Love is all you need

Love is all you need
Love will save the world

Love heals everything

I'm sceptical of these slogans. I'm sceptical of avatars with hearts praying hands and buddhas in them. I'm sceptical of little prayer hands in emojis. The other day, someone send a message ending with prayer hands. As part of a role I play, I had to set a tiny little boundary (of which the individual was aware in advance), and I did so neutrally and kindly. The next message I received was quite sniffy. No prayer hands this time.

The three slogans are absolutely true. But you can't move straight to that square on the board. That's why, when we turn our wills and lives over to God in Step Three, the first thing we examine as part of the Step Four process is our vicious mental attack on fundamentally everyone we have ever met. The darkness has to be reviewed surgically and dealt with. It cannot be bypassed. Love cannot be pasted over the top. Our heads have to be fixed in vices, and we have to be forced to stare at the truth of what is going on in our minds, to realise the selfishness, cruelty, callousness, and cynicism of the ego's plans and mechanisms. Then and only are we able, in Step Six, to really say we want none of it. Until then, the goals of the world, which are really the goals of the ego, will appear to yield some good; we will believe we can split off the darkness from those goals, not realising they are their corollary, and pursue worldliness in a spiritual way.

There is no spiritual way to pursue worldliness, as a goal in itself.

The two sides: the material world and the realm of the spirit are not in equilibrium; they are not yin and yang; we do not live in a Manichean universe; we do not have our feet or heads in two worlds.

We have come to believe He would like us to keep our heads in the clouds with Him, but that our feet ought to be firmly planted on earth. That is where our fellow travellers are, and that is where our work must be done. (Big Book, Chapter 9)

Our heads have to be entirely in the higher realm. The appearances of the world are not to be believed as any form of reality at all. However, our feet must be firmly placed in the material world, in other words, our actions are accommodated there and have their immediate goals there. The ultimate goal is God and love and whatever. The immediate goal is seeing through the falsehood of the world, its essential unreality, and having it converted through 'the miracle' from a nightmare into a happy dream. It is only from the happy dream that we enter the borderland and then, in time, go beyond it, for a while, and then for increasingly long periods, from which we can look back at the material world as a dream, a play on a stage, innocuous, nothing.

We belong here practically in the material world, because the miracles must be wrought with the other people here and, thereby, ourselves, the other fragments of the one consciousness. You mend the rip by starting at the furthest point of the rip, and moving backwards. In fact, we're still here, in the material world, precisely because our job is not done with ourselves.

There is no symmetry to these two worlds. There is no balance. There is hell (the world seen through the ego's eyes) and there is reality. Truth has no opposite; hell is not carved out from heaven. Hell is an illusion in the minds of those who are in heaven but have their eyes closed and are entirely asleep. Nothing has happened. Everything is fine. But in the dream of hell, trying to conjure a vision of heaven without seeing through the dream, is to simply insert into the dream a drop of light in the distance, a cup of clear water into a salty ocean. This approach cannot work. The saltiness of the sea cannot be remedied by adding more fresh water to it.

No, the only way out is through.