(from the novel, Discovering Love, Chapter 16: Invitation to Heaven)

"Drinking to Truth?" I asked.

"Isn't that what a scientist does every day?" he replied. 

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Priest's look for God," he said. "By definition, religion is an instrument for finding Truth. But by nature, Truth is absolute. That is something that no man can ever fully reach, because the Universe that we behold is constantly expanding. Truth is something we can only strive towards and understand its shades and color as we move along and apply our understanding. Our glass is never as full as it could be. There is always more to be discovered, which can be understood. There will never be an end to this process of filling our world with ever greater light."

I raised my glass, smiled at Ushi, and suggested we drink to that. So, we drank to Truth.

Steve grinned at me. "Most priests, religions, and institutions, literally prevent you from filling your glass, but freedom requires that one's glass be filled to the brim and be overflowing. This presents a great challenge," he said, raising his glass again.

We all drank to that, too.

"Our lives depend on our glasses being as full as they can be," he said as he put his glass down.

I must have looked at him with a blank stare. What did he mean? He didn't refill our glasses.

"It's a natural phenomenon," Steve explained. He insisted that we take a moment to think about that.

I shrugged my shoulders. Ushi didn't say anything.

Steve stood up and raised his glass as if it were for another toast. "Oligarchies are very poor," Steve continued, "their glasses are empty; they are never free; they are constantly struggling to manipulate the world in order that they may have their glasses filled for them by the labors of other people. This is becoming evermore precarious for them. They steal, loot, and plunder, but nothing happens that fills their glasses. In a sense, they are desperately poor in spite of their stolen riches, or because of them. This vital point they cannot understand. That is why they steal more and more. They are determined to continue down this road until they own the whole world and everyone else is dead."

He paused and reached for the bottle and filled his glass up just a pinch more. Then he continued his lecture.

"The oligarchy cannot understand what makes humanity truly rich," he said. "What makes us rich is not what we take from the cup, but what we put into the cup out of the riches of our human Soul, our intellect, our ingenuity, wisdom, caring, etc. Our glasses contain only what we create for ourselves, what we discover of ourselves, what we enable ourselves to be, and the joy that we find in the beauty and the strength of one-another and of the whole of humanity. Our glasses contain all that. One might call it the substance of Love."

Steve turned to me and said. "You must never forget this little parable, Peter, because it embraces everything. What the world calls God, I recognize as the creative Principle of the Universe, the root of its existence. Everything that exists in the Universe unfolds from this Principle expressed by Intelligence, from the greatest clusters of galaxies to the tiniest part of a particle of an atom. Everything is ordered by universal principles that are aspects of the Principle of the Universe. And it is all exceedingly intelligently arranged. The Universe manifests one Principle universally. It does this in an extremely harmonizing manner, which I call Love. Love then is the substance of the Universe, and Intelligence is the reason for its being, and by reflection, our being. Our universal humanity manifests this one Principle to the fullest, whose Spirit is Love, as far as we comprehend it. It renders us the tallest expression of Life on our planet. The principle of our humanity, therefore, is Love. Love is its name. We live it."

Steve put his wineglass down and reached for a slice of lemon that he had prepared for his soda water. He held it high. "If I squeeze the lemon, what do I get out of it?" he asked. "I get lemon juice, right, because that is what is in it? Now if I touch a human being, what do I get? Well, unless our humanity has dried up in the desert of sophistry, hate, mutilation, and slander, I'll find myself surrounded by expressions of Love. The name of our humanity is Love, among other such elements of the Sublime as I had listed before."

"Elements like Principle, Mind, Life, Soul, Truth, and Spirit?" I interjected.

Steve looked at me for a few moments in silence. "We radiate all of that, because it is the substance of our being," he continued. "All aspects of the Sublime are a part of the design of the Intelligence that shapes the Universe. If we touch a human being, that is what we get. We get a manifestation of the Principle of the Universe, and that Principle is Universal Love."

"This includes a whole lot, I agree," I said quietly.

"We find in it the substance of good," said Steve, "and we rejoice with a great joy over it, which is an expression of Love. However, in order to live Love, it has to be alive in us. The Principle of the Universe has to be our Life, consciously, including everything that pertains to it. Then loving will be the natural result. However, this loving must be a joy for what we are. It must manifests the joy that we find in our own humanity. Joy manifests our self-loving as an expression of universal Love. It expresses these in the highest possible sense, as the tallest expression of Life in our Universe. It defines us as a spiritual species with near boundless capacities and potentials. There is so much to be in Love with in our humanity, because Love pervades everything, Peter. That is why it's unfolding, borders on the miraculous. Our joy in Love, Peter, fills our glasses. Nothing else does. It becomes a radiant sun that enriches the Universe around us. That is why I say that what we put into our glasses is the substance of our humanity and our being in Love with it. That's what counts and enriches our living. The rest is secondary."

