Author: Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila

In the beginning, a spiritual journey is a transition from living in various states of denial to discovering an insatiable love for truth. When living in denial, your focus is more concerned with anticipating fearful possibilities, while making choices to avert the very fearful things that only you may be imagining. Most of the time, even if something you fear becomes a reality – the experience itself is never as scary, daunting, or hopeless as it was imagined to be.

When run by fear, your self-worth lives and dies by the outcomes you face or how others view you, while responding to life in a distrusting or defensive manner. In denial, you are unaware that each moment was created to assist you in opening up and evolving to your absolute potential. When this truth is denied or overlooked, happiness and fulfillment is imagined as fleeting moments in time when life goes your way.

In essence, denial means that you are choosing to see life in a way that denies you the right to consider a greater divine source within you that ensures the perfection and completion of your journey, no matter how different it seems from the way you want it to be. As a love of truth opens up within you, you begin to question, “Is my view of life the way it actually is or just my personal version of it?” Once everything can be seen as a subjective version of absolute potential, there is an inner sense of permission to consider other viewpoints with the courage to select a point of view that is less fearful and more supportive to the evolution of the whole.

While a love for truth creates an initial spark of inner spiritual exploration, it is certainly not the end-all-be-all of your adventure. It is actually just the beginning. When confusing the beginning of your journey with any imagined end point, you tend to rely on knowledge instead of love throughout your encounters. When this occurs, spiritual concepts become extensions of ego to defend against those who oppose your view or seem uninformed. This can even lead to the impulse of needing to constantly correct those, who in your perception of experience, are clearly out of touch with reality.

They may be as asleep as you sense them to be, but when relying on knowledge, you tend to be life’s exhausting rescuer that unknowingly attempts to rob them of their journey. You may even wonder, “How do I know the difference between being a rescuer and serving the evolution of someone’s journey?” The answer is astoundingly simple: when you are meant to pass along your knowledge to another, they will ask you a direct question.

If you are offering your knowledge before someone has personally asked you to be their bearer of higher wisdom, some form of projection or rescuing is occurring. If you see someone who can benefit from your knowledge, but hasn’t asked for it, maybe it can become a moment where you ask yourself: what are they here to teach me? What if I became the one who acted upon the very advice I’m waiting to dispense, instead of assuming my role in someone else’s journey?

When not relying so heavily on your library of knowledge, you become a living blessing of love. From this space, you are free to honor how each character in your play provides you opportunities to act upon your best advice as a way of making your love even more unconditional and potent in power.

When being rooted in love guides you beyond the love for truth, each fight against injustice, or judgment towards those who aren’t as knowledgeable as you, becomes a living prayer for the salvation of every heart. As this occurs, the unsavory actions of others can inspire a more powerful response of blessings and conscious action for the well-being of all.

Those who rely on their knowledge often imagine hypothetical circumstances to justify why loving what arises seems too passive in response. They are the ones who insist the people of this planet come together in greater conscious action, while being too consumed in righteousness to act upon the very suggestions they project. One who is rooted in love, feeds a hungry person in sight. One who relies on knowledge believes they are helping by trying to rally others into the very actions they have yet to choose.

This is why for some, loving what arises is the ultimate leap of faith one must take in order for attachments to knowledge to be living transmissions of heart-centered wisdom in action. In heart-centered consciousness, we don’t love instead of help. Instead, we help from a space of love by allowing love’s infinite wisdom to determine how our help is offered.

Relying on your knowledge also acts as a double-edged sword: when good things seem to happen, you may think you are being rewarded for what you know. Equally so, when you interpret your life circumstances as “bad”, “adverse”, or “wrong”, you may believe that if only you knew more than you do things would’ve been different.

At certain stages of your spiritual journey, you can be so knowledgeable, while still living in subtle realms of denial. When this occurs, there are reasons why your life happens that are superstitious, creative, and intriguing, while unrelated to the greater good of life’s eternal truth that only brings forth experiences to assist you in making more room for love to emerge.

This is why, further along the spiritual journey, a love for truth must transition into the truth of love, in order for the spiritually-hungry mind to merge into emotional oneness with the actions and integrity of an open loving heart. Once this merging occurs, truth is no longer something to know, keep straight, argue with others, attempt to defend, or in need of being remembered, but a fully-embodied expression of your highest self in form.

Inevitably, truth is not what you know, but how often you love. This is today’s moment of insight.
– Matt Kahn