Love speaks words of power.
Love is power, and whatever it touches becomes imbued with an impulse and an impact that is beyond the ability of words to describe. But it is there. It speaks for itself, whether or not it is heard by the human ear or detected by the human mind.
The simplest message may transmit the greatest idea and make it completely believable and practical. It may, if the idea originates or germinates in the inner spirit of wisdom and the words are spoken with all of the force of love.
Love communicates itself, the greatest power in the universe. Thus, it charges both words and ideas with something above and beyond our ordinary ability to communicate.
Love is like dynamite. It must be handled with care, but it can accomplish tremendous miracles. It can move mountains of distrust and suspicion. It can level whole areas of doubt and fear. It can clear the way for new life and new growth. It can heal and harmonize and build and attract. It is the greatest means of communication known today. And it will accomplish even greater things in the future.
Words Transmit Images
At the present time in our civilization words are a very important asset in communication. They serve a definite purpose.
The time will come when we communicate entirely by means of thought. Words will be unnecessary, because we will have so developed the power of our minds that we can project images to be picked up by others.
For the present, however, for the most part, we must use words. People who are very close in thought and feeling may communicate without words from time to time, but they are the exception rather than the rule in modern civilization.
So let us consider words and see just how we can make them most effective and powerful in our lives.
At best, words are translations of mental images. One person, referring to a thought in his own mind, uses words to try to create the same thought or picture in the mind of another.
You want to describe a beautiful scene to someone. So you search your vocabulary for the phrases that will best communicate your picture of clear blue sky, a rolling meadow, a fresh and sparkling stream. With the vivid mental image you have formed, you grope for those descriptive phrases that will enable the other person to see what you are seeing. You speak the words, and, according to his own ability to visualize what you have seen, the other person translates them into a picture in his own mind.
Obviously, words by themselves are only as effective as the meeting of the two minds involved. The picture the other person sees never matches exactly what you are seeing in your mind, no matter how beautifully you have described it.
Now suppose, besides putting the scene into words, you also convey a feeling of the beauty, the experience of your love for the place.
You are no longer limited by words. You have the descriptive phrases, but you have added to the picture something of the feeling you have about the idea. And the feeling gives body and meaning to the words. It helps the other person, if he is interested and receptive, to develop his own picture. His picture may be different from yours, but he will have a greater depth of understanding of what you are trying to convey—that is, if he really wants to understand.
The word picture, then, that is telepathically reinforced by feeling is more vivid, vital and real than the one that is conveyed by means of words only. The word picture that is backed up by love power is the greatest of all.
Feelings Add Power
In a sense, when you project an idea with love, you are sending something of yourself with it, but it is a part that is never lost, but rather is enriched by being shared.
Usually your words are backed up by feeling of some kind. It can be any kind of feeling from hate and resentment to love and faith.
To the extent that another person is able to feel your feeling, he receives the message that goes beyond your words.
Sarcasm, for instance, may seem to give a compliment, but the tone of the voice and the feeling it conveys create another impression.
Resentment against injustice may be conveyed with such strength that the words are puny in comparison with the storms of hate that are generated.
But how much better it is to reinforce words with positive emotions, so that their effect is a constructive one, rather than destructive. Words can heal, harmonize, help. But they are only really effective when they are spoken in love.
Love, in a sense, “sells” the good thought that is being communicated through the limited means of language. Love imbues the words with an impact that gives life and meaning to the whole idea. It tells the story more effectively than mere speech can ever tell it. It gives hope, encouragement, reassurance, life itself.
It can convey ideas that are beyond anything our minds are ready to comprehend at the present time. It is the light and power of the new age, in which mechanical and scientific developments will be small when compared with the increasing awareness of love power.
This is the principle of communication:
What you think and feel has greater power to communicate than the words you say. Where words and feeling agree, the ability to reach other receptive minds is greatest of all.
Words by themselves are only as effective as the ability of two minds to meet and agree on a mental image.
Words backed up by hate, fear, distrust or any of the other negative emotions may lead to murder, riots and mob action. They have a power that is tremendous.
But even greater is the power of love which conveys ideas of good with such strength and faith that they can overcome even the wrong that has been generated by words backed up with negative impulses.
A Man of Few Words
One of the greatest men in history was a Man of few words.
The recorded words of Jesus Christ would be infinitesimal when compared with the number of words in a modern dictionary. Taken by themselves, they might have been lost in antiquity.
But this Man didn’t just go about speaking words. He communicated something tremendous to those who were receptive to His message. He worked with the principle of communication to get across a message of hope and healing for all people everywhere.
What He thought and felt literally charged His words with a power far beyond the human ability to comprehend. Who would think that a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago could communicate a message that would continue to affect the whole trend of history, influencing not only the lives of individuals, but also the fate of nations and of the world?
