Love and Its Opposite

The clear and penetrating eye of love sees only love. The highly fractured lens of the loveless and mind-dominated eye sees through the lens of its own faults and fissures. It sees only minds and not souls. It sees only a particular distortion of itself. It is a state of being, a level of awareness that keeps you at arm’s length from everyone else and from unity. It is a faculty of the critical mind that, although perfectly ‘correct’ in its observations about others, keeps us locked in separateness.

If your whole being were purified and made clear by love you would not even see faults, just the underlying perfection of existence. In the end, the Perfect One sees only his own perfection reflected in everyone.

The entire lattice work of minuscule thoughts, opinions and preferences in all its incredible complexity and detail is mind, the fractured lens. If we step back and view mind in its totality, there is a single consequence: it blocks the stream of divine love-light from flowing through into our lives and all of creation. There are two great paradigms of awareness: unity and separateness. When the egoic structure is dormant we are connected to the Flow and part of the All. When it awakens and asserts itself in a trillion small guises we are cut off from the All. Actually, the story of life is the perpetual swing between love and its opposite, separateness – of being connected to God and being orphaned from God.
_{Henry Mann, Love Stream}