"Actually the rest isn't secondary," I countered him. "By what you have been saying, there isn't anything else. The world is filled with problems, but they all have one root. The war of empire versus civilization is wide and encompasses many fields and many fronts, but they all have one common factor, which is their denial of the Sublime, the denial of our humanity, the denial of anything that matters. The biggest failure that we make is that we are fighting on these fronts where nothing really matters. We get locked into meaningless single issues if we are fighting at all. When we are fighting little single issues we get lost in the back-alleys without ever hitting the core issue. I think we can only hope to win by developing what really counts on all of these fronts. I don't think there is a secondary front. The one thing that counts everywhere, I think, is our humanity. Bur we must develop it scientifically. When we address all of the challenging issues at once in a fundamental way, maybe we can actually win. But for that we have to be honest with ourselves about everything that pertains to our humanity, even sex, even when facing the Truth poses a challenge."

Steve just smiled. He looked at me, taking hold again of his still half-empty glass and asked us if we were all satisfied to have our glass only half full. He said, that one should never be satisfied with that, because that would be dangerous according to what he had just said. Then he continued his lecture, holding up his near empty glass.

"Here comes the part that very few people understand," he said. "If we only embrace science and knowledge and discoveries, our glasses will always remain half empty, because our knowledge, our science, and our discoveries will forever be incomplete. There will always be a higher hypothesis superseding the highest hypothesis that has been created. Our understanding of the absolute is never full."

He smiled at me. "But Love, my friend, has no such limits. Love is boundless at every moment. The Sublime has no limits. God has no limits. No limits are imposed onto our loving in appreciation for our humanity and one-another. Love is an infinite source and a presence that fills our glasses right to the brim and lets them overflow at every moment of our life. This flood, of course, doesn't reflect how well we ARE loved, but how well we DO love. To be in Love, means to be joyous;" he added. "It means to be joyous with appreciation for the beauty of our humanity that we find within and see reflected also in one-another."

"We have much to be joyous about," said Steve to Ushi. "This is what fills our glasses," he said emphatically to both of us, "and our glasses will be overflowing. Indeed, we expect them to be overflowing constantly, to be flooding the whole world with the substance of Love. Naturally, as our glasses overflow, we thereby enrich one-another's existence with the outflow of our loving. This is what happens naturally when we begin to be in Love universally. It is a natural process. This process defines what it means to live as a human being."

Steve then turned to me and smiled. "Be careful, Peter, to never limit the flow of your loving, or anyone else's. Never create the slightest barriers that inhibit the power of your loving, or another person's. You must become sensitive to this requirement, because such barriers are all too easily created, especially against the loving of those whom we profess to love the most. Don't let your marriage ideals create boundaries that would hinder your wife in developing herself to experience the fullness of her being in Love in her daily living."

Steve raised his glass again. "Remember, our cup must be overflowing, because that is what it means to be human. Everyone's cup must be overflowing if the substance of our humanity is to be a light by which the whole world becomes enriched. Then, and only then, can we hope that as we inspire the same flow in others across all boundaries and creeds, and numerous divisions, that the need for nuclear weapons will fall away. Only then can we allow ourselves to feel secure."

He turned to me again. "The worst thing we can do," he said, "is to build barriers against another person's loving, or against our own. If we do this, there will be no light and our world will drift into a Dark Age. This drifting into darkness has already begun around the world."

Steve sat down after his speech. He sat down without taking another sip. "That's why I won't fill your glasses," he said and grinned. "This responsibility belongs to you." He reached for the bottle and gave it to me.

"But no flooding, please," Ushi requested, and laughed. We all laughed at that.

Steve said that his analogy wasn't intended to become messy.

I took the bottle with a smile. I would have been lying if I had said that I wasn't impressed by Steve's speech. Except he stopped short of answering the two questions that puzzled me the most. I put the bottle back onto the table. Its time had not yet come.

"Steve, what really is universal Love?" I said to him as I put the bottle down, looking directly at him. He seemed surprised at the question. "Steve, it has been said that the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended eighty years of war, was founded on a platform of universal Love. But what is universal Love, Steve? And most of all, what is it in terms of our self-loving? Are the two really the same? We've been throwing the terms around too casually. How do we understand them at the leading edge of science?"

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