Subject #18: On love

This is the subject among all subjects, which has puzzled me the most. I have spent countless hours thinking about love. Love…it is so overused word. Love is talked about everywhere without people really having a clue what it is. As for me too, during the years my mind has had lots of ideas about love - what is it or how should it be. Nowadays I would really prefer not to write anything about love because it, just like truth, is really beyond words. So I can not tell you what love is but perhaps I can write about what love is not.

Love is not about giving or receiving - it is about sharing. Love is not possessive. Love is not jealous. Love does not turn into anything else. Love does not require a target. Love does not expect anything. Love is not disappointed about anything. Love accepts everything. Love cannot be divided into different types of love (such as love of God or love of parent or love of partner). Love cannot be measured anyhow. Love cannot be compared. Love is not a desire. Love never hurts. Love is not connected to time, it has no beginning or end.

However, in romantic relationships there are often lots of those above mentioned feelings and ideas – love is always there as well but it depends about person how well love is channelled – usually it’s mostly covered with those other things which have nothing to do with love. So when people say that “love didn’t last” or “it was not love”, they actually mean that their covered view to love became too covered. In fact it seems that relationships are most often substitutes, ways to fulfill a desire or counter the feeling of loneliness. Anthony de Mello expressed this very frankly:

We're crazy, We're living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.

In a way whole expression “I love you”, is very vague. It is targeted from mind’s image of oneself into mind’s image of the other person. When we meet a person, mind creates image about him/her. Image is always different from the person - just like a word is a different from what it describes. So when we become disappointed with other person, it’s because the image which we created turned out to be different than the real person (=another person’s image of oneself). Another common expression “to fall in love with someone” is not pointing to love either, it’s just description about fascination to the created image about another. Also, when there’s “I” and “you” – there is no view to love. This is very difficult to see as people are so used to play game of egos, game of images. To step out of those games requires clarity of vision.

As mentioned before, love does not require target (or even can’t be targeted). So love does not require relationship. One can live alone full of love. Many spiritual characters through history have chosen this way for few reasons. First of all there’s no real need to be with someone, to have a relationship anymore. Second of all it’s very difficult to be with someone who does not share this view to love but lets it to be covered, not to mention that one’s vision may become somewhat covered too as mind is strong. So surely being alone is an easy solution if one is able to break free from loneliness, which I wrote about earlier. On the other hand there’s nothing “wrong” with relationships either, there’s a great beauty in sharing – if couple is able to practice losing of this concept of “I” together and become one. There are just traps here and there to be noticed.

There are also such concepts as “true love” and “soulmate”, which are close to each other. They are based on a wish that there’s a person for all of us (set by a God or destiny) who understands us totally and with who we can live happily ever after. My mind used to believe in both concepts, just because of the beauty of ideas. Nowadays I see these ideas as different type of traps though those traps should not be considered as negative because a great deal can be realized when the trap is broken.

Though I did not directly say what love is, I can quote Karen Sunde’s attempt to put it into words:

To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.