An inspired sermon delivered in the 1980's at Montereys Church of Religious Science

Love Story
By Reverend Bill Little

Love is the greatest teacher there is. Love is a practical, living energy that flows through us when we can truly be receptive to it. It’s that simple.

Love is not some poetic thing. Yes, poets describe it; poets make some sore of attempt to put down on paper the fullness that comes as love flows through the individual. That is fine! It is good that we write music and paint portraits and so forth, to some how express love. But love is also a very practical thing. Maybe we need to look at the practicality of it for it to really hit home in us.

My training in college was in physics and mathematics. When I decided to go into this field everyone said, “No, don’t do it because you have no talent in it whatsoever” And like many people, I said, “Well, it’s the only thing that interests me so I’ll do it.” I spent many years at it, and I earned several degrees. I reached that point of thinking, “Well, when you have this kind of scientific background, you know all there is to know, or at least your mind is so sharp and so quick and logical that if any problem comes up in life you can solve it.” Intellectual education prepares you for everything. It makes you complete, the fulfillment, the royal road, it is all there. Right? We know too well that there is no truth to that at all! Life has its way of working us out of our conceit about intellectual knowledge. It has its way of bringing us back to brass tacks and basic truths. Thank goodness it does. What I began to discover is that, quite contrary to the idea that to the idea that I have so much knowledge and so much understanding. I have none! Probably the best thing to do was to admit that there was an awful lot to learn-on an unintellectual level-about myself. That is when I began to study that field of metaphysics and became interested in being active in it.

As a counselor and practitioner, I continually meet with people who are running into that passage in life where they have to break with their logical understanding of events in themselves and somehow, switch the whole mechanism of consciousness over to being receptive to flowing with a very essential force called love-and they do not find it easy. So let us look at a practical level of love.

Let us talk about men first because this is a problem men have to face. Men have been trained, carefully trained, by our social establishments to the idea that a man should not express love. This can grow into the feeling that a man is not to feel love. A great percentage of males in our society today find it very difficult to express feeling at all, much less engage in the beautifully refined experience of letting love flow. Men are trained out of it, because all the outer trappings of what you look like and sound like and act like, when you are in love; are not supposed to be masculine. Now, that is a shame. That is a shame for the simple reason hat half of our society is therefore blocked from the net major breakthrough into experiencing the God Presence-because the God Presence is indeed love.

Then I find mothers who are having great difficulty in relating to children because they have been told that they are supposed to love a child by doing this thing and performing this act and acting this way, all of which is totally inappropriate. They do not allow the child to be itself. They think love possession. Or they think love is control, and therefore they never love the child to the point of letting it blossom forth into what it is. And because real love is not stirring the heart of the mother, there is great friction, great upheaval.

Emmet Fox said, years ago, “if only we could love enough, everything in our lives would be healed.” I believe he is right. Love is a practical thing.

To really understand the necessity-the immediate necessity now in the lives of every one of us, every human being there is-of experiencing love, let us discuss the nature of evil for a moment.

A good friend of mine wrote a letter recently in which he said, “Evil is the automatic operation of the unconscious forces of ignorance, and that’s all there is to it.” All right, we have a subconscious nature. We have an automatic nature. We have something that runs in us like a machine, and it keeps repeating yesterday’s feelings and moods and images and so forth; and it is as evil as the unconscious operation of the forces of ignorance. Ignorance means “to ignore.” There are forces in us which ignore simple truth, which ignore the existence of goodness, which ignore the existence of an energy such as love, which ignore peace. The unconscious operation of the forces of ignorance. And what are they? You know them-fear, anger, resentment-the unconscious operation of these things, the compulsive movement of these things through our personality. What person has not experienced them? Every one of us has had something come up in us which we did not seem to have control of; it spontaneously raised it head and expressed itself to another person-anger, hatred, resentment! Where does it come from? Paul talks about that. “The good which I would do I do not.” My friend continued in his letter and said, “But evil is no match for the pure heart.” I thought that was well put. The unconscious operation of these forces which ignore the truth is no match for the heart which is purified, the heart which is in love. You see, being loved, giving love, expressing love, is not just a matter of, “Well, yes wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be sweet?” It’s a matter of necessity! We have to do it!

Some day I am going to make a list of things I wish they had told me, and what will be at the top of that is if you want to live on this planet, and if you want to enjoy living on this planet, number one is: Learn to let love happen. Not an intellectual learning. You cannot learn it by proving it with mathematical hypotheses and all sorts of things. You cannot even reason about it. Jesus said, “God is Love.” That is the only comment he hade about it. He did not go into the depths of the philosophy of it. He said, "God is Love.” Reality is love. The Good is love. The reason for the universe being and therefore the reason for each on of us being is love. And you cannot intellectualize about it.