Jesus worked with the universal laws to perform miracles. He activated laws not normally understood to gain results not usually expected.
People were impressed, and are still impressed, by the stories of feeding five thousand people with only a small boy’s lunch, raising the dead and healing all types of diseases and physical difficulties.
On a smaller scale, such things have been done and are being done by others. This doesn’t take anything away from the work of the Carpenter of Nazareth. It simply reinforces the idea of what may have been His greatest miracle, the miracle of communicating to a materialistic, worldly society the idea of God’s love.
Jesus was no fanatic who threw himself into a fight to change the world. Neither was He a charlatan who tried to make his work mysterious and difficult in order to impress others.
Rather, He was a Teacher, but such a teacher as the world had never known. From His own understanding of universal law, He projected the teaching through words and actions. But most of all, He projected God’s love.
Without hurry, without tension or anxiety, with patience and purpose and inner peace, He did the work that was before Him. He cooperated with principles that people had not begun to understand. He showed that they worked, and in a few simple, well chosen words he told others how they might also use the miracle power to do God’s work. Most of all, He backed up all of His work and all of His words with a real, living, universal love for God, Himself and His fellow person.
The Great Commandment
When asked to choose the greatest of the ten commandments, Jesus gave another commandment. He said,
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matt. 23:37-39)
The words spoke of love, but they did more than that. Projected by a Man who made every thought, emotion and action a demonstration of that love, they sent forth a love power that is still reverberating through the world and will continue to reach all who are receptive to its message.
Tuning in to the power is as simple as working with the laws of love and letting the love power itself do its work of good.
But obeying the great commandment is not a part-time prescription to heal a life, a country or the world. It is a full-time job and a full-time dedication, just as Jesus’ life was a life that demonstrated the teaching of love not just occasionally, but in thought, word and action all of the time.
It is a great undertaking to seek to live a completely love-powered life. But it can be done. We know it can be done, because it has been done.
To start, do not look at the magnitude of the task, but begin where you are to let your words and feelings express love.
This doesn’t mean going around talking about love all of the time. One who is in tune with love power doesn’t squander a great many words trying to convince others of his love. Rather, he loves and lets the little voice within give him the right words to speak in every situation. When he speaks, he sends them forth with love and lets them go to do their work, knowing that all are blessed as he communicates a pure, unselfish, universal awareness of God’s love.
A strong feeling of oneness with all God’s goodness and love communicates more than the words you use to convey it, but, used in conjunction with words that express the same idea, it will provide a greater force to project good than anything now active in your life and in your world.
Communication without Words
Words are an important means of communication in our society today. They can accomplish tremendous things, especially when backed up by love power. But they are not the only means of communication in use today. Sometimes the things you don’t say convey much stronger ideas than the words you do speak. And you’d be surprised at how much you can communicate without any conversation at all.
Our little dog has a tremendous ability to communicate without being able to say a word. He would like to speak. Sometimes he makes a great effort to tell us something by noises that seem almost human. But physically he simply doesn’t have the equipment that would enable him to articulate a syllable.
But he can project love!
When we come home after having been away, the dance he does and the violent way he wags his tail very clearly indicate his joy that we are back and also his recognition of us as his beloved family. He couldn’t make it plainer by using all the appropriate words in the dictionary.
When we talk to him, his ears tell us what he is thinking. They perk up when he is interested. They lie straight back and almost disappear in thick fur when he is being reprimanded. When he is uncertain or is trying to figure out just what we are telling him, his ears stick out sideways, at half mast.
If a dog, a lesser form of life in the animal kingdom, can convey this much without any words at all, how much more can we communicate by using our greater gifts of love and intelligence!
As a matter of fact, we do tell others a great deal more than we realize. We tell them through the expression on our face. We communicate by means of the atmosphere we create when we enter a room. We speak in many different ways without uttering a single word.
In some ways we communicate consciously. In others, we tell our story without any awareness that we are revealing anything.
The Greatest Beauty Treatment in the World
Love gives the greatest beauty treatment in the world, because one of the ways in which love gives its message to the world is through the beauty of an inner glow.
This is the principle of beauty:
When love shines on the inside, the outside will beautify itself.
This is not the type of beauty sought by fashion designers as they strive to build a fashion “look.”
Rather, it is the beauty that is never outdated, the loveliness that stimulates joy in others regardless of the style of the moment.
Through the ages, women have spent fortunes trying to be beautiful. They have creamed, cut, lifted, styled and had their facial features, hair, teeth, skin literally transformed. But without love there is no true beauty.
