From a presentation by Leonard Laskow, M.D. at the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library, March 1, 2008

Each of us is like a wave in this ocean of
awareness; this quantum field, of oneness. And when we are identified
with the wave, we have a sense of separation; a sense of separation from
other waves, from the ocean itself. It is all water; the wave is just
the water of awareness given form. We use these terms metaphorically.
And it is all One. I like to speak of it this way: Pure awareness is
without any quality, it can’t be known. When there is only one, one
can’t be known, because it takes more than one to know. There has to be
an object that is being known, and there has to be a knower and there
has to be the knowing. In order for something to be known there has to
be duality or relativity. When there is only One that can’t be known.
When the One becomes aware of itself that is what I call Consciousness.
One aware of itself was the first wave: The I AM. When this
I Am interacted with itself, other waves were created. I Am
that I Am is the first other wave. Call that I Am that I
Am “mind”, big Mind. And then, I Am not this.
I Am not that. I Am this. I
Am that, and all the other waves were created, and then
the separation from these waves. And now, what it is all about is
returning home to the awareness we never left. That’s the great paradox.
We’re searching now in so many ways for what we already are.

So what is it that veils us from the awareness of who we already are?
What are the veils? This is what we will be exploring this morning
experientially. It is identification with the mind-made self. The little
I/me, the little mind. The identification of the mind-made self with the
thought waves, the feeling waves, the sense perception waves, with the
beliefs, that are consolidations or coalescences of waves into a more
substantial energy form. I call this a Holoform. A belief creates a
Holoform. Interpretations of what we see that become consolidated into
beliefs. Judgments, consolidation of experiences that we’ve had.
Interpretations of experiences that we’ve had. Identification with our
story. All of this is what veils us. Even our desire for something that
supposedly will fulfill us and will give us more. Why do we want what we
want? One of the things about the Law of Attraction is that it can
provide you with more. More of what? More material things? Well, that’s
fine, but the greatest gift of the Law of Attraction would be if it
pointed you back to Source and allowed you to realize your true nature.

Partial transcription:

It’s an honor to be here today to share with you a celebration of love. Isn’t it amazing that our society has set aside a day devoted to the celebration of love? Of course, there are commercial interests which are perpetuating this, and that’s fine too. There is a lot of room for the heart in commerce as well.

Now it’s interesting that we don’t call this “love’s day”, we call it Valentine’s Day. When I was asked to present here, I became curious about why we call it Valentine’s Day. Some of you may know the story of Valentine’s Day. I found it very interesting. Valentinus was a Christian martyr who lived in 270AD in Rome. And because of his belief in Christ he was sentenced to death. He refused to recant his beliefs. The Roman Emperor at the time was Claudius II. While Valentinus was awaiting the carrying out of his sentence, his jailor noticed that he was a very learned man. The jailor had a daughter, her name was Julia, and she was blind from birth. And he asked Valentinus if he would be so kind as to teach Julia the things that he knew. Valentinus agreed. And so he taught her mathematics and history. He taught her about the world.

She was with him the night before his sentence was to be carried out. She asked him if God hears all our prayers. He replied that God does what is best for all of us, and He hears everything, and if you really believe then what happens, happens for your best interests. And so she said, “You know what I pray for every night and every morning? I pray that I can see all the wonderful things that you’ve told me about and that you’ve described.” He said that if you believe, and it should be so, it will be so. She said, “I do believe, I do believe.” Suddenly there was a radiance that filled the room, filled the space; a radiance in the emptiness, as it were. Suddenly she cried out, “I can see. I can see.” This is a documented experience. That night he wrote to her and said, “Always continue to believe and hold God in your heart.” And he signed it “your Valentine.” His sentence was carried out the next day. Julia planted an almond tree at his grave. He is buried at a place that is now called The Porto Valentini in Rome. There is an almond tree that blossoms every year that is said to be the one that Julia planted. Wonderful story, isn’t it?

It is only when it’s taken away, really, that we realize how blessed we are just to be able to see, to have physical sight. And we are equally blessed with spiritual sight or insight into the core of our being; into the loving awareness that’s our essential nature. When our loving heart becomes the eye through which we look at the world around us, what is it that we see? We see the web of life. We see all forms interconnecting, arising, relating, subsiding back into the formless one sometimes called the void, the ocean of awareness, the Source of everything/nothing. Call it God, whatever the word is you want to use for the unknown, unknowable beyond the known. So on this day, when we say to our loved ones “I love you”, what are we really saying? Words are sign posts that point to something. So what does the word “love” point to? Just go within for a moment and explore what the word “love” points to for you.

What comes up frequently are thoughts, feelings, sensations in the space of awareness called “I”. So let’s look at these three words. I love you. I, me, or subject, loves you, object. Now what if the distinction or separation between subject and object was just a perceptual illusion created by the mind and its extension of the senses? What if subject/ object, “I,” “you,” observer and observed were not ever really separate, but only appear to be? What would be left of “I love you” if at a deeper level there was no separate “I” or “you”? What would be left is “love;” the thoughts, the feelings and especially a felt sense of connectedness called love. And what is this felt sense of connectedness? In the world of form it is energy. What is energy, its essence is movement or vibration? What is it that’s moving? Ultimately it’s the void, space; the stillness that’s full of potential; the faster the movement, the higher the vibrational frequency, the greater the energy. Let’s look at this for a moment. When something is moving back and forth, it comes to a place where it stops before it moves in the opposite direction; so it is moving back and forth, back and forth; movement and stop, movement and stop. As the energy increases its movement, stop, movement, stop, until, as you can imagine, the energy is so high and it’s moving so fast that the stops overlap the movement. Then what do you have? Once again, the stopping and movement overlap and become the void, or no thing, pure total potential, the ocean of awareness.

