Love is the Bedrock of Curiosity
I remember going for a walk one day many years back when I was traveling in San Francisco and looking at the small front yard garden of a home along the sidewalk path. Something shifted in my awareness completely the moment my head turned to this city yard. It was like the sun was going through me. Presence radiated. The vision of the yard was suddenly awake, reflecting itself back to me in total luminosity. It didn’t look different, but it had somehow totally changed. Or rather, my perception had changed. I was suddenly very, very curious.
Each blade of grass seemed to shine with “I-Am-ness” or wholeness of being. Each flower radiated. Each dead patch shone.
What I saw was the plurality of the different items in the garden- the leaves, the sprigs, the pebbles on the path, the cracks in the cement, and for each of these items there was a completeness as if to say “I am entirely full with myself. I see myself fully.” Every single thing was both independent and also whole at the same time. There was so much joy and quiet aliveness, such a pure being-ness, in this simple aperture of sight that it stopped me completely.
I was not creating this. This was not creating me. Life was flowing through me, as me, and for me with living curiosity.
The moment simply was there, pulsating, glowing, radiating in some particular way that could be called color and shape and form but could also be called stillness and wholeness. Shape and form, stillness and wholeness, unbroken.
Love
It hit me with absolute clarity that the only power that can be so full of itself, so complete with its own “selfness,” is the power of curious awareness, or love. When curiosity becomes very, very clear, we call it love. That vision forever changed my understanding of what love means, what it is, and how completely total and inclusive real love is. Love is the fabric of awareness. Love has as its core the ability to be self-amplifying, self-reflexive, and self-driven. It is not born from something else. Nothing needs to happen to create love. Love creates itself from itself.
Everything that love touches turns into love. Try it out. Try touching love to anything and see what happens.
Other emotions can influence or “color” our thoughts and feelings- like when we are frustrated by something someone said we might get in the car and be frustrated at the car, frustrated at the road, frustrated at the way that person in front of us is just such a terrible driver! That person is so annoying!
But frustration cannot take over love. Love will always absorb the other emotion, tendency, or felt sense into itself.
This ability to absorb all things is not true for any other essence in all of reality- not fear, hate, nor desire. Like curiosity, love is totally transparent.
They are the same thing, but only when love is uncorrupted by pain. It can touch something and that something is not colored or tinted or influenced by love. It is simply and clearly seen as totally itself. Love turns everything into itself.
People tell us this. There are wild ways we can try to understand this, and because we really, really want to understand this, we will do all sorts of things to experience boundless love. People try to simulate this experience by taking drugs, doing sacred ceremony, or even subjecting their bodies to extreme breathing, extreme cold, or extreme discomfort.
This technique can even work sometimes. And it can be shocking! Love absorbs everything! But because love is the core of our being and the only truth that our heart is calling out, we don’t need the intense or dangerous or shocking or expensive “treatment.” We need only be very curious.
The common word love that refers to human relationships is meager, biased, and doesn’t do heartfelt love, what I call awake curiosity, the justice it deserves. That’s not the kind of love that I’m talking about.
It’s difficult to impose this small and emotional word onto the deeper experience, for the word love which came to me so clearly did not refer to the human feeling or expression only. It was the collapse of relationship rather than an action or an act of an expression of relationship.
You might call this love fullness, luminosity, and wholeness. The feeling or expression called human love does indeed reach for, or perfume itself with, this higher love, which is why we seek it out in so many ways, both helpful and hurtful. Seeing love this way was, for me, a simultaneous understanding that love is the same thing as fullness. Fullness applies to all lived experience.
A dream is so full with itself that, at least while we’re dreaming, it seems totally real and self-evident. A thought is so full with itself that , at least while we’re thinking it, it has the tendency to convince us that it’s super important.
No matter how silly, irrelevant, or banal the thought is, it comes to us as the most-important-thing-ever. Pay attention to me! I’m telling you something! Don’t forget! A physical sensation is, at least while we’re feeling it, very important.
If love is fullness then love is all-things, not just the pretty or the good or the things I prefer. Not just the things “I love.” This walking down the street vision of fullness gave me the instantaneous and irrevocable understanding that everything is so complete with its own fullness that there is no room for anything other than itself in that expression.
It may seem self-evident, but a leaf is so full with its leafiness that it can only be totally that exact leaf. I may be holding the microphone of Captain Obvious here, but that chair over there is so full with itself that it can only be exactly and totally, no more and no less, itself. This is how love hides in ordinary life. It takes the form of things and those things are completely full with themselves, and so we just kind of forget that their fullness is their common feature.
