Truth Emerges from Deep Communion
| ROB BREZSNY SEP 16, 2025 |
TO KNOW THEM, WE MUST LOVE THEM
In order to understand anyone or anything, we have to love it. Every act of true knowing begins not with intellect, not with data, not with clever analysis—but with love.
I don’t mean romantic passion or self-centered yearning tinged with expectation or sentimentality. The love I mean is the radiant force of compassion, empathy, and lovingkindness.
When we open up our perceptions and sensibilities with love to a marsh frog, black oak tree, or red fox, we declare: “You are a source of truth we aren’t familiar with. You are a portal of blessing worthy of communion. You have teachings and influences we are interested in. We are receptive to your specific intelligence speaking through your special language.”
We are not being metaphorical or poetic here. We are not using fairy tale logic. Our meaning is literal. This is the law of the Divine Hologram: Every living entity is a fractal cell in the Divine Consciousness; is a special case of the One Intelligence expressing itself; is a facet of the Infinite Soul offering a unique gift.
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I’ll tell you an ultimate and primal fact that goes largely unacknowledged: Every living thing LONGS to express its unprecedented genius so that we can take it in. (It’s the same ache we all carry: to be witnessed, to be loved, to be known.)
In giving our loving attention to the marsh frog or black oak or red fox, we are expressing our wish to understand it. This allows it, in turn, to give us the tremendous and mysterious gift of its special intelligence, expressed through its unique language.
The gift we receive is double.
The first initiation: We are jolted awake out of our narrow perspective. We slip free from the flatland of habitual consciousness. We see with frog-eyes, think with oak-roots, roam with fox-senses. We become amphibious, arboreal, feral. Our human awareness sprouts new limbs of perception.
The second initiation: We receive the harvest. The marsh frog’s croak may disclose the savvy of living in two worlds; the oak may murmur a gospel of endurance; the fox may smuggle into our dreams a joke that doubles as a revelation. Each offering awakens a corresponding chamber of the Universal Goddess
Yes, each of us is a holographic shard of the Universal Projector, the One and Only Hologram. But sometimes, in order to “turn on” parts of the All-In-One within us, we have to open to those specific parts in the physical world. They remain remain dormant until the outer frog, oak, or fox sings us into remembering.
And this is a crucial part of our strategy to enter into a variety of altered states in our quest to viscerally commune with a myriad aspects of the Divine Consciousness.
If we can learn to speak the language of the marsh frog, black oak, and red fox, and awaken in ourselves the parts of our intelligence that are like a marsh frog’s, black oak’s, and red fox’s, then we have glided into an altered state.
Let’s say we can do this regularly, in little or big ways. Once every day, and more on our freer days, we can open our heart-soul-brain with love in the quest to understand the essence of a marsh frog, black oak, or red fox. And can, thereby, allow the marsh frog, black oak, or red fox to do what comes naturally for it, to do what it was made to do, which is to unveil itself to us in glorious extravagant fullness, with its own love nature bursting.
And so the marsh frog, black oak, or red fox can initiate us into the enigmas of its intelligence, teach us how to experience the world as it does, and bestow on us the power to alter our state of awareness—giving us yet one more tool for knowing the Divine Soul not just conceptually but with gnosis, with visceral understanding.
TO KNOW A PERSON, WE MUST LOVE THEM
The same law that opens us to frog, fox, and oak—or cat, dragonfly, rose, horse, goldfinch, and all the rest—applies to the human beings who cross our path. A person, too, is a fractal shard of the Infinite Soul, aching to reveal their genius if only they are met with love.
To know a person is not to catalogue their traits or analyze their patterns. It’s to open our heart-soul-brain with the same luminous receptivity we offer to the wild intelligences. The gaze of love says: “You are not a puzzle to be solved but a song I long to hear. I will sit close enough to feel your rhythm, patient enough to let your hidden roots speak.”
When we approach a person this way, two initiations awaken:
First Initiation: We are jolted out of the flat caricatures we make of others. We slip free of projections and prejudices. We begin to glimpse their many-sided paradox, their amphibious capacity to be more than one thing.
Second Initiation: We receive their gifts—their sly humor that rescues us from despair, their rooted endurance that steadies our own trembling, their capacity for metamorphosis that awakens hope. Each offering is a spark of the Universal Goddess refracted through their singular life.
To know a person, we must love them. Love is the solvent that dissolves the barriers of fear. Love is the riddle that rouses our dormant chambers of recognition. With love, we breathe their air, taste their dreams, and let them alter our state of awareness.
And the gift is doubled: They are witnessed into fuller being, and we are rewilded into fuller knowing.