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Threads

Love

Not the bargain. The thing that gathers until it has nowhere left to stand outside.

Baba says true love is unconquerable and goes on spreading until it transforms everyone it touches. Ram Dass says we are all just walking each other home, which is the same sentence in a warmer coat. Watts would smile and mention that you cannot love as a project; the wave does not try to wet the shore. Myss would ask where love has been refused in the body, which chakra still bargains. Macy would take you outside and let the grief speak, because grief is love with nowhere to go. Easwaran: we receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others. The Midnight Gospel lets a mother dying of cancer say it without theory: death opens the heart we closed against pain. Grace Walk keeps one line near: through love, all pain turns to medicine. Not later. In the midnight.

On this shelf

Titles that sit in this room. The books remain themselves.

Hold Me Tight

Sue Johnson

The Power of Vulnerability

Brené Brown

The Path of Love

Osho

The Tantra Experience / Tantric Transformation

Osho

TANTRA: The Way of Acceptance

Osho

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For

Richard Schwartz

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

In this weather

Meher Baba

The happiness that merely IS

Only when it attains God-realization on the seventh plane can the soul fully control its joy. The unlimited happiness that is eternally his does not in any way unbalance the person because he is now permanently established in the poise of nonduality. The happiness of the God-realized person is unconditional and self-sustained. It is therefore eternally the same, without ebb and flow. He has arrived at unqualified finality and unassailable equanimity. The happiness of the aspirants is born of their increasing proximity and closer intimacy with the divine Beloved — who, however, remains externalized as the Other. Whereas the happiness of the God-realized is an inalienable aspect of the God state, in which there is no duality. The happiness of the aspirants is derivative, but the happiness of the God-realized is Self-grounded. The happiness of the aspirants comes from increasing bounty of divine grace, but the happiness of the God-realized merely IS.

Discourses — The Man-God

Meher Baba

Those who stay

After God-realization, most souls drop all their bodies and remain eternally immersed in God-consciousness. For them, God is the only Reality, and the entire universe is a zero. A rare few God-realized souls not only possess God-consciousness but are also conscious of creation and their own bodies. They take active interest in the souls who are in bondage; and they use their own bodies consciously to work in creation, in order to help other souls in their Godward march. Such a God-realized soul is called Man-God, Perfect Master, Sadguru, Qutub. When man becomes God and retains creation-consciousness, he is called a Man-God; but when God becomes man, He is called the God-Man, or the Avatar. The God-Man and the Man-God never lose their God-consciousness even for an instant, although they may be engaged in all sorts of activities in relation to creation.

Discourses — The Man-God

Meher Baba

What is Love?

What is Love? To give and never to ask. What leads to this Love? Grace. What leads to this Grace? Grace is not cheaply bought. It is gained by being always ready to serve and reluctant to be served. Never backbiting. Tolerance supreme. Trying not to worry. Trying not to worry is almost impossible — so try. If you do one of these things perfectly, the rest must follow. Then Grace descends. Have Love — and when you have Love, the union with the Beloved is certain. True love is unconquerable and irresistible. It goes on gathering power and spreading until eventually it transforms everyone it touches.

Messages

Ram Dass

Walking each other home

We’re all just walking each other home. The sentence does not require you to be further along than the person beside you. It does not require a teaching credential. It requires company. The dying taught him this. The stroke taught him this. The years of being the one who still showed up taught him this. Home is not a location you drag another person toward. Home is the quality of how you walk.

Talks

Ram Dass

The compassionate father

Ram Dass kept Meher Baba in the heart’s household. He wrote of the Silent One whose teaching gives no importance to creed, dogma, caste, or the performance of religious ceremonies. The photograph in Be Here Now is not decoration. It is a lineage nod: the Harvard man who became a friend, bowing to the one who did not speak and still filled the room. Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God. The three are not a sequence. They are one motion.

On Meher Baba

Caroline Myss

Devotion as a need

Spiritual crisis often arrives as the need for devotion — not as a belief to defend, as a current to rejoin. Loving oneself as the path to the Divine is not a slogan for the mirror. It is the end of using the self as an enemy. Between the head and the heart there is a walk. Myss will not let you skip it with information.

Anatomy of the Spirit

Joanna Macy

Pain for the world

Your despair is a form of love. The Work That Reconnects helps people discover their innate connections with each other and with the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action. You are not broken for feeling the forest fall. You are intact. The numbness was the injury.

The Work That Reconnects

Grace Walk

Love in the midnight

There is always love available in the midnight. The gospel is not that we escape suffering, but that we can meet it with presence, surrender, and an open heart — and in doing so, transform it into medicine. The deepest teachings arise not in sterile temples but in the beautiful mess of existence. After every explosion, the only instruction that survives is: just be here now. You are not offering escape from the simulation. You are offering high-quality company inside it.

The Midnight Gospel Study Guide

Grandfather

Alone, not lonely

The chasm between being alone and loneliness is deep. The way you begin to be alone and at peace without being lonely is to know that you are with your best friend. When you are at peace with yourself and love yourself, you can never be lonely. Only when one learns to love himself can he love another. You must find that love for yourself before you can touch the purity of aloneness. Love of self, without being selfish, will not allow loneliness to exist. Love of self also creates a love for everything else and brings us closer to the sacred oneness.

Grandfather

Grandfather

Peace, love, joy, purpose

The four things people really work for in life: peace, love, joy, and a purpose beyond self. Peace becomes a doorway to joy. When we know our purpose in service to others and the world around us, our sense of peace and joy grows. We settle into ourselves and our personal gifts come forth. Our capacity for offering and receiving love grows with this as well. The herd does not ask you to manufacture these. It asks you to tend them, the way you would a fire you did not light.

Grandfather

Jon Young

Connection is the birthright

Connection is our natural state, our birthright. Civilization has made disconnection the only thing we know. When we connect with each other we also connect with nature; when we work on our connection with nature we are also working on our connection with each other. People have an innate and deeply rooted need to be seen, heard, understood and valued. They need to know that they are contributing and that they belong. When everyone participates, and everyone feels seen and heard, the group becomes stronger than the sum of its parts.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Jon Young

Ten stones of agreement

Welcoming into the container. Wiping off road dust — what is keeping me from being fully present. Gratitude, to bring hearts into resonance. Unconditional listening, as you would listen in nature. A culture of allowance. Lifting up the gifts in others and ourselves. Supporting peace, love, joy, and purpose. Facilitation so even the quiet voices arrive. Mentoring, curiosity, and inner vision. Wrapping the bundle and closing, so nothing unfinished walks home with you. The stones work together. There is no one right way. Nature is a common context.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Edgar Cayce

One force

All force is one force. The apparent many is a way the one has of meeting itself. Healing, in the readings, is a return of the parts to that agreement. You do not have to accept every transcript to sit with the sentence. Baba’s Oversoul, Grandfather’s oneness, Tesla’s unseen ties — the same weather, different porches. What you do to the least of these, you do to the circuit you are.

Readings

Nikola Tesla

Ties inseparable

Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. Each of us is only part of a whole. The man who means to be a useful member of the community must first feel this. The current does not begin at the socket. It was already moving in the field we call a self.

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy

Eknath Easwaran

Putting others first

We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others. Putting others first is not a slogan and not a loss. It is how the fist of I opens. The eight points walk together: a passage in the morning while the day is still cool; a mantram whenever the trunk starts to wander; slowing down; one-pointed attention to the matter at hand; training the senses; spiritual fellowship; spiritual reading; and this — freedom from the small self, joy in helping, the far shore used for someone still in the water. In living for others, I come to life.

Passage Meditation