Jesus Christ, when asked what was the greatest commandment of Moses, replied,
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
The question is how to love God, and how to love our neighbor?
God seems so large, so abstract, so far away. Our neighbor (friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, etc.) are not necessarily people we always get along with or feel a personal affinity with, much less love.
Gnosis teaches us that God is the inner Being, our intimate divine origin.
We are also taught that love is a cosmic force, rather than a sentiment or feeling. Love is the energy that sustains the universe, and all living beings participate in this unfolding of the creative act of divine love.
Therefore loving God is a practice, a discipline, activated and strengthened through prayer and meditation. We may have a spiritual experience such as a dream, a vision, or a moment of inspiration and devotion to remind us of this connection.
God, the Being, is beyond time and space.
Love is beyond time and space.
Our neighbor however, is often right here, in time and space.
In the classic childrens book A Wrinkle in Time, there is a very interesting explaination of time travel. The term they use is tesseract which indicates a fourth-dimensional shape.
The idea is that time is like a piece of fabric and we move along it like an ant from one end to the other. When a tesseract is introduced it creates a “wrinkle” in time, which is like bringing the ends of the fabric of time closer together so the ant skips all that time/distance and arrives.
In every day life we perceive the third dimension but actually live in the fourth dimension of time. To feel ourselves like an ant moving along from the past to the future is a stifling way to experience life. When the consciousness is awake and open we can glimpse eternity, the realm that connects us with divinity. That which is beyond time.
When we encounter our neighbor, family member, acquaintance or other fellow human, we can remember this great commandment to “love thy neighbor”. It may not even mean we like them, but we love them because they too are a multidimensional being participating in this creation. They too have their hopes and struggles, they have a unique purpose to fulfill, as do we.
And when we love our neighbor and fulfill this commandment, the ends of the fabric of time are brought closer and we find ourslves in that special place called eternity whereby it is possible to love God and to know his love as the greatest reality and truth.