Promises- Love and The Universe

Promises-

If I promised to love you forever in the old days, you can rest assured it meant something, but something uncertain.  Misleadingly it would sound like the most absolute phrase in the world. If I say I love you now, you can know I mean it. Why, you ask? Because now I don’t pretend to assume how I will feel in the next minute.

These days in the moment I say I love you, you can bet you’re hat that I do!

I used to think I could predict how I would feel, I would argue for myself passionately. But how could I know?

Maybe this is what happens when you grow up or become disillusioned, one too many promises couldn’t be kept; promises that you have finally realised were no-one’s really to make and now you know that it was no-one’s fault they were broken.

It is comfortable to be angry with someone else for not keeping a promise because if you think they could have controlled their feelings you can fool yourself that it might be possible to control your own. Double-edged sword, we want things ordered and safe in an effort to get through the life without getting hurt. So we try to keep to all the rules, saying the right things at the right times, hence I will love you FOREVER.

I promise this, that and the other thing- poverty, chastity, I will never love another, YUK.

The terrible, terrible payoff for demanding all these vows is the way we give up our own feelings, desires and all the many experiences that meet us on our path in an effort to maintain this illusion of control. And ironically when we try so hard not to respond to the energy that naturally flows our way, it tends to become all the more compelling!

I don’t think we are very kind to ourselves, I think we are spending too much time in conflict with our inner voices. I wonder what would happen if we practiced active listening with ourselves? If we sat for 15 minutes in the morning and listened to our mind. If we heard it say, I want to eat and eat and eat all day long without stopping, then we could respond with; I know darling and that’s okay, I love you anyway, there’s nothing wrong with you that is just the way it feels and feelings change. What do you think makes you want to do that?

If we could dialogue with ourselves on this level do you think there would be so many misunderstood, frustrated people running around?  If only we could just accept that the feelings and urges that we have are not really us, that we lie beneath the confusion and we are so wonderful and that with a little bit of loving compassion from, at the very least our own self, we may uncover and relieve some of the stuff that stands in our way.   

We exist forever, we are love, it stands strong in that context then, that we automatically love forever, and that has little if anything to do with anybody else. We don't need to make promises or try to keep them because the simple truth of our existence is promise enough.