I was in Bali a number of years ago and I saw a wonderful Balinese dance. Those of you who are aware of Balinese music know there’s a lot of energy, a lot of movement. Suddenly, at one point, everything just stopped. The dancer was totally still, but so full of energy that it overwhelmed the whole room, and yet not one movement was made. It was awesome. The same thing happened when I went to hear Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in Carnegie Hall playing the Ode To Joy years ago when I was a medical student. In the forth movement of Beethoven’s 9^th there’s a crescendo and then everything just stops. That stillness was more powerful than the whole choir and all the music. It was really awesome. So nothing moves and becomes something; these quantum fluctuations of the void that create the waves, the particles.

A revered sage from India, Nisargadatta, said “When I recognize that I am everything that is love. When I recognize that I am no thing, that is wisdom, and my life flows between the two.” He could have added, when I recognize that I am no thing, that is peace. The every thing is fullness, the vibrancy, energy, passion. We call it passion. The no thing, the space, the stillness is peace. And love expresses and experiences itself as both the passion and the peace; cyclically or alternately, and also simultaneously unfolding in the totality of being. The peace and the passion of love–that radiant emptiness Julia felt with Valentinus; the dazzling darkness, really the source and the resolution of duality. So how does love’s passion lead to love’s peace? Love’s passion seeks unity; that’s the passion—it is seeking to become one again. When it finally merges with the unity that it seeks, what happens to the seeking, the searching, the desiring for the one? It stops. All movement, all seeking ends and only stillness remains; only the peace remains. When I recognize that I am everything, one with everything, then there’s no wanting anything because I already am everything. No wanting anything to be different from the way it is because I am all of it. So this ultimate passion of love, this alive desireless presence is simultaneously the peace of love. We are both the passion and the peace of love, love’s form and formlessness, a delicious drop of love that dissolves into the unknowable, unspeakable one, only to reappear as the love dance of unity.

Excerpts from an interview by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Thinking Allowed
series

DR. MISHLOVE: A moment ago at the end of our last segment, you
suggested that love and truth and awareness – pure awareness – are all
the same.

DR. LASKOW: Uh huh.Yes, let me explain what I meant by that. This is
an insight that came through. Love seeks unity. And when love finds the
unity that it seeks, what happens to the love? It ceases because, for
love to exist, there must be that which is loved. In other words, the
essence of love is –

DR. MISHLOVE: Attraction.

DR. LASKOW: Well it is relativity, duality, something between.In
order for attraction to exist, there has to be more than one.

DR. MISHLOVE: Yes.

DR. LASKOW: So love becomes aware of its connection, its attraction,
and desires to merge with it.What happens to the movement of love once
it realizes the object of its love?

DR. MISHLOVE: Well then there is self-love, I would think.

DR. LASKOW: Yes.

DR. MISHLOVE: The is ness of love.

DR. LASKOW: Yes, well when love finds that which is seeks, it merges
with it.And even love disappears into stillness.So stillness is another
metaphor for pure awareness – emptiness, nothingness,
everything/nothing, the ground of being.In the same way, knowing seeks
truth.And when it merges with that which it seeks, it too
disappears.There is only the truth.There is no knowing.There is the
truth.And that is stillness as well.

DR. MISHLOVE: Referring, for example, to the quiet mind of a
meditator.

DR. LASKOW: Exactly, exactly.Of course, I mean, the ultimate seeking
of truth is to become one with source and that which seeks it disappears
into the one.You can do that.There are the known paths to doing that,
the path of the Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga –

DR. MISHLOVE: Uh huh, then yogis of knowledge and the yogis of
devotion.

DR. LASKOW: Exactly.And the karma yogic path of action.And once
you’ve completed your action, there’s only the stillness.The action
disappears.

DR. MISHLOVE: Uh huh.

DR. LASKOW: There is no doer, there is no doing, there is only, as
you said, the “is ness.”So ultimately the paths of truth, the path of
love, and the path of action lead to the same peak – awareness itself,
present awareness.Is ness, stillness.

DR. MISHLOVE: Really, I do concur with you, but I am aware that in
the literature, for example, you have some very eloquent writers, the
existentialists, for example, who talk about the horror of the
stillness, the agony of being totally isolated, totally in nothingness,
you know, Sartre, Camus have all written very powerfully about that
state of nothingness as part of the terror of existential reality.

DR. LASKOW: Yes.And that is because the perception takes place from
the position of the mind, looking at the emptiness.And that is what’s so
beautiful about any self-awakening process.When you shift from the
context of mind to the context of pure awareness, there is just in the
stillness peace.And then you can look back at the discontented mind, the
mind that has a fear that it is nothing.And that’s the truth –

DR. MISHLOVE: The ego or mind is terrified of its own annihilation
and yet that is precisely what the mystic seeks.

DR. LASKOW: That is exactly so.But the key thing is the
misidentification with the body/mind.As long as we’re identifying, which
is I have to say natural to the human condition –

DR. MISHLOVE: Sure.It’s kind of a biological imperative.

DR. LASKOW: Yes. It’s the human condition.We’ve come in here with
this condition and reversing it is part of the evolutional imperative of
spirituality.

- from an interview by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Thinking Allowed series

“A felt sense of oneness is a ONEderful definition of love.” - Leonard Laskow

- from an interview by Gokul Krishna Gokani, M.D., Rogue Valley Community Access Television, Southern Oregon University

“Love resolves duality into unity.” - Leonard Laskow