Engulfed in Agapé

As I was looking out of the window of our new home, I enjoyed seeing our new neighborhood covered in 6 inches of snow from a late Spring storm. Even though the view was beautiful, I have to admit that I started wondering what it would look like when warm Spring weather finally melted the snow and the branches sprouted with leaves.

Then I remembered a late April blog posting I’d made 9 years before. It had developed from a meditation time outdoors in a park near where we’d been living for over 11 years. I remembered that while I meditated, I experienced the radiating Life force of Spring. Then as I went deeper, I had the spiritual sensation of being engulfed in agapé. The memory was so strong, that I looked up that blog posting to read how I expressed it. 

The experience had been so powerful that there was no distinction between agapé filling me from within and agapé surrounding me from outside. In that sense, there was no “within” and no “outside.” The engulfing was complete, and I was joyfully enlivened by the spiritual sensation of being opened to divine Presence.

At the time I’d been reading Ram Dass’ Be Love Now. So after I returned home and was attempting to write about it in a blog posting, I reflected on the one time when Ram Dass admitted that the spiritual experiences he’d been writing about were what the ancient Greeks called “agapé.” He explained the process of sharing in the flow of agapé with these words: 

"If you put out agape, then you immerse yourself in the sea of agape.”

Since that time, the influence of agapé has developed more strongly throughout my life. Agapé consciousness has formed for me in such a way that I have found that it changed the way I developed identity. My identity in life reformed with the vast, formless, eternal Essence. That has helped me release being controlled by any ego-identity. So that has helped me see other people from the viewpoint of the vast, formless, eternal Essence.

Agapé consciousness can develop for all people as we are able to move away from ego-identity and experience our identity with eternal Essence. We can be helped also in our relationships with Life around us, with the expressions of Life in the people and creatures with whom we come into contact. As agapé consciousness develops, we are able to learn an increasingly deeper appreciation for people, other creatures, and all of Creation.

And that learning involves a profound acceptance of eternal, spiritual Presence permeating all the entities within relational fields. Agapé also spreads spiritually throughout all the relationships of life, deepening that relating. Also all relationships are sensed as connected through spiritual Presence.