Love That Contains Everything
There comes a moment on the spiritual path when pain is no longer theoretical. It moves from being news headlines or distant horrors into something you feel as if it were happening inside your own body. Starvation in one region of the world burns in your own gut. The terror of assault trembles in your own bones. The rage of a lynching mob snarls behind your teeth.
This is no metaphor. Consciousness itself breaks open to encompass every cry, every injustice, every cruelty humanity has ever inflicted on itself or on the earth. There is no distance left between observer and observed. The entire spectrum of suffering is laid bare without filter or anesthetic.
Mystics have called this the dark night of the soul, but the phrase barely hints at its magnitude. It is not your personal night alone. It is the night of the whole species, the whole cosmos. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, genocides, rapes, wars, the silent grief of mothers burying children, the loneliness of elders abandoned, the silent weeping of animals led to slaughter. Even the death of worlds, the cold ending of stars.
This unbearable totality can seem like the end of sanity. It is, in fact, the end of the false self that pretends it is separate from any of it.
What follows is not relief but a deeper unmasking. Your own buried fears, resentments, and desires surface with equal force. You see your potential to be the perpetrator as well as the victim. There is no moral high ground left. You become both the murdered and the murderer, the liberator and the oppressor.
This is not punishment. It is a purification so complete it destroys every shield you held up against reality.
Something unexpected happens when there is no more defence. Love appears—not a comforting emotion, but a force that can hold everything without turning away. This love does not choose sides. It does not say “this is holy, that is unholy.” It does not deny the reality of atrocity. It enfolds it.
Ultimate love contains the screams and the silence after. The destruction and the rebirth. The cruelty of humanity and its boundless mercy. The ugliness of our shadow and the beauty of our tenderness.
This is the same force that drives a mother to shield her child from harm and the same force that calls the contemplative to pray for the world. It is what lies behind the tears of remorse, the acts of forgiveness, the revolutions that upend injustice, the small kindnesses that go unnoticed.
Such love is not naive. It has seen everything. It knows what humans are capable of at our worst. Precisely because of that, it offers compassion without condition.
Spiritual awakening, at its deepest, is not an escape from the world’s pain but an embrace of it so complete that the illusion of separation collapses. What remains is love that refuses to exclude anything.
Love that has become vast enough to be the world itself.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 