ARTISANS - Loving and Being Loved

[Excerpt from: Michael Speaks: December 2001]
 
[Dewliet] Hi Michael. Would you please discuss the concept of “missing” other people (i.e. “longing for”) as it relates to overleaves, soul age, etc.? I seem to have kind of an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude and never really “miss” anyone, no matter how much I love them — this goes for my husband and kids, parents, everybody. I was wondering if this is likely a function of overleaves or some combination of CF and false personality.
 
[M_Entity]
This is a particular trait of Artisans. “Missing” people whom you know within a lifetime can be a trait anyone can develop in their varying degrees of attachment, but Artisans tend to be the least likely to attach to an individual identity. Artisans, however, can be the most likely to have a feeling of “missing something” that cannot be defined, which is, of course, linked to their existence at the “edge” of creation and their innate knowing that all are “one.” This can lead to all kinds of fantastical and invalid ideas about who they are or are not “connected” to.
 
This is not to say Artisans do not get attached to people, but usually they will choose a single individual, if any at all, and that person will not have to be “missed” because that Artisan would die before separating from them. We say that metaphorically, of course.
 
The Overleaves themselves are not inherently geared toward or away from attachment, except in how they manifest the Chief Features and create or balance Karma.

Courtesy of @petra, channelled by @Troy.
Andre Heller, Activist, Artist, Singer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Heller
5th Old, Artisan cast Artisan, C1E4.

Truth, Love, or Energy is a variation of the game Truth or Dare that utilizes the overleaf cards. The game is for 2 or more players. Note that trust and consent are required for this game; players may not use this game to coerce or manipulate others into compromising or illicit situations.
 
Setup
Players sit in a circle and a dealer shuffles the cards. The cards are placed face-down in the middle of the players. The player to the left of the dealer begins the game.
 
Simple Version
On their turn, the player draws a card from the pile. Cards are either Truth (Expression axis), Love (Inspiration axis), or Energy (Action axis). Assimilation axis and Wild cards allow the player to choose either Truth, Love, or Energy.
 
If the player draws a Truth card, they must truthfully answer a question.
If the player draws a Love card, they must say/do something positive about/for another player (with consent from that player).
If the player draws an Energy card, they must successfully act out or perform a dare.
The player hands the card to the person on their right, who determines the specific question, task, or dare. This person hands the card back to the player after they have attempted or declined the turn.
 
If the player succeeds, they keep their card, which is scored as a point. If they decline or are unsuccessful, they must return the card to the pile. Play then continues to the left. The game ends either when the stack has run out of cards or when the players decide to end the game. The winner is the player with the most cards (i.e. successful turns). The game may also be played without the use of scoring.
 
Advanced Version
In the advanced version, the player draws a card as normal. Along with the card’s axis, however, the overleaf of the card determines a specific category of task. If the player draws a wild card, they still decide Truth, Love, or Energy, but the person to their right decides the overleaf. The person to the right still determines the specific question, task, or dare, but must adhere to the categories as outlined below.
 
Soul Age – a question, task, or dare relating to memory or knowledge.
Role – a question, task, or dare relating to an activity, service, or job.
Goal – a question, task, or dare relating to a challenge, goal, or taste.
Mode – a question, task, or dare relating to relationships, affection, or touch.
Attitude – a question, task, or dare relating to opinion, philosophy, or sight.
Centering – a question, task, or dare relating to repetition, habit, rotation, or sound.
Body Type – a question, task, or dare relating to physical appearance, talent, or balance.
Chief Feature – a question, task, or dare relating to fear or smell.
 
For example, if a player draws a Soul Age card, the person to their right might ask them about a childhood memory (Truth), recall a fond memory of another player (Love), or be asked to recite the alphabet backwards without error (Energy).

Tasks may also reference the overleaf directly. In the example above, the person to the right may also ask the player how they experience their Soul Age and Level (Truth), to guess the Soul Age and Level of another player (Love), or to act out a Soul Age stereotype (Energy).
 
