Leading a Devoted Life

By Wallace Huey

Love is a relationship where we care. And leading a devoted life is having a relationship where we care about the whole world!

Early in life, we care mainly about ourselves. Then as we grow older we are offered the opportunity to expand our circle of care to include our life partner, children, extended family, community, country and world.

As our circle of care expands, where we place our concern expands with it. The young adolescent, whose concern is fixated on himself and his problems. The devoted husband whose concern has expanded to include the needs of his young wife. The devoted father whose concern now includes the needs of his children. Unfortunately this is where the expansion of concern stops for most people.

The secret of leading a spiritual life is to keep expanding our circle of concern and the circle of our devotion. We find it easy and natural to hold concern for our life partner and family, because we relate to them everyday. And they have either been born through us or are directly wedded to us.

But what of the homeless person we meet on our way into work. What of our concern for this person?

To have this level of concern we must be able to take the leap from being concerned with our immediate family to whom we relate every day, to also being concerned for and to assist those from whom we may receive no direct benefit. This is the start of the spiritual in us, because now we are expressing a love that necessitates sacrificing some of our immediate gratifications for a love for which there may be no apparent personal benefit.

And this can be challenging…to make this leap.

And to then go on to keep expanding the circle to our concern until it encompasses the whole world.

To be spiritually awakened is to suddenly experience the whole world as a factory generating more and more love. More and more consciousness. And to then go on to play our part in this endeavour.

Then in time we may finally come to that place, where our sense of self and circle of concern, bursts so that it is boundless, a state of consciousness where we not only care about the whole world, but we experience ourselves as the world.

This is the enlightened state.

This is God made manifest as Oneness.

This is where we require no object for our devotion, but rather have become devotion itself.

This is what it means to have become an embodiment of love 💕.