, the label he gives to the highest emotion measured, is full of the feeling of love.
His book, Power vs Force, explains that we move through consciousness with our emotions. Because he was able to measure the frequency of emotions, he developed a scale that highlights what level of consciousness a person might be in, based on their emotion. At the lowest level, our access to consciousness is limited but with each step upward our consciousness expands, and with that expansion we have access to greater awareness which in turn influences our experience, going from feelings of separation and fear at the lower levels, to feelings of oneness and bliss at the higher levels.
It’s as if there is a faucet of love that is barely a trickle in the lower feeling states which gradually increases as we move up the feelings ladder. This increased flow of love, accelerates our conscious awareness, and enables our understanding and awareness to shift and expand.
Who amongst us hasn’t had moments of depression or shame, where our world closes in on us and we feel separate, isolated and alone? Hawkins would argue that in those states of emotions our awareness of the world does indeed close in on us which is an indication of consciousness contracting. On the flip side, who hasn’t had moments of joy and perhaps bliss, where the world expands and we feel connected and more fully alive? This is an example of consciousness expanded. If love is the force through which we access this highway of expanded consciousness, then tapping into the emotion of love will surely help us climb the ladder of conscious awareness. This is the work, on our journey to raising consciousness.