Three-Deck Version
If all three design styles of the Overleaf Playing Cards are available, players may opt to combine these and play the three-deck version. In this version, the three decks are shuffled together into a single pile and placed in the middle of the players. When the player draws a card, however, the card’s style determines if it is Truth, Love, or Energy rather than the card’s axis. Classic-style cards act as Truth cards, Soul Spectrum (rainbow)-style cards act as Love cards, and Midnight (black)-style cards act as Energy cards. Wild cards and overleaf categories (as applicable) remain the same.

TruthLoveEnergy Great Gathering 2016
Michael Speaks
Loving The Unlovable
[transcript below, courtesy of Daniela]
 
 
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT
TLEGG 2016
Loving the Unlovable
2016-10-03
Channeled by Troy Tolley
 
MEntity:
Hello to everyone.
 
We are here now.
 
We understand the topic is that of Love and loving what would be described as the Unlovable. One of our favorite topics and part of the entire point of not only our sharing of this teaching but of your existence and of your being here. And of your making the effort to understand and to comprehend and to wake up and remember.
 
So it is always Good Work to seek to grasp the seemingly allusive quality and nature of Love. Because without being too poetic or cliché, that is what it is all about. In the end, that is what it is all about. There is so much along the way that it is about as well, but it is the state of Love towards which you move, in everything you do, even when you do not think you are.
 
One of the things that makes it difficult to know if you are being loving is because you do not understand what it is, what it truly is. You are taught that Love should feel good, and that it should bring some form of stimulation with it and often some sort of obvious reward. What is the point otherwise?
 
You live in a world of dichotomy, dominated by a dynamic of punishment and reward, effort and result. And this can get confusing when you throw in such a large context as Love because it is the largest context of your existence.
 
And when you try to reduce it down to a simple equation to whether it feels good or feels right or gives you the promised reward or the promised stimulation, then the concept of Love loses its footing and it is constantly being evaluated, slipped into and out of, as if it is something that could be caught, captured and lost and hunted again. But it is none of those things and all of those things, of course, because of its vast context.
 
So what we wish to do today is offer you a simple approach to your efforts to love even the Unlovable because when things are true, they tend to be simple. Truths tend to be simple. And while Love in its vast context that encompasses all of existence includes a great deal of complexities and complications, Love in itself is as simple as any other truth.
 
So what we will say today is that your capacity to love is parallel to your capacity to include. And it really is as simple as that. And when we say include we mean that you do not exclude it, you do not ignore it, avoid it, reject it, diminish it. You are making the effort to allow it to exist in the same space that is your world. Your capacity to love is your capacity to include. This is an effort that all Old Souls make, is to aim more and more toward inclusion.
 
The capacity to include is not just in terms of your seeking to love the unlovable, but to love the forgettable as well, and to love that which is taken for granted as well, to include yourself in your life. And so we will start there, or invite you to start there. We know that most of you are already doing this, making this effort on a regular basis. But often our students do not realize how much they exclude themselves from their own lives. They remove themselves in a way that feels as if they must, and they are observers of a life passing by them.
 
But it is your life, however messy it is, ugly, painful, difficult, beautiful, rewarding, sensual. It is your life. And building upon our discussion with you previously this is IT. This is not the conclusion, but this is IT.
 
And if you can include yourself in that, you begin to be able to include everything in that space that we call Love. And when you include everything in that space that we call Love, then the circuits begin to build, the circuitry begins to open up, your neural pathways change. Your vocabulary changes. And as these things change then your world begins to reflect more accurately what it is that you consider more ideal than what it is at any given time.
 
So the first step we invite you to consider every day is how much you are including yourself in your day versus floating above it to just get through it. Do you understand?
 
The next thing or things and people to work on is then that which makes up your life. Once you include yourself in your life then it is a little bit easier to begin to make the effort to hold the space to include what is your life because now you are in it. You are not above it. You are not enduring it. You own it as your life. You embrace it. You include it. You are now inside the equation instead of outside of it.
 
You do not have to like your life. You do not have to like the people in it. You do not have to like anything. And you can still love, you can still include, when you do not like.
 
When it is unloving or exclusionary, this is when you are moving away from Love. When you look at your politics, the state of the world, the unrest, the troubles that are erupting, the violence that you witness, you do not have to like these things, but to love these things simply means that you hold the space for them to exist while they work things out. You cannot do the work for everyone, but you can be a part of the equation that helps others and helps events work themselves out.
 
