You said in Conversations with God that even making love, experiencing sexual ecstasy, can
be a form of meditation.
That is correct.
But that is not being with the self. That feels like being with another.
Then you do not know what it is like to be truly in love. For when you are truly in love, there is
only one of you in the room. What starts out as being with another becomes an experience of
being One—of being with the Self. Indeed, that is the whole purpose of sexual expression,
and of every form of love.
You have an answer for everything!
I should hope so.
So what about the other two love-enders, expectation and jealousy?
Even if you manage to eliminate need from your relationship with each other, and with Me,
you may still have to struggle with expectation. This is a state in which you have an idea that
someone else in your life is to perform in a particular way, is going to show up as who you
think they are, or who you think they should be.
Like need, expectation is deadly. Expectation reduces freedom, and freedom is the essence
of love.
When you love someone, you grant them total freedom to be who they are, for this is the
greatest gift you could give them, and love always gives the greatest gift.
It is the gift that I give you, yet you cannot imagine that I am giving it to you, because you
cannot imagine a love so great. So you have decided that I must have given you the freedom
to do only the things that I want you to do.
Yes, your religions say that I give you the freedom to do anything, to make any choice you
wish. Yet I ask you again: if I torture you endlessly and damn you eternally for making a
choice I did not want you to make, have I made you free? No. I have made you able. You are
able to make whatever choice you wish, but you are not free to. Not if you care about the
outcome. And, of course, all of you do.
So this is how you’ve got it constructed: if I’m to grant you your reward in heaven, I expect
you to do things My way. And this you call God’s love. Then, you hold each other in the same
place of expectation, and you call this love. Yet it is not love, in either case, for love expects
nothing save what freedom provides, and freedom knows nothing of expectation.
When you do not require a person to show up as you imagine you need them to be, then you
can drop expectation. Expectation goes out the window. Then you love them exactly as they
are. Yet this can only happen when you love your Self exactly as you are. And that can only
happen when you love Me exactly as I am.
In order to do that, you must know Me as I am, not as you have imagined Me to be.
That is why the first step in having a friendship with God is to know God, the second step is
to trust the God that you know, and the third step is to love the God that you know and trust.
You do that by treating God as someone you know and trust.