pursuit of love

The pursuit of power is based on fear. This fear we need to hide from others lest we be found out a coward. It is an interesting journey into the desire for power as it comes from our depths and hence psychologically the id. The peculiar thing about power is the pursuit of it is out of the closet. When we embark on that path it is no longer something that we keep hidden from others. Instead it is now part of your personality and identity as someone who seeks power. It’s a good study into how we can manifest our deep desires and change our relationship to them. When I looked at the desire for power I knew it had to be connected to control and the need to control our circumstance comes from a deep seated fear that we can keep hidden as long as we have power.

This is most evident and plays out in global politics. National borders are created for security, with fear of others what ultimately underwrites wanting to belong to a country and protect the homeland. So it started out as fear but then once the fear materialized it was transformed into a quest for power. Fear then retreated back into the dark and the quest for power into the light. Fear sometimes bubbles up to the surface in the forms of racism and nationalism. This is not the most altruistic of templates for bringing up feelings and wants from our depths but it is pretty instructive in that this is how it works and how we can transform ourselves.

I wrote a few blog posts back about how the id is a reflection of our lower self and is how we control our deep down desires. We hide them away and we also use this construct to bury love so deep that we will have a difficult time finding it because we don’t even realize we have lumped it in with our desires, pleasures, and fetishes we wish to keep hidden. Once love is discovered, we have to muster the courage to bring love out into the light. First of all that courage we have put away with fear we have to dig down deep and bring to the surface. When I look back on my plant medicine journeys and how they ran me through a gauntlet of fear, incredible love, and then hammering home the need to be courageous it is quite striking the sheer breadth of how these teacher plants know what makes us tick and how to help us get out of the morass. It’s fine to show the student cosmic, unconditional love but without some tools, life lessons, and repeated knocks on the head it is not going to grow within, instead it will have been just a novel experience from when I altered my consciousness.

So the problem or should I say quest is how do I take this love from my depths and transform it? I’ve been listening to a lot of Ram Dass’ lectures lately and he is pretty clear about how to do this. It’s also something that don Howard would talk about a great deal. It’s service. Being unconditionally of service to others without any expectation of a carrot in return. Abundance and love will grow out of being of service.

There’s no need to then follow the fear template and let love retreat back into the shadows. Once the love has manifested and been transformed into service then lift that love up as high as it will go. Express this love in all aspects of life whether it is through the pleasures you get from foods you like, from knowledge, or sexual attraction to another. There is friendship and the caring of family and of others, including your pets and the love of self. There’s is so much love to give and get.