Chapter 8
Detachment is essential to unconditional love and its fulfillment. Detachment is not deprivation, repression, or oppression of the senses. Detachment is a matter of focus and intention.
Whatever you make most important in your life is your deity of choice. People, places and things make poor deities. Love does not ask you to abandon your desires for experience with the world around you and the pleasure it can bring. Love asks you to redefine your attachment to whatever appears to be outside of you. Love seeks to draw forth what is within you.
It is very simple. External validation will always fall short of the radiance within your soul. Happiness comes from inside of you. The universe is within you.
You are responsible for your own happiness. Anyone or anything you choose to make responsible for your happiness is destined to disappoint you. There is a cosmic irony invested in this truth. All people, places and things will fail you if you are attached to them. When you have exhausted the escape routes only to discover that there is no escape, stillness will find you.
The lies of this world only point to the truth. Happiness is in the here and now. Love is always present.
There is an emptiness we all share that calls out for MORE! More fame, more power, more money, more beauty, more perfection, more control over our environment, more sex, more romance, MORE! It is an insatiable hole. Nothing external can fill it. There will never be enough of whatever it is you thought you needed more of to quench this thirst or appease this hunger.
Only the light of unconditional love can fill this emptiness. The light comes from within you.
Our attachment to the desire to achieve fulfillment through external validation weaves a manic and tangled web of deceit into the fabric of our existence. We become flies caught in our own webs. Why not become moths drawn to the eternal flame of the soul?
The light will fill your emptiness.
Detachment is willingness to surrender to the light within. You are the light that is shining within you. You are not empty. You are feeling the lack of conscious connection to all that you truly are.
Disappointment is a doorway to transformation into joy. Whatever or whomever let you down only pointed the way to the light within you by showing you where it is not. Nothing is wasted.
Acceptance is the key.
You are more than you appear to be.
When we turn to face what is sacred within ourselves, we can begin to see it in others. When we no longer seek people, places and things to fill us, we can relate to them through the love we have found within us.
You have the power to change your mind. The mind is easily led. Turn your mind toward your heart. Feel the light within, and follow the path of light that unfolds before you.