In a weird way, this gives dignity to all things that we experience because they are expressions of fullness. It also makes one experience equal to another in fullness if not in subject- not better than or worse than (though certainly sometimes more or less pleasant!) because all experiences are totally full.
This seeing opens us up to deep love, or total reverence. Only love has the power to be so in love with itself that it allows its own completeness of expression. The dead rat on my driveway is totally full with “dead rat-ness.” I may not like it, but it’s beingness is full, and so too is the fullness of my “Ewww that’s gross!” reaction.
In this definition, everything that we experience can be called love. Take grief: if we are in the midst of grief, that grief is so full of itself, so complete with itself, that if someone were to say to the griever, “Can you find hope here?,” or, “Can you find your happiness?,” it would seem an absurd or possibly an insulting notion. Grief is whole and complete when it comes through us- there is no room for anything other than itself. When we experience grief it is full with itself, or an expression of abiding love, by that flash of insight that I saw so deeply on that simple fall afternoon walk.
Not only grief, but any emotion, sensation, thought pattern, experience, or insight carries this quality of deep curiosity- a living self-completeness that shines upon itself by the very fullness of itself that it expresses.
The content and context of overwhelming grief and, say, a passing thought feel like they exist on vastly different scales, which they of course do, but the core energy of self-reflection and self-amplification are what make all life experience so powerful: the path of embodied realization is the ability of plurality, of the diversity in the ecosystem, to shine as complete and whole in that plurality, never diminishing the particular. Never diminishing the whole. It is One and it is many. What people call enlightenment is simply the ability to see the fullness of being in all being, no matter what.
Many of us as children and teenagers had moments of looking in the mirror and wondering how awareness has taken this shape, this form, this body.
It can provoke wonder or anxiety, or both in turns. Or we played the game where you repeat a word so many times it loses its meaning and leaves us unmoored (Read Lord Tennyson’s experience of this very exercise and you will see the birthing of a great mystic).
There is a truth to this deep strangeness that grows with us as we grow. When the questions build, when the anxiety or the wonder spills over the barriers of the mind, when we break free of our edges, we begin the journey to our wholeness.
On the path of the Goddess we are becoming the whole of consciousness, its fullness, rather than a fragmented point of awareness hiding in an unmarked corner of space: hiding behind a barrier made of thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations, and associations. The process, then, is about getting back to ourselves or something essential within ourselves that remembers that wholeness, and then unfolding into life with that knowledge.
Love is the bedrock of curiosity. When we awaken our available curiosity we, like an extraordinary blade of grass, shine forth with all of the power of our own being, which is entirely complete. The goal of curiosity and engagement is to come to view our experience from an open perspective, seeing both unity and distinction at the same time.
When we have pain, trauma, or intense discomfort at the level of the body, relationship, or energy, we aim to no longer sink into a feeling of failure or incorrectness, trying to get through the experience as quickly and quietly as possible in order to return to silence, but instead hold the multi-reflective surface of that experience like a diamond- if that diamond could see itself. Then we can say to ourselves, “There is more to learn here!” or, “What a curiously complex thing that is!” This is when we are available to falling in love with ourselves.
Whenever a new lesson comes up, we can learn to stay in gentle curiosity, which means we’re staying available to our capacity for remaining whole. We can be the ever deepening and unfolding process of the heart with its complex experiences.
Curiosity is the highest form of practice in this process of embodying the self.
Curiosity pulls us out of the muck of distraction, anxiety, desire, thinking patterns, and ego and moves us toward living gratitude and reverence.
If spiritual practice brings us through a wide circle from wholeness to separation and back to wholeness then curiosity is the brush that sweeps the circle, the pen that takes the shape of our edges and measurements, and the coloring of aliveness that gives it vitality and purpose and direction.
Spiritual self-inquiry has always been good at looking at analyzing parts of the circle, at pinpointing parts of the heart, especially the parts that have to do with the mind and thought, but not many traditions have looked at the whole heart as a map. Curiosity is our most sacred gift. It not only creates and directs and reabsorbs the lessons of our lived experience, it also always points us back to the center of the circle, which is the heart.
Since curiosity is the language that the heart uses to remember itself and recall its fullness, it’s important to call upon this important trait that we all carry, that we have all carried from the moment of noticing anything at all, and that leads us through billions of pathways, like nerves and capillaries and electricity signals in our fascia leads back to the heart.