Where Does Love Come From?

I work in a call center. Every day I find myself invigorated and inspired to help my callers on a deeper level. This is abnormal I am told. Many who do my job don't share this same level of passion.

Where does this come from?

My experience of it feels like love. I genuinely love these people, and I am aware that my ability to do this comes from years of honing that skill. What I am thinking as I embrace them for that brief time on the phone is that I am the one person in the Universe that can do for them what they can't do for themselves. This may seem dramatic, but it's still very true. And if I am willing to take on a Universal Consiousness I must bear the responsibility that comes with it.

As a Christian I am inclined to attribute this "love" to an endowment of the Holy Spirit. Fundamentalists are taught that only those who have "accepted" this endowment are able to love in a transcendent manner. I have done this.

Jesus said to Nicodemus you must be born of both water and spirit. Initially it appears he meant baptismal waters, but later decided it must have meant the waters of the womb (after experiencing my child's birth firsthand.) Either way it must mean an earthly physical birth, and another of transcendence.

Genuine compassion is truly transcendent. Loving others with a Universal Consciousness must certainly require some sort of initiation into a higher level of existence - a rebirth I must assume. Within the process, there is a point of no return. Eventually you can no longer be the primitive caveman who cares about no one but yourself. You have reached a crisis and must choose to accept transcendent consciousness in order to grow further and avoid further pain. You then exist as a new creation, in the same way that a baby is no longer an embryo. You are made of the same stuff, but you have been reconfigured and can never be that creature again.

Love must certainly come from rebirth, but what's most important is that the Universal Consciousness that brings it is already in us. We are all capable of loving at the most transcendent levels, or at least we will be when we are ready to be born of spirit. But we all have to grow there which means facing the cycle of crisis and resolution as many times as needed to reconfigure our consciousness.

I am quite sure I could never un-learn the love I feel for those callers. I could only suppress it or ignore it in some way, which I sometimes do. But even on the worst days there is always one whose need is so great and plight so dire that I cannot ignore it. In that moment I am the only one in their world given a chance to help. To act differently would be a step in the wrong direction - the opposite of love is the opposite of life.