Is it not amazing that we are immersed in an experience where indeed we must learn? We have a great deal to learn. But the learning is not at the level we think it is. It is not at the level of facts or theories or opinions or attitudes. It is at the level of our own intimate experience of what we are. It is much more abstract, much more diffused, than we would think with the intellectual mind. We go through years of education. We listen to everybody who tells us what we should do. Yet, we can not live life fully. We cannot enjoy being. The learning is in the region of the expansion of love.

There is something else to understand about evil. Evil has the ability to propagate itself. Jesus talked about this. He said, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons unto the seventh generation.” The forces of ignorance which operate unconsciously have the ability to propagate themselves. Now this may sound scary, but we should look at this. We should be aware that this is happening. Let us look at the psychology of this for a minute.

Take, for example, a man and a woman who are going out some Saturday afternoon to buy a new car. They go down to the dealer and the man says, “Oh, a bright red sports care. Isn’t that wonderful? And the woman says, “No, I want a big blue station wagon.” Or something like that. So they start taking. And suddenly she thinks, “He is inconsiderate. He doesn’t understand that I need the room and the efficiency of the station wagon.” And he thinks, “My goodness, doesn’t she have any feeling for my needs? This sports car is exactly what would make me feel like I’m playing and enjoying myself.” Anger begins to rise. All sorts of negative emotions and resentment come up, and they do not understand it. It all happens is a flash! There is no actual talking like this that goes on inside them. They just all of a sudden feel the resentment. They do not buy a car, and what is more they do not even talk for a few hours as they are driving home. The forces of evil. “All right,” you say, “that’s not so evil. We can live with stuff like that.”

Suppose there is a child present. That child is sitting there-an open slate, ready to be written on. “mother and father are fighting. They cannot get along. They are angry.” Now, remember, to a child, mother and father are God itself-love, warmth, security, food, and all the rest. The Gods are fighting. Now, Gods cannot be wrong. The only assumption the child can make is, “There is something wrong with me.” The child had nothing to do with the fact that one wanted a red sports car and the other a blue station wagon, but the child does no understand that. It is not intellectually capable of understanding that, so it assumes, “There is something wrong with me, because mother and father are fighting. It instantly impresses the child with some sort of negative emotional guilt which manifests years later in its life. Perhaps guilt-guilt that subtly ranges around in consciousness. Maybe it will feel guilty, oh, for twenty or thirty years later and never really understands why. That one little instant. Evil propagates itself; it passes itself on from generation to generation-unconscious forces. And this is what is important: These forces are unconscious; they are the repetition of ignorance in the subconscious mind propagating itself.

This is how close life is. Evil is not some devil who lives in an underworld somewhere. Evil is as close at the words that come from us.

In Matthew, Jesus said, “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. Oh generation of viper, how can ye, being evil speak god things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” Out of the abundance of the feeling nature the words come forth which form our lives. That is a very clear statement, one of the clearest in Christianity. Out of the net result of the feeling nature comes forth the thoughts and words which not only form our lives, but they form the lives of those around us, the impressionable ones who are the future generation. And so they are passed on form generation to generation.

Now, if we are not able to look at ourselves objectively and see that this is the mechanism by which ignorance, darkness, fear, and anxiety push themselves through our lives and through the lives of our loved ones, we are just kidding ourselves. We have to see that that is going on. That provides the motivating impetus to discover love.

Love is not some sweet little thing which would be nice to have. It is a necessity. When the heart is filled with love, unconscious ignorance cannot operate. It is put in the Bible this way, “Perfect love casteth out fear, -and anger, and resentment, and all the rest. But love is a necessity

Today we understand enough about psychosomatic medicine to know that that is true even from the standpoint of the body and the emotions. We know that a great percentage of the psychosomatic diseases stem from an individual not being able to feel love move through the heart. Harboring resentment for years, perhaps, breeds all sorts of trouble in the joints. They call it arthritis and equivalent between these things that there must be a connection. Emotionally speaking, we know that there is such a statistical equivalent between these things that there must be a connection. Emotionally speaking, we know that harboring fears, deep traumatic fears, for long periods of time, pops out in tumors and cancer. We cannot afford not to love, not to discover what love is.