A woman may leave the beauty parlor completely renewed and rejuvenated by the best experts available, but if her facial expression shows her bad humor, no beauty treatment is effective.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use cosmetics, expert styling or other beauty aids. It does mean that when you look first to the inner glow and let love and good will shine through, the other helps merely enhance the beauty that is already there. And this is the beauty that never fades, as long as you love.
The bride who loves and is loved is always beautiful. This love is just a small sample of the beauty that comes from an understanding of love in its greatest sense of oneness with good everywhere and a deep feeling of good will toward all people.
Glow in an English Sky
It was a windy fall afternoon that I visited the ruins of Hastings Castle, high on a promontory overlooking the English Channel. The ruins were just that, remnants of a castle that had once represented beauty and grandeur to many people but was now haunted only by ghosts of the past.
An elderly guide took me down into the whispering dungeon and out through the skeletal remains of what had once been an impregnable stronghold. The wind blew strongly across the field where knights had held their jousting tournaments, and it whistled through the remnants of the chapel.
The history of the castle was fascinating, but the scene was one of desolation and desertion.
That night, after I had spoken to the Hastings, England, Unity Group, in the town below the castle, first one and then another of the people asked me to walk over to the window to look out at Hastings Castle.
The transformation was hard to believe.
The ruins, high on the hill, were lighted by tremendous lights from within. That which had been a desolate skeleton became a glow of beauty in the night sky over the seaside town of Hastings.
If an inner glow can do so much for a ruined stronghold, think what the inner glow of love can do for you! It can transform you into a person who not only looks beautiful on the outside, but is beautiful on the inside and somehow manages to convey a sense of loveliness and joy to others.
Even the ruined life can be transformed when the light is turned on within.
Even the drab experience of daily boredom can be made over into an atmosphere of love and beauty that you carry with you.
And when the beauty of love shines out through you, you are bound to communicate not only beauty, but a very special blessing to others. Your awareness of the potential goodness in every individual, the presence of light in every dungeon and the possibilities of love in others sends out a message that surrounds you and those you meet with a radiance that grows lovelier through the years.
When Jesus Christ said, “Ye are the light of the world” (Matt. 4:14 KJV), undoubtedly He was referring to the power of God’s love shining through us, a light that is equally bright, night or day.
Your Greatest Protection
The wordless message of love is not only one of joy and peace and beauty. It is also the greatest protection you can ever have. If you are armed and fortified with love and a sense of oneness with God’s good everywhere, and if you are willing to be guided always by the little voice within, you will always be protected.
The little voice within will make sure that you are in the right place at the right time, and the glow of love from within will surround you with an aura that is greater than any danger that can ever threaten you.
Love will give you the words to speak and the reinforcement you need to make them effective. Or it will remove you from an area of danger. Or it will transform a threat into a blessing for all concerned. It will provide whatever is the best and most effective defense under the circumstances.
Love will never provoke you into taking foolish chances. But love will never leave you defenseless, even when you have made some mistake that caused you to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to attract a threat of some kind.
We hear a great deal these days about missiles, bombs and satellites, as nations seek to protect themselves against other nations.
The more nations concentrate on building bigger and better weapons, the more other nations concentrate on building bigger and better arms to protect themselves. There is no end to the race toward destruction.
But there is a missile that is more powerful than any of the products of the engineers. It works in silence, but it works effectively, whether it is in the life of one individual or in the defense of many. This is the missile of love, one means through which love communicates its message of peace and oneness.
No one, by himself, can arm a whole country with the power of love, but each one, individually, can start to put this missile to work in his own life — not just as a weapon of defense, but as a way of life.
Love for all God’s good creation is its own defense, but it is not a weapon that can be bought in a store. It is not a wraith or guardian angel that can be conjured up in a moment. It is an atmosphere, an inner glow, a whole attitude toward life and living that must be built by the individual.
Many stories can be told of seemingly miraculous escapes of individuals who were threatened by danger. These are stories of people who were steeped in a great love for others, a desire to give their best always and an ability to expect good from others.
A quiet little lady who lived alone opened her door one night to a rough-looking man. He made a threatening gesture toward her, grabbing for her arm.
She made no effort to move away. But looking him full in the eye and communicating all her great love for people, she said, “God loves you.”
Her message gave him more than words. It had the extra added ingredient that made it a missile of love. He turned and fled.
Love is the most effective defense there is — not love that is put on for the occasion, but love that is built into life day by day and called into expression when it is needed.
Love communicates. It adds impact to words, and it also carries its own force, which is greater than any negative influence in the world.
Best of all, love isn’t stockpiled for just a few. It is available to all who will use it to communicate good.
Many people talk about love these days. Some even try to force it on others. But if you really feel, express and project the idea, you don’t have to talk about love. It speaks for itself.
© 1986, Winifred Wilkinson Hausmann
All rights reserved by the author.
Reprinted with permission.
