Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host and today we will be talking about experiencing spiritual love. There's a lot of information out there about this. I'm thinking about Bible verses and all kinds of things, but today I'm going to add my own thoughts and we'll see if we can have a nice discussion on this. But before we get started, if you are watching us on YouTube, please consider like sharing and subscribing. As you know, that helps trip the YouTube algorithm and get our content out to more and more people. And of course, please consider sharing with your friends and family as well. So love, what is love, right? This, this 15 minute video, but There's been verses about love. There's been songs about love. There's been all kinds of expressions about love. And I'm going to talk about it a little bit from my own experience and then try to bring in a spiritual aspect. As I was thinking about this from a Raja Yoga perspective, soul consciousness is the basis of spiritual experience. So what is soul consciousness? If you've been watching the podcast, you know that, I am a soul. I am living consciousness. I am eternal. I am the living being that's using this body and speaking through this mouth. I am pure consciousness, pure awareness. I am the soul and this is the body. So that's the basis of all spiritual experience, according to Raj Yoga. But where does love come in? I feel that love is a human phenomenon, a human experience, a human action, a human way of being. And I wrote a couple of things down Love fulfills needs, love, you could say, makes us happy, but I think from my own experience, love is the thing that makes us feel that our needs are being met. So what kind of needs do we have as human beings? So I wrote down to be seen and heard. So as human beings, we would want to be seen and heard. And maybe if you've been in a good relationship, a loving relationship, you feel seen and heard, whether it's a friendship or a partnership or a marriage or, any other kind of relationship, you can feel seen and heard even at work or anything like that. Second thing is companionship. We need companionship. We need to be maybe sharing our life with someone or being able to reflect with other people as we go through our experience in life. The third one I wrote is belonging. Belonging is a little deeper than companionship. Belonging means that I feel that I am a match. For my surroundings or that person or that relationship. I feel like I'm matching, meaning that there's very little difference or no difference between me and the group or the religion or the relationship or whatever it is. Belonging. That's a very stabilizing. experience. And then the last one I put is contentment. So if I feel belonging and I feel seen and heard and I have companionship and, and then I, maybe I'll feel content. So those are the needs maybe that we have as human beings. I think love fulfills, helps fulfill those needs. But I wanted to read from the Bible because there's a beautiful verse and I'm sure many of you. Are familiar with it, this is it's 1st Corinthians thirteen and many times they read this in wedding ceremonies. So it's 1st Corinthians thirteen verses four through eight. So I'm just going to read it here. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails. There's a little bit more, but I'll leave it there. It's funny as I'm reading this, I'm like feeling moved, you know, it's a very moving scripture there. Very moving passage. How does that bring us into what love is or how to experience spiritual love? As I'm reading that, It's saying love is patient, love is kind, but don't we want people to be patient and people to be kind and not envious? And isn't that kind of what spirituality is all about? So it's, it's kind of a nice marriage between the two, Ideas here that if we look at love the way the Bible says I'm using the Bible as a reference point here But it makes perfect sense to the con to the spiritual science, which is there's no difference between you and the love Sometimes people say don't tell me you love me show me right? So there's kind of a common sense about if I say I love you, that means I'm not gonna hurt you or try to hurt you. Or if I love you, I'm not going to betray you or lie to you or whatever. So in that passage, you could see it says love is this and love is that, but isn't that a personality that it's describing? So I'm going to say that in spirituality, our aim is to bring forth our elevated personality, our loving, in this case, personality. We also want other people to be that way towards us, right? So back to the soul consciousness now. When I start telling myself that I'm a soul, that I'm eternal, that I am living energy, I'm living consciousness. My original nature is peace. My original nature is love. My original nature is benevolence, wisdom, purity. When I tell myself that I'm changing the way I feel and think about myself, but also I'm creating an experience. In my experience, practicing soul consciousness helps us to remove the selfish parts of myself, the unreasonable parts of myself, the anger, the, the vices, let's say. Lust, anger, greed, ego attachment. When I practice soul consciousness, those vices get less in me and the