May this season be inspired by many moments of “seeing” and compassionately appreciating the reality of the people you love, and embracing the reality of the people who invite you to increase your capacity to presence love ever more deeply in your life and in the lives of all you touch along The Way.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

How few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service.  But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and how and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that
you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.

The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is.  And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking… a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person’s need or your own?

— Father Anthony de Mello

Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
And between the two my life flows.

–Nisargadatta Maharaj

That oneness is the true feeling of who you are. You are not the personality, or any particular aspect of essence. You are the whole thing, including emptiness and space, and you experience everything in complete harmony. When this happens, there is a sense of intimacy, an exquisite, personal intimacy, the feeling …that you are you, with nothing excluded, nothing rejected. You also feel that you are both a person and a universal existence, that what is personal and what is universal are completely harmonious and can coexist. When your whole organism is in harmony on all its levels, there is no conflict. The expression and radiance of that harmony is love. You become a channel of love, a manifestation of love. You feel completely yourself and not separate from anything. It is possible to be you, completely you and not separate from the other at the same time. This is the action of love. The action of love is to unite, to reveal the connectedness. A loving person doesn’t love you—a loving person is love. Love isn’t given. It overflows. It’s not even your love—it’s everyone’s love interacting. Love emanates from us like the scent from a rose.

– A.H. Almaas

With each breath may we take refuge in the Living Truth alone, released from coarse arrogance and subtle pride. May every thought and action be intended in the Supremely Holy Name as direct expression of boundless Divine Compassion and Most Tender Love. May the exaltation of endless praise arising spontaneously as the life of endless beings flow consciously toward the Single Source of Being, Source of the intricate evolution of endless worlds. May we be guided through every experience along the Direct Path of Love that leads from the Human Heart into the Most Sublime Source of Love.

– Excerpt Holy Koran in this translation by Lex Hixon

Some day, after we have mastered the winds,
the waves, the tides, and gravity
we shall harness the energies of love.
Then, for a second time in the history of the world
man will have discovered fire.

– Father Teilhard de Chardin

Love is that flame that once kindled burns everything,
and only the mystery and the journey remain.

– Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Whoever finds Love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

– Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This pure Mind, which is the source of all things, shines forever with the radiance of its own perfection.  But most people are not aware of it and think that the Mind is just the faculty that sees, hears, feels, and knows.  Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling, and knowing they do not perceive the radiance of the source.

— Zen Master Huang-po

There is the dual nature of self:  The incomplete self and the complete self… As humans, we are seeing from the perspective of the incomplete self.  This incomplete self is undoubtedly very important.  But if we attach to this incomplete self, although this incomplete self is important, then we’ll never be able to experience the complete self.  We Zen people say, if you believe in God, this complete self means the same thing as God.”  That is it shares the same standpoint as God.

— Joshu Sasaki Roshi

Emptiness is two things at once:

the absence of self and the presence of the Divine.

Thus as self decreases, the Divine increases.

— Bernadette Roberts

If you look for the truth outside yourself,

It gets farther and farther away.

Today, walking alone,

I meet him everywhere I step.

He is the same as me,

yet I am not him.

Only if you understand it in this way

will you merge with the way things are.

— Tung Shan