What is Love?
What is Love?
What do you think love is? When one says, ‘I love you,’ what does it really mean? What is the depth of it?
Whether it’s love for myself, the love for a partner, a friend, or life itself - What is the true meaning of love?
We have all heard the spiritual teachings talk about love, oneness and unity. We’ve attended classes, workshops, read all the books, but do we really know the true meaning of love and are we living from love?
The word LOVE seems to have become very watered down these days, to the point that we need to emphasise UNCONDITIONAL love, even though love itself IS without conditions. It is whole and complete, it gives without any expectation of a return and shines on everything, just as the sun kisses the entire earth.
“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘you owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky.” - Hafiz
You see, we say we love people, things and life, and we are quick to share our joys on instagram after we’ve sweated it out on the mat, or experienced a heart opening kirtan, and are feeling a moment of sweet bliss of being alive. However when a relationship ends, or we lose something we cherished, someone expresses anger toward us, or we meet challenges in life, we can often judge, criticise, condemn, feel jealous, angered etc. The person we say we loved, now becomes an enemy. We have no peace because the object we owned is now broken. We become outraged or hurt that someone would shout at us and hold onto that. We realise that our love was based on conditions (which is not love), and create suffering in our minds based on these self created conditions which may have been completely invisible to us until now.
Love Has No Conditions
It is not fearful of the next moment. It does not depend on someone or something to fulfill it. It does not exclude or discriminate. Love does not ebb and flow, it does not move in waves of highs and lows. Rather it is a quiet peacefulness that embraces all, an unwavering light, illuminating.
So perhaps the way to discover love, is to see what love is NOT...
If I do something for you because it makes me feel good - that is not love.
If I offer you affection because I want something in return - that is not love.
If I am fearful that you may abandon me - that is not love.
If I am jealous that you are close with another human - that is not love.
If I am possessive of a person or belongings - that is not love.
If I hold an image of who you were yesterday and I interact with that image - that is not love.
If I think I am above you and so attempt to dominate - that is not love.
If I depend on you for security, affection, comfort, companionship or validation - that is not love.
If I hold an image of you as superior or inferior to me - that is not love.
If I compare myself or you to another - that is not love.
If I condemn, judge or critique my actions or circumstances - that is not love.
If I am kind to myself only when I have a certain status - that is not love.
If I care or work for you out of duty - that is not love.
If I pity myself or another - that is not love.
If I long for love in another - that is not love.
If I only love myself if I am ‘successful’ in my career - that is not love.
If I only love myself when I have lost 5 kilos - that is not love.
If I push myself to work more even when I am tired - that is not love.
If I act out of obligation - that is not love.
All of the above is created in the mind. Driven by a narrative. How can I know love, if I see you as separate from me, as below me, above me, subservient to me, or in control of me? As long as I see through labels, conditioning, acting from memory and identity based on what society has told me I am - there is no love. I will meet life in my head and never with my heart. Only when the mind is quiet, empty of its conditioning, all its stored knowledge and experience, can I meet you and all of life openly, from curiosity, compassion, respect and kindness.
Can we eliminate all these common ‘problems’ that we find when relating with one another, and even with ourselves, all our prejudices, our pain and desires? If I chase pleasure, I will try to use you and life to my own personal benefit. If I want to avoid pain, I defend and do whatever it takes to repeat being hurt. Therefore I am always operating from a program, from a motive.
Love is always new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of the past, of memory. It is only the innocent mind that is free of prejudices that provides silence for the heart to be heard, that can know what love is. Like a child who sees the world through fresh eyes.
As the famous poet, Rumi wrote: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.” - When you realize that all is you, then there is love. To have compassion for yourself is to have compassion for all.
Ram Dass also expressed a lot about true love. He talked about the space of true compassion, that we are all one. “We are all talking to ourselves when we talk to one another. There is the plane of the ego, the plane of the Soul, and the plane of the One. As you go on, you gravitate towards the one. Compassion comes from that identity of our oneness. When you help someone, you are helping yourself.”
It’s so simple, yet so profound. And it all starts with us. Loving ourselves. To be aware of the contradictions inside your own mind is to erase the conflict between your mind and heart.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
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