Matthew 22:37 Meaning Jesus Said to Him

The whole of healing is gathered into one direction of the mind, that it turn all of itself toward the source of love and hold nothing back. To love with heart and soul and mind is to end the inner split by which the self keeps one part loyal to fear while offering another to truth. The ego lives on that division, for a mind at war within itself cannot remember what it is.

So this is less a command than a description of what a healed mind naturally does. When love is chosen without reservation, no fragment is left over to be afraid, and the sense of being separate and alone has nowhere left to stand.

Lord thy God: the source of love the mind is asked to turn toward wholly, the wholeness it remembers when it stops dividing itself between fear and truth

To love with all your heart and soul and mind is to gather your whole scattered attention into one place and give it completely. Most people never love this way because their mind is always somewhere else, divided, half here and half in its thoughts. The commandment is really an invitation into total presence.

The God you are asked to love is not distant. It is the deep aliveness underneath all form, the Being you sense in the stillest moment. To turn your entire awareness toward it, holding back no fragment of yourself, is the most complete thing a human can do. When mind and heart and soul are undivided and fully here, that undivided attention is itself the love, and there is nothing left in you that resists.

The whole instruction is the gathering of a scattered consciousness back into one directed flame. Heart, soul, and mind are the 3 great centers of a person, the feeling nature, the animating breath of life, and the thinking faculty, and turning all 3 toward the highest awareness is the act of uniting a divided self around its own divine center. The Lord thy God is not a distant ruler but the supreme awareness within, the I AM at the core, and love is the pull of the lesser faculties toward that core until they align. As long as heart pulls one way, mind another, and the life-force a third, a person stays fragmented and half-alive. The command is really a description of integration: every part of the human being magnetized toward the single point of spirit inside.

When feeling, life, and thought all face the same inner center, the person becomes whole, and that wholeness is what the old writers named the love of God.

Lord thy God: the supreme awareness within a person, the I AM at the center toward which every faculty turns

To love what stands above a person with everything he has is no sentimental command. The instruction gives the specification for a life that can bear weight. The heart, the soul, the mind: these are not decorative. Each is a faculty that can be split, divided against itself, sent chasing a hundred small idols while the center rots. What the command demands is integration. Orient all of it toward the highest good you can conceive, and the parts stop warring.

The Ten Commandments spelled out the shape of that orientation, and this is their root. A person who loves the good with only part of himself keeps a reserve for resentment, for the lie he tells to stay comfortable. The discipline is brutal in its simplicity. Stop lying, and aim the whole of yourself upward. When every faculty points the same way, you become someone who can act without betraying himself.

The sickness this heals is a love parceled out, a heart that gives God a slice and keeps the rest for smaller devotions. Feeling, life, and thought get scattered across many little altars, and none of them holds the whole self.

The cure is to gather the pieces into one aim, spending affection and strength and reason on a single love until nothing is held back. Think of many streams pouring into one sea and losing nothing. God asks for everything because He is the ground the lesser loves are already standing on.