All right, how do we do it? Let us be very practical about it. Our psychological investigations of the past century or so have brought us to the point where we are beginning to understand the words of the great teaching of the ages scientifically. We are beginning to understand scientifically. We are beginning understand suggestions such as “Love thyself, know thyself.” This is why, when I see people who are so convinced of their adulthood and so convinced of roles they are playing in the world that they cannot love what they are. I sometimes become sad. Love begins at home. It begins where you are, in your mind, in your consciousness-right NOW! It begins with your being able to say to yourself, “I love me. I love what I am.”

Each one of us has a psychological structure. Today we are told by psychologists that this structure bears a great deal of resemblance to our relationships to people. We have within us parent, adult, child. It is not surprising. We have had parents, we have been children. And we thing we are adults. So our psychological structure has these three levels to it. Now, this is just a broad view of our psyche; but imagine being able to say to yourself, “I love all that I am. I love my intellectual abilities; I love my thinking, logical abilities. I love the tiny little child in me who just wants to go out and have some fun today instead of being at a certain place at a certain time with some dull people. I love the kid that wants to go out and run and jump today. I love the parent in me also because there are parts of the parent in me that have kept me alive and well and functioning in this world. I love my psychological structure which will reveal to me things I need to see only if I love it. I love me! Imagine being able to sit down and look in the mirror and say to yourself, “I love you.” You know many people have a lot of difficulty with that. Try it! Just look in the mirror, look into your own eyes and say “I love you,” and you’ll see how much you’ve been told not to do that.

But if you cannot love yourself, how can you love any human being? How can the role of unconscious forces of ignorance ever cease? Let us look at it a different way. In the Christian teaching, Jesus emphasizes over and over again that we must become as a little child. He said if we do not become as a little child we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. We must be “born again.” What did he mean? He is telling us that there is a gateway in our psychological structure which will allow us to break through into love. He said “God is Love.” He said, in essence “If you are going to enter the kingdom of God you must become as little child: there is a doorway in the psyche, and if you find that doorway, and if you find it open, you will find God.” And he tells you what the doorway is. He says it is childlikeness, simplicity. How much more clearly could he have said? “Learn to love yourself until you discover that within you is a childlike presence which can pass through the doorway from the intellectual rational world, the factual world, the learned educated world, into the world that is very simple; it is just love?” He says you can do it. This is his advice. “Become as a child and you pass through that doorway.” Why? Well, when you investigate the child within you, first of all you find a being who does not require great intellectual understanding of things. Children do no have to understand why on Christmas the red bicycle is there under the Christmas tree. They do not need a logical explanation of it. They do not have to know how much it cost or shat the tax was and where it was bought and whether it can be returned. A child does not think of those things. A child accepts the mystery of the bicycles’ appearance. It asked its mother or father for it, and somehow there it is. Marvelous, out of nothing, there it is. But, you see, the child therefore can accept the mystery of the goodness of God. It is a mystery. The action of love is the flowing of this goodness through the individual heart, and it is a mystery. It is not logically comprehendible by the mind. So the child is necessary. It is necessary to feel that child like wonder, that awesomeness. God is here. Jesus was so enamored with this idea that he spoke of God as the Father, and that is the only work he ever used. God is the Father. To him, that is the relationship. “There is a Father here who always hears me, and I am thankful that he always hears me.” He was willing to be a son.

Now, this man supposedly was the greatest human being that ever lived on the earth. He did miracles no one else has ever done. What was his chosen relationship to reality? He was a son to a father. Simple. Absolutely pure and simple. When he wished to experience something he went to his father and said, in essence, “Father, please fill the cup. Here, it is empty. Fill the cup. Whether it was for the power to heal a person or whether it was for an understanding of what must be done next, this is what he did. “Here, Father, please give it to me” His heart was open. He could love. He established a relationship between himself and reality which allowed love to flow. He felt and intimacy: He was saying, “The creative cause is an invisible presence but it is alive. Just because it is invisible does not mean it is not alive. It is a living thing; my heart vibrates: my heart moves because it is here.

And that is a childlike thing! Intimate warmth! It is kinship. He had a kinship with the Diving Presence. He did not tell God what to do. He said, in essence; “Father, what are you doing? Let me see what you are doing.” Just as a child would ask its father, “What are you doing?” “I can only do what I see the Father do” These words sound so simplistic next to our great theories of the mind and our psychologies and all that. Yet, no one has ever approached the power to that man. “What are you doing: How do you live through people? How do you live as a flower? How do you live as a person?” And as a result the works just poured out of hem. He said, “Consider the lilies of the field.”Why? Because the Father in him revealed the beauty of what a lily is. He was so intimately one with this nature called the Father that it lived through him, it illumined his mind, it raised his heart, and it caused him to act. He could find no difference between this Father Presence and himself, and so he said, “I and the Father are one.” It is such a simple teaching, a pure teaching, but it is a teaching of love. It is not a teaching of intellect.