When you step outside of that, when you cut off yourself from that equation, you cut off a source of fuel, a source of energy from the collective potential. Now, this is not to say that it will not still work out, but if your goal is to love, if your goal is to include, and you are willing to do so and you are intrigued by the possibility of what it is like to have a life where you are sustaining a certain state of Love, then you must allow the room for those things that are not so lovable.
 
And one of the ways to do this is to stop equating Love with Deserve. Many of you determine what is lovable and what is not lovable by who deserves it and who does not. Love is never discerning when it comes to terms such as Deserve. When you look at the world, when you look at your immediate life and when you look at yourselves and you ask if it can be loved and you throw out the condition of whether it is deserved, your answers begin to change.
 
Many of you withhold Love as a form of punishment. I cannot love that until it reaches a certain state where it is lovable. That is a lie. And we always encourage our students to stop lying not only to each other but to yourselves, or at least to transcend the lies that were told to you by your culture and your world, because Love is not something that is earned nor is it something deserved. It just is something that you give.
 
And this is the next, most difficult part for many of our students to understand and we urge you to make an effort to truly grasp what this next part means. You have been in the cycle of incarnations for many many years. Many incarnations. All the way up to your Old Soul lives, it could be said, that the dynamic of exchange with existence and with the physical plane and your interactions was to take. This is natural, this is healthy, this is part of what is necessary to gather the experiences that evolve you, but it is a dynamic of taking. When you reach the state of the Old Soul perspective, everything shifts toward your capacity to give. And the questions that you ask no longer can be answered in any meaningful way or way that is satisfying when the question is: Where is what I deserve? When is it my turn? What can I get from this? What am I getting from this? And I am not giving until I get. The dynamic shifts almost 100% towards your learning how to navigate the shift towards giving.
 
And when you start asking the question: What more can I give? How can I give differently? How can I give in a way that does not hurt me or harm me? Then the question of whether you can love or not becomes easier.
 
You can give Love to the difficult experiences of your life. You can give Love to the dangerous and difficult people in the world. This does not mean you are giving them permission or what they deserve. That is up to their dance through their lives as to how that is worked out. But if you can hold the space, give to that space and include all of it as much as you can, do not push yourselves beyond what you can, then you'll see your circle of capacity to love continue to grow.
 
We cannot change how you experience your efforts to love in one conversation, but that is why we are a teacher and will be here for the times that it is more difficult. But we will ask you to open the floor to questions for us or for each other regarding where you are in understanding what we just shared with you and how you think you might approach things differently.
 
[Question] I just wanted to say that I find it very very helpful when you talk about being inclusive. I find it very helpful because, again, the acceptance of reality as it IS is not always joyful, but it does NOT mean that it is not equal with disliking something or not wanting something. It is not automatically rejecting it and not giving it space. So I just wanted to say that I find it very very helpful.
 
MEntity:
Yes, Love is not a sensory experience. It can bring sensory experiences and some of them are quite pleasurable. We remember. But the truth of Love is about your capacity as a consciousness to share existence. And that requires inclusion. Because you are fragments working your way back toward home and when you refuse to include or make it dependent upon deserving or feeling good, you remain not only fragmented from others sharing an existence but often fragmented within. And this contributes more to your pain of existence in a Personality, often far more than the external circumstances that you experience.
 
Next question.
 
[Question] I'm probably going to sound like a broken record here, but I have a pretty profound fear of being hurt, isolated, abandoned, snubbed—I guess from, I don't know, maybe expectations? I have no idea—but of giving Love and then being hurt in return, like I was open for it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way. How do I put all of that aside and give Love anyway? How do I get rid of that fear so THAT can become Love? Help me here.
 
MEntity:
First, what is it that you think is being given that puts you in position of less safety when loving versus not giving it and staying safe? What is it that you are giving? What would you call it? How would you describe what it is that you are giving? Because it is most likely not Love. It is something different. Something more personal.
 
We have seen many students presume that the concept of giving Love is to give YOU away, to give YOURSELF away. And to reconcile the experience of loving while holding on to YOU is a process that you must work to navigate. That is part of YOUR life. That is part of where YOU are. But if you can learn to understand that loving is not losing, it is not a process of losing yourself, it's not an investment that you hope for great returns from, it is something you simply give away. When you are ready to give yourself away with that, you will do so. You will make that effort and you will be expanded enough to include yourself in the giving of that Love. But you can give Love at any moment, at any time, whether YOU are ready to give of yourself or not.
 