loving personality emerges. So when I say, how do I experience spiritual love? It's funny, it's not like ordinary where love would be coming from somewhere else. Experiencing spiritual love, I'm going to say, means that I'm experiencing the truth in the scripture. It said, love rejoices in the truth. So what's the truth? The truth of me. I'm a soul. I'm a spiritual being. I'm eternal. My nature is peace. I'm a child of, you could say, a child of God, of the supreme soul. You could say that too. There's a, there's a belonging there too, a spiritual belonging, or you could say, I'm part of the brotherhood of man. I'm part of the brotherhood of souls. There's belonging there. Companionship. I want to share something about this with companionship. One of the things that I grew up with, is this idea that somehow I'm going to be alone, or, people are going to leave me, or I can't trust anyone, or I have to be strong because I can't count on anyone. In the scripture it said love trusts. So, when I'm in my soul conscious state. I feel that my heart is open and I'm able to trust because I know who I am. How does that translate into companionship? Well, if I am feeling stable in my own self, I begin to realize a secret that I'm actually not really alone. I know that some people out there are alone, like maybe they don't have family around or so forth, but in the consciousness where I'm soul conscious, the experience of being alone is not there because I'm full. I'm full of my own self awareness. One other thing I'll throw out there. Some of you who are listening to this may be feeling lonely or, or something like that. Maybe And I don't want to minimize that because that's a real thing. So I'm not, what I'm about to say is not a solution or trying to fix that feeling. I just want to add the spiritual aspect of it. I want to invite you to, even if you are alone and if you feel lonely, I'd like you to consider bringing forth some aspect of companionship that makes sense to you. For instance, you could say, God, God is my companion. You could start talking to God or start thinking about God or praying. And we know it's not the same as having another person, like it's not to replace, but it's to get the feeling of belonging, the feeling of companionship, because we need that as human beings. The other thing, it could be God, it could be nature, could be nature, it could even be your body. You could even say, okay, I'm here with my body and I'm now I'm doing this. But the consciousness of being with someone or something is what we need. We need that feeling of belonging and the feeling of companionship. I feel like different circumstances make us feel disheartened. Maybe if I'm not seen or heard, or maybe if I don't have the companionship, or maybe if I don't feel belonging, it's hard for me to feel content inside. So experiencing spiritual love, I would say, I'll give you a little bit of homework, read that scripture, that first Corinthians 13 verses four through eight, read that scripture and imagine that it's not talking about love as a separate entity, but it's talking about us. The way we can be without vices, open to others. And then the other part is if you are alone, if you do feel lonely, if you do feel like disconnected, come up with a spiritual way to feel connected. It might not be easy, but I can say I'll share my experience. I grew up feeling like, you know, maybe people were going to leave or so forth. I, and then I had to think to myself, there's never been a time when I didn't have family. Like there's never been a time. I know some people out there don't have family. But I want to say that I believe that it is possible for us to get what we need. Regardless of the circumstances. And I feel that even if the world has taken away all the things that I have recognized before as something that would make me feel good or content or a sense of belonging, that I can create a scenario inside my own mind and heart that would help me to feel that. Also, there was another episode about finding your path. And if you like to go back and watch that episode, because that's about finding a match, finding a match for myself. That I can follow or have fellowship and I feel in the world today, this is the time for that, that everyone should take a chance and look at different religions or spiritual practices, whether it's meditation, whether it's Hatha yoga, whether it's different religions, you know, formal religions. But I feel that opening ourselves up to the spiritual side of our humanity opens us up to the, up to this experience of love. Receiving and giving and being it like in the scriptures, like talking about it like it's a person, but we are that. So I'll leave it there. I hope that that gave a little food for thought. It is a moving topic as I'm sharing, I'm getting a little emotional about it because it's touches the heart so deeply that these are fundamental human needs. And I want to say that I really do believe, and in my experience it's true, that when I didn't have anyone, I was able to feel those feelings by following a spiritual path. So I'll leave it there. Remember our slogan is Heal, Empower, and Serve. And thank you for joining us. And until next time, take care. You
