Spirit and heart are the same. Whenever we are loving, the divine is showing up. Because God is love; It is love for existence, it is love for itself showing up through us.
With nothing left out. Because if anything is left out, it can't be divine love, it can't be the One. In this sense all acts of love, particularly unconditional love, make God possible on earth.
Of course, that includes you and me. Without us existence would have no eyes and hands and heart to express divine love. Everything is needed. The proof that something needs to be here is that it is here.
Existence is an all-or-nothing deal, a "package deal" as the ads say. It includes up and down, right and wrong, pain and pleasure. Everything exists as dualities (or what seem like dualites to us). The existence of defeat makes victory possible, the existence of down makes up possible, the existence of pain makes pleasure possible.
When we begin to see this, something lets go. We begin to let go of our resistance to how the world is. And as we do that, the One begins to move through us—of course it always is doing so anyway, so I'm caught in hopeless contradictions here—and as it does so, and to the extent that it does so, the melody begins to play...
But of course it's already playing everywhere, forever and always anyway...so language just breaks down. And when everything has broken down that we thought was so, what we're left with is love.
Whenever we love someone, that is God showing up on earth again. When we love some part of this existence that we previously hated, and see that it has to be here, and that it's also part of the One, then too God shows up again.
But of course Itself is already here, so in that sense God doesn't show up because It is already everything there is.
Nevertheless, God shows up again when we love.
Just a metaphor: If you were God and you could let existence exist—knowing that it would always contain equal amounts of pain and pleasure, equal amounts of suffering and joy—
If you were God and you could let existence exist exactly as it is—knowing that it must be the way it is—would you let it exist? I would. The existence of dualities is simply the cost that is paid to have an existence at all. Since existence must exist as it is, let us allow ourselves to appreciate all of it.
When we do, the Mystery, which is us, moves through us, as us, like a melody singing through its own flute.
—jim sloman, summer 2000 for Jan 20
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