We can elaborate upon this with more conversation and clarification if you do not feel this addresses it. But we do think that many confuse the giving of Love with the giving away of themselves, the giving away of power, the giving away of choice. And it is not the same thing.
 
However, it is a risk that each of you must take when you are ready because giving Love can feel risky and you must be willing to take that risk. You will get hurt until you can differentiate the capacity to love, the capacity to include from your capacity to exist. Your safety is not dependent on how others respond to your capacity to love.
 
[Question] I guess I'm wondering, what is Love?
 
MEntity:
As we mentioned for simplistic purposes we will say that it is inclusion without condition. There are many ways that we can describe what Love is and is not, and how it takes its form and how it does not and how it includes everything. But for the sake of this discussion in trying to bring more Love to your life, including the capacity to love the Unlovable, we will describe it as inclusion without condition.
 
We will say that, for the sake of this conversation, we differentiate Love from Agape because Agape moves more towards a true affection for that which is loved. And it is very difficult to sustain Agape in your world. It is a wonderful aim, but it is something that grows out of your capacity to love. So you must learn to love first. Before you learn to love, many of you have to learn to accept. And that is why we put the positive pole of Acceptance as Agape because the process of Acceptance leads to Love leads to Agape.
 
But today we are talking about Love, and it is something that all of you can strive for whether you have the Goal of Acceptance or not. And it is your capacity to include without condition.
 
We use that term include because it is not charged with liking or feeling good or all of the other false expectations surrounding the concept of Love. All you have to do is include. This means you look at your world and its conditions and you recognize that you are a part of that. It is your world. You look at your life and its disappointments and its pain and you know that it is your life. It IS your life. You include it. You look at yourself and your flaws and your aloneness and you begin to include yourself. And Love springs from this.
 
This may not be a dramatic answer that impresses anyone but it is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be simple.
 
Do you think that loving is something you can reduce to something simpler than what you expected of it?
 
[Response] Yes.
 
MEntity: 
Do you really?
 
[Laughter]
 
We invite you to practice that at this moment. There are three or four of you in this room, regardless of the intimacy and the Love shared here, will carry forward and move very quickly into a state of exclusion. You do not have to be pointed out and we will not and you know who you are. But what we invite you to do as part of this moment with us is to say, all of you, to each other and to yourselves, in as heartfelt and meaningful a way as possible, and if you cannot then we suggest you sit quietly, to say I include you. I include you, and then to say I love you.
 
We know this may sound corny but if you take a moment to rest into this being a meaningful opportunity, someone in the room will be able to take that with them and it will matter.
 
We will leave it to you to coordinate.
 
[Discussion over how to carry out the group exercise.]
 
[Group: “I include you. I include you. I love you.”]
 
MEntity: 
Belief is not required.
 
[Laughter]
 
We will take any other questions.
 
[Question] Based on how you are describing Love as we should be truly experiencing it and doing it, is there really anything called Unconditional Love? Because I think we use that often as a way of separating it from other types of Love that we give. But maybe those other things aren't real Love and there's just no one Love. And to your point you think about inclusion without conditions so those other types of Love will result in us giving power away or self-sacrificing yourself or other things but they clearly weren't Love.
 
MEntity:
The effort to truly love is paved with a lot of practice. And that practice will always include conditions. There is not a point in your life where you are not loving and then suddenly loving. You instead can make the effort to love with a great amount of conditions on what that means and then slowly you begin to remove the conditions.
 
So the effort to love across a lifetime or across lifetimes, to truly love, is the effort to reduce conditions. And every effort you make to reduce conditions is a part of Love. So there is a process and just because you have conditions or may have conditions does not mean you are not making the effort to love. It is important to recognize that you have to make the effort to love to see where you still hold conditions, to see where you still have expectations that lead to pain and disappointment.
 
That in itself is Love. Because you are including your incapacity to love in your effort to love. Do you understand?
 
[Comment] But your attempts are important and instrumental to the end result.
 
MEntity:
Very much so.
 
