LOVE WINS.

Earlier today while driving home I saw the most beautiful, the most precious, and one of the most poignant, window stickers I have ever seen. I’m normally one of those guys who think stickers on cars are kind of funny looking no matter what they say, but today was different for me, today I read two words followed by a period symbol, as one of the most amazing combination of letters and symbols ever recorded in the history of the English language. The sticker was about the size of one’s palm, in the shape of an oval, the letters were scribed in white while the background was filled in with black. What I saw today that rang louder in my core than any church bell to date, was simply: LOVE WINS.

If you don’t take a minute to stop and really process that declaratory statement I can see how it could sound like I’m making too big of a deal over a silly little sticker, let’s take a minute and examine it together.

In this world I believe there are two competing choices in any given situation you find yourself in; you have the choice that’s rooted in love or the opposite of that, fear. This place of either love or fear is what people believe the thought behind the thought comes from, the place of the sponsoring thought. There’s a theory out there that says behind every thought you have, therein lies an even deeper sponsoring thought. The sponsoring thought is what helps us determine the outcome of our choice before we ever really make it. The funny thing is though that even when we make a choice out of fear, and make a bad decision, we immediately know it was the wrong choice. We know it’s inherently the wrong choice by how we feel; fear is an illusion that sends out different energy than love. When we make a choice out of love we immediately feel we made the correct one, we’re relieved, and like we’re complete even for just a moment in time.

I believe Love is all there really is and that fear is just an illusion.

Fear is something we have been taught from the earliest days of our life. Think back to when you were a child and you reached for the hot stove. What did your parents do to you? They smacked your hands away from it and probably scolded you some to SCARE you from touching it again, now for a long time you’ll be afraid of fire. What if you’re parent lovingly moved your hand away and taught you why it was detrimental to you to touch the stove? What then? As a child you have no fear, none whatsoever. You’ll go talk to anyone, crawl anywhere, and even eat dirt! What stopped you from doing these things? I’ll tell you what, your parents training you to believe these things were not right, telling you to grow up and stop acting like a child or act embarrassed when you wondered up to strangers in the super market. Because of our conditioning in our youth we have grown to understand that fear not a pure emotion, but actually as perceived risk due to our upbringings. Let’s look at this just a little further: Aren’t all people capable of loving at some point in their life, no matter the age of the individual? A man or woman can lose their spouse early on in the marriage but can he or she not fall in love with another? Doesn’t falling in love just kind of happen without even really knowing that it’s happening? That’s because love is natural, it’s what we are at our purest, under all the layers of perceived risk. Under every fear that we’ve been taught to fear, LOVE WINS.

As you age you can continually love people you meet but how often do the fears of your youth remain with you? LOVE WINS. I don’t fear my face sticking that way, or burning my hand on a stove top anymore, I don’t fear strangers, and I definitely don’t fear the boogie monster… as much as I used to! What’s under all of these fears, someone teaching me I should fear them; we live in a constant state of illusion, unless we chose not to. LOVE WINS.

All joking aside, the reason fear is an illusion is because it’s been taught to us and when we experience for ourselves that something isn’t bad like maybe we used to think, that thought of fear is replaced with one of understanding and acceptance. Once you can accept something for what it is, fear leaves the scenario, and if fear is gone, love is apparent. Love is underneath all of the layers of illusion, it’s at the core of the illusion, and it’s what the illusion is built on. Is not the foundation the strongest part of the house? So if Love is all there really is, think just how deep that could change how you look at the world… If you really believe that LOVE WINS. then I can promise you that your life will be deeper and fuller and more abundant than you could ever imagine. When you stop fearing things that may seem scary, or weird, or strange, and when you choose to change how you look at those things, fear suddenly becomes a thing of the past, and you see the fear of something as the illusion it creates. LOVE WINS.

As you process this and either choose to discard what I’m saying, or accept at least the thought of it as being a possibility, ask yourself one question: Why wouldn’t love win?

The Effects of a Choice

All of life is one big melting pot of information, some of the time we can recognize what this information is and what to do with it, other times the information we receive needs longer to simmer before we can find the true benefit in its ingredients. We all process information differently, we have to or else we would be mindless drones that merely co-exist. This particular blog is about the effect of what our choices have on the rest of the world that we often forget as being part of the larger equation. Every day we make hundreds, if not thousands of choices that affect the entire world around us. Where do I eat breakfast? What route should I take to work? Should I work out today? Should I have coffee over water? Etc. Each choice we make throughout the day pulls us in a different direction for the moment, but no matter what choice we make we're always moving in the direction of having to make other choices. Because choice is an option and a given, we often times forget that we are both the victim of our circumstances and the creator of them. No matter where you find yourself currently, it's directly related to the choices you made along the way to get there. When we slow down and pay attention to the world around us, when we stop and listen to what our body, mind, and soul are saying, then and only then do we have the chance to morph and form our lives into the life of what we desire most. I believe that we have the potential to accomplish anything we can imagine for ourselves if we can train our thought process to make the choices we need to make in order to realize this desired outcome. The president of the United States did not become the president by accident, nor did the Dali Lama become enlightened by a stroke of luck. These people along with every other person in the world accomplished their goals of being who they wanted to be most by making the choices in order to do so. Very wealthy individuals have made the choice that they deserve their wealth, highly accomplished athletes made the choice to train for the goal of athletic success, even the homeless man on the street asking for loose change has made decisions for himself that led to his current situation. What we know is that everything in this world is made up of energy, a constantly evolving and shared energy that can translate into any thought or any action. Because of this fact we can hypothesize that the amount of energy we put into choices through our thoughts about them can cause them to either appear or never exist in our life. The secret in life to having what you want is deciding how you are going to think about it, how your choices will reflect that attitude towards whatever it is you desire most, and understanding that the energy of creation is the same energy that facilitates thought, which is the same energy that produces action. Once the action has been created and the thought has been realized physically we set a course in motion for that particular moment in time to directly reflect the energy we put into it. We made a choice either to do or not to do something, and because of that choice other opportunities are made available to us. There are no right or wrong decisions, there are only choices we make towards a situation that are fueled by whatever motivates us at the time, you can't judge the choices of someone, you can only be a witness to the outcome and form your own idea about how it affects your life and the direction you wish to travel. We owe one another nothing, and yet we owe each other everything. Everyone on this planet is here so that everyone else can know who they are based on what they see around them, are choices constantly define us. We can only be an "I" because there is a "we" to base the idea of the "self" on. Without others we we would not know the truth of who we really are and what we're here to do. So the next time you feel guilty about a choice you have made try to remind yourself that it's okay, no choice is bad or good, it's just a choice that's best for you at the time. If you find yourself constantly making detrimental choices I think it's time to look at your life and ask yourself what it really is you want from your 80 or so years and change the choices you make to fit that picture of yourself. Everyone will do something different with their life, the key to happiness is listening to your inner self in a quiet place and deciding to make choices based on becoming that person; what would that person wear? How would they view the world? What steps would he/she take to land that dream job? Etc. whoever that person is you want to be, your decisions along the way to being that person will dictate if you ever reach your goal. We are a slave to our choices but we are also the master and creator of our present circumstance, contemplate that idea for a while and you’ll understand the significance of your ideas towards things and your choices concerning them.