He also addressed himself to the problems of evil. He said, “Let not thy heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid for I have overcome the world. My peace I give into thee, not as the world gives unto you.” He knew about the fact that an individual’s heart could be contaminated, polluted, shall we say, with suggestions that are ignorant, that ignore the truth, and that come form early childhood, he knew that. He was a spiritual psychologist, he knew where it happened. He knew that since we come into the world and have to live with people and people are by no means perfect-that every human being is going to inherit some degree of contamination. He knew that the heart could harbor resentment. You can tell from his statements. He knew that here could be fear impressed in the heart of a tiny child at a time when it did not even know why or how. He knew all of that could happen but he said to cleanse the heart. Let love move through the heart. He was not closing his eyes to the way the human situation was and is. Nevertheless he said that God is the Presence which cleanses you-love casts out fear. And his continual advice was: Make sure that your heart is surrendered to God, make sure hat the heart nature the feeling nature, is cleansed and purified by continually giving it up to God just as a child would.

So, today, if you find within yourself some stat that is less than joyous-anger, guilt, any of these things which we as human beings are liable to inherit by virtue of being here-if you find his within yourself, why no, in a very simplistic, childlike way, speak to the Father Presence: It is always there. It does not move. Speak to it and give it your heart. Give it your feelings and say, “Please erase forever this burden of anger. Erase forever the ideas that have caused me to feel guilt. Purify my heart. Reveal love. Reveal love in its most magnificent essential purity, as it was before I even touched this world. Reveal it.” Why not do that? Take a chance! It might work. It is simple. It is a childlike thing to do. And that was Jesus teaching a very childlike thing.

Look what it says in Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet hundreds of years before Jesus. He says, “For unto us a child is born, into us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlisting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with the justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” Now everyone immediately takes those words and translates them into a prediction that he is going to come. But maybe that is not what he meant. Maybe he meant that within each individual there is a child born, there is a child given, and his is the gateway in consciousness to the experience of the God Kingdom which is the kingdom of love.

Imagine now, that we could go back and take those two people who were out buying the car, disagreeing about the model and the color and all that. Imagine that, Just as in photography, we can freeze them for an instant and stop them from expressing and radiating the forces of ignorance and walk up to them and shake them and say “Doesn’t it feel better just to let love happen? Of course they would agree. Who would not agree with that? This is how love transcends ignorance. Unfortunately, in our social structure we cannot run up and talk to people that way, but you, as an individual, can discover that there is a child given unto you, there is a child within you that goes into the most sacred place in consciousness, which is the dwelling place of love.

So how do we face life? Well, we face it with one simple assurance-that there is no experience in life which will not disintegrate in the face of peace and love. No one. We face life with the realization that indeed we are like beginners just starting out. It does not matter what age we are or what status we have. We are just as beginners this instant; innocent open, saying, “Father, what do you do? What are you? What am I? By the experience of love flowing, show me what love is? By the experience of intelligence and wisdom, show me who I am.” We face life from the point of view of being as open and innocent as a child. Then absolutely no experience can overwhelm us. None. There is nothing that does not melt in the face of that.

Now, does this take practice? Yes. I must tell you that it does. I have never met a person who did not have to have patience with himself or herself, and patience with their ability to love what they are; that it does take practice, yes. We spend whole lifetime thinking in a sophisticated way. We are a mature adult! We think this way because opinions and our attitudes that way. We have got our opinions and our attitudes that we have inherited from the past. Yes, it does take practice to become as a little child, to be open and innocent and just simply let loves provide you with what you need. Yes, that does take practice. But it means living in a different realm of reality. It means looking in different dimension of what is. Because when a person begins to live in the flow of love, personally changes instantly. There is no more need to possess people or things or objects. You can begin to understand the words of great poets such as Kahilil Gibran who said that children are meant to be like arrows from a bow, they’re meant to come from us but fly from us. You can begin to understand what these people who have written poetry meant when they said that the only thing you can ever have is what you let go of. That makes sense. Personality changes instantly when loves flows.

Yes, love is the healing power, because love conquers evil. Love takes us past the unconscious ignorance of the soul. It takes us past the unconscious thoughts and patterns of feeling which would run us in ways we do not want to run. Love flows through the heart, cleanses us of the negatives of yesterday and fills us full. It is a very practical force. We have to have it. It is the lifeblood of our consciousness. It is what causes us to be.