It is OK that you looked for it in ways that are not quite as satisfying or fulfilling or stable. It is OK. That is what you are supposed to do, so to speak. But eventually you ask the questions like you brought to us. And say, what more is there to do? What more can I do? What is the last condition to remove? And in this case, in this particular conversation, we would say that it is the hurdle of deservedness. The differentiation between what is deserving of Love and what is not deserving of Love.
 
When you make the decision that everyone is capable of being included, capable of being loved, it is no longer about whether they deserve it or not. And this is the next step that each of you, we think, needs to look to for learning to love the Unlovable. Because the word “Unlovable” is a lie.
 
Next question, if there are any?
 
[Question] I have this, sort of, one hurdle for sustaining that inclusion or affection. I'll use work as an example. Like, I'll go to work and maybe the environment doesn't reflect my truths or the people don't reflect my truths at the grocery store, but I'll still be able to create meaning there. I'll be able to bring myself there and some days I'll find myself very present and I'll be, like, myself at that till just beaming bright. And then I'll notice afterward I'll be so content with my life that there's that fear which strips that away for months at a time where I won't want to create more of my truths in this world if I'm so satisfied as it is in a sort of environment where the truths don't reflect me. And there's that sort of fear of not being able to make more of what you love or your truths if you begin to sort of love the Unlovable so much. Or create meaning from the Unlovable to an extent, of will you stop . . .
 
MEntity:
Our first question is, what is wrong with that?
 
This was not a rhetorical question.
 
To create your truth in the world through your contentment and your capacity to have those moments is entirely in alignment with what you consider to be the greater truth. That inclusion does not mean you are done or that you will not expand more of your truths and the variations of it into the world. But what you just described is one of the steps towards that. Not an indication that you will not be able to any further, if we understood your question correctly.
 
Finding contentment in an environment where you have found a way to love the Unlovable does not mean you are done and that you will not find other environments that will challenge you, or seek other environments. In fact, what will tend to happen is, if you are able to exist within the space of the Unlovable, and of course you know we use this word only for convenience, you then find within you the creativity, the motivation, and the impulses and you begin to listen to those to find your way, not only to create more inlets, inputs, circuitry to attract to you those who might support your truths more to your liking, but you may also find yourself creating the means to move to environments that support you more to your liking.
 
So what you describe is a first step. It is only a part of the dynamic of what is generated from the efforts you make. It is not the end result.
 
Did this address your question?
 
[Response] Yes. Thank you.
 
MEntity: So when you are finding yourself happy with your efforts and happy with your day, when you start to feel that fear, we suggest you remember our question of, what is wrong with that? I've got more to do.
 
[Question] Would Essence Recognition be considered Love?
 
MEntity: 
Oh yes. Yes. Because you are including. The entire point of Essence Recognition is the recognition of the existence, the core existence of another being. Or your own. It is the only way to evolve, and because it is the only way to evolve, it is Love. Because you cannot evolve if you are not expanding beyond where you are. And when you recognize the Essence in another it is an immediate expression of Love or effort to Love and an immediate fuel for your evolution.
 
Did this answer your question?
 
[Question] When you put us through the exercise of saying, “I include you. I include you. I love you.” It strikes me that is a tool that could be used for more than just this group. That it might be a mantra that could be used sometime when we find ourselves in a difficult situation, or dealing with a person that we're having trouble including and loving. So is that like a good mechanism for extending our capacity to love?
 
MEntity: Yes, we do not offer disposable wisdom.
 
[Laughter]
 
MEntity: We offered that as a means for you to carry forward to say to yourselves, to say to others silently, to say to the world silently, as a way to practice sensing where you are in your capacity to love. Because when you say those words, and in particular if there a person or situation in mind, you can feel your willingness or lack of willingness. And understanding where you are in that lets you to embrace where you are, in itself being a form of love, and then return to it and see where you are later. So, yes, carry that forward and say it as a form of practice.
 
[Question] I have a question about, I'm curious to know if there's a limit to the type of Love a Personality can express. And where, if you're expressing Personality, it's Conditional Love, but once you start Manifesting Essence it goes to Unconditional and then once you're fully Manifesting, it's Agape. Is that how that is structured?
 
