The tree of love
We each are unique. There is not one of us that is not treading a path different to the next. That is what is so perfect and so interesting about our journeys

Having said that, our experience of love has some interesting similarities.

It might surprise you to realise, for example, that along the path to real unconditional divine love, for many of us there may also be fear and mistrust.

Whether we realise it or not we are all growing into a state of perfect and unconditional love for all things and every one. This is how we evolve and grow and perhaps the only thing in our lives that we really have no choice about. We have no choice because that is what we actually are. The deeper we dig, the more we find our real nature is that of an unconditional flow of love.

To come to this realisation might take many life times, many years but eventually we must all realise that there is an inevitability about our journey and that is that we are all growing into becoming unconditional love.

That is the nature of the universe, the nature of God, that is the nature of us because we are the creators of the universe, we are God and we are all one.

Now if we can come to terms with this – we must also come to terms with the notion that everything that is not the highest love in our lives is inevitably on a journey to becoming the highest love.

Everything.

Fear is the lowest love there is. We feel separate and disconnected. What do you fear? How did you arrive there? Do you not trust someone or something, or do you not trust God? Fear is a step down from mistrust.

Mistrust mostly arrives when our expectations or conditions are not met. It might be someone that we have liked or trusted that, in our opinion, has betrayed our trust. We might not trust fate or the universe because we hoped for something and it did not appear. We might not trust God because we cannot find proof or evidence of Gods existence helping our life.

Fear and mistrust in every form they present themselves in our lives have to evolve into trust, then faith, love and finally unconditional and divine love.

When we start our lives the little infant is loved without condition or expectation. We love unconditionally. The child responds with faith and trust and love for its parents.  As time passes the love from the parents begins to become conditional. With conditions, so too does the child begin to lose the perfect faith in the parents. Perhaps it felt that no matter what the situation the parents would always be there with the perfect answer or remedy. As evidence appears to the contrary, the child loses faith and in some dimensions of this love actually mistrusts the parents. Nearly all parents abuse the trust they are offered, and almost universally the child understand this, mistrust grows and the foundations for unconditional love are shaken even more.

Usually by the time the child is a teenager, their trust is so badly shaken and their mistrust is so high that they can barely listen with any faith to the parents. The child has regularly responded extremely critically to the smallest of what they perceive to be, their expectations not being met. There is no-one to blame here. As the child matures and they realise that their expectations were impossible to meet, then reconciliation and real divine love has another opportunity.

This spiral continues in many experiences of the individual. We desperately crave real unconditional love but for many people over and over again we love with conditions, and in doing so, we wrap our love in all the dimensions of failure.

Ponder for a moment the things that you do not trust in your life, the people you mistrust, fate, the universe, God - and realise that you cannot be complete until all these experiences evolve into unconditional love.

For a moment, perhaps see yourself as a teenager putting impossible to meet demands upon the universe or God. Take a moment to just be and contemplate the ultimate reality that you are being loved unconditionally and infinitely more than you imagine every moment but you are not opening yourself to that love because you are stuck in mistrust and lack of faith.

I would like you to picture yourself as a tree. All around you is perfect unconditional love, a glowing energy that feeds and nurtures your tree. Every branch on your tree represents all the dimensions of love in your life.  Every branch is inevitably trying to reach that glowing energy, to grow into perfect unconditional love.

Look at each branch. One might be a relationship with a parent. Is there love and gratitude or mistrust or worse still, fear?

Look at another branch, perhaps it is a sport you play. See how much trust and faith and perhaps love you have for that sport and how it makes you feel and experience love.

Another branch might be a relationship with a work mate. Is it trust and faith you feel?

Look at another branch that reflects your relationship with what might be an addiction of yours. Do you feel the highest love or only conditions and expectations?

Reflect for a moment about every branch. Perhaps your tree would be stronger if some branches were just pruned off, because right now their fear is killing the tree, whilst perhaps it would be more and more glorious should it have millions more branches.

Look at your relationships with your children or sisters and brothers, uncles and aunties, mother and father, grandparents. Do they mistrust or love you? What can you do to help them have more faith? Do you trust and love them?

Believe it or not – there is a secret to all this. It will benefit you greatly to be aware of your tree and all your branches and to see how you can help make your tree more magnificent. But the secret is really much more powerful than just being aware.

The secret is not to love from the tree at all but from the perfect unconditional love that surrounds and nurtures the tree. Not to love up but to connect with the unconditional love that is surrounding the tree and flowing down in what some might call, grace.

The branches of the tree ultimately evolve to unconditional love, so why not go straight there. While we love with conditions, then we will find that we will never be happy. The world, God, our parents, our children, can never meet all of our conditions and when they don’t our branches will die back. We will mistrust, perhaps even fear.

Using conditional love we bind our expression of love to others actions, in effect, we have to wait until everyone else loves us unconditionally before we can love. How else can they meet all our conditions?  This is important. Using conditional love we bind our expression of love to others actions – whilst we love like this we will be the last person in the world to move on.

Love with conditions nearly always results in the spiral of mistrust and fear whilst unconditional love always results in the highest happiness. Conditional love is bound by time and the ego, it is a slippery slope until eventually it becomes divine, unconditional love anyway. If we can start with unconditional love in this moment, now, we will recognise our actions as those of the highest actions of ourselves, one God.

Whilst we tie our love down with conditions, we will see each of our branches spiraling through mistrust and fear. Look around you will see, just as we discovered in class 37 that many people are filled with mistrust and fear, and find solace only in addictions.

The spiritual causes of depression, anxiety and many other illnesses come from this spiral of conditional love, mistrust and fear. The answer, as usual, is simple but requires practice. Unconditional love is very simply the highest action, the highest practice we can focus on. Also as usual, the universe will help us the more our intention is to practice unconditional love, the more effortless it will become because the more the universe will power it.

In every branch of our lives - evolve. Evolve and grow.