MEntity:
Yes. What your process is in your pursuit to understand and to create and pursue Love is very much rooted in sensory input and so it just takes some time to rise above that, to go beyond that. But there will come a time when you then move it towards a more intellectual concept where you know that it is a decision, a choice to love, whether it feels good or not. And then it will move into a space that is what we would say, simply, IS. It is something that you carry that cannot be put into words. It cannot be felt in a way that makes much sense or complies to an expectation. It is a state that is honoring, if you will, the very beauty of existence. It is being able to hold in some form, even if it is only a slice of comprehension while in a Personality, that existence is Love. And that is a very difficult concept to carry in your tiny brains.
 
[Laughter]
 
And we say “tiny” not to diminish your intellectual capacity or intelligence, but it is a tiny piece of meat [Laughter] that is trying to comprehend a universal reality. [Laughter] Do not be so hard on yourselves. [Laughter]
 
Include as you can. Love as you can. You will find your way home.
 
[Question] While physical, obviously the aim is to love. But would you be able to find the words to describe for us what that Personality would experience when no longer in a body, from the Astral side, since it is the realm of emotion?
 
MEntity: We will rephrase your question to make sure that we understand. Are you asking, as a discarnate being from a lifetime with your Personality still intact, experiencing Love in the Astral, what is different in that experience?
 
[Response] Yes.
 
MEntity:
Not much. It is quite similar to being in the Physical because the Personality as an independent consciousness in the way that you are thinking of it as YOU would still be in the lower Astral that still has quite similar qualities to the Physical plane including sensory input to some extent at least replicated to a great degree and experienced quite similarly although its far more malleable and understood as less permanent, the experience of Love and the effort to Love is quite similar to how you experience it and pursue that goal here.
 
Did this answer your question?
 
[Response] Yes.
 
[Question] We have all these axes. Is Love a doing thing? Is Love an expression. Or is it just the inspiration to receive when you've included and opened up. Is it the ground of assimilation of it all? Is it relevant to have distinction, what is Love to define it in terms of axes?
 
MEntity:
Only as you are trying to figure it out. It is all of those things. And when you are trying to figure out Love in terms of doing, then it is a doing thing. When you are trying to figure out love in terms of existence and being, then it is a being thing. When you are trying to figure it out in terms of your receiving it and allowing it to be in your existence from the sources that are offering it around you, then it is a receiving thing or a having thing.
 
When you are learning that when you give Love it is not always received, it is not always accepted, you learn very quickly about the dynamic of Love in terms of giving. When you give, it is not always received. That does not change the fact that you can still give. And so all of those parts and perceptions and explorations and facets of Love are part of the whole package. And where you are is just up to you in terms of where you would like to look at it and how you would like it to look at it at any giving time. And then you will move to another part.
 
Did this answer your question?
 
[Question] Just the obvious right now. In the US with the election with Trump. How do we love Mr. Trump?
 
MEntity:
Should we start from the top again?
 
[Laughter]
 
You can hold the space for that individual's existence, however difficult or “Unlovable” this individual is, and however much of a mess may come from this individual's existence in this form in this time. You will be coming home with that individual at some point. And recognizing that individual ON THAT LEVEL, the inclusion of this individual as a soul, as a being experimenting in the Physical Plane in ways that are not necessarily beautiful or wanted, is enough.
 
You will still have to do the work of fighting against that mess or standing up for what is more inclusive because you are teachers. You are not here to grade people. You are here to share what you know and show what you know. And you cannot do that if you turn your back or simply condemn.
 
So including this person as an individual ON EQUAL GROUND WITH YOU as a consciousness sharing existence can sometimes help you to keep your cool and to navigate your feelings and to choose the responses that are most effective.
 
You do not have to like this man. And you do not have to like what is coming from this experience. But Love is a very different thing. It is creating an equal ground and generating a force of resource that will be available to those who need it who might be affected by this individual and those who may support his truths.
 
[Response] One last go around. Anybody?
 
MEntity: Keep loving when you can. And do not when you cannot.
 
[Response] Thank you.
 
MEntity: We will conclude here for today then?
 
[Response] Yes.
 
MEntity: Good evening to each of you and good-bye.

Courtesy of @petra, channeled by @Troy.
 
Keanu Reeves, C2E6, seventh mature Server cast Artisan.