7 minute courses
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The 7 Minute Course inIt’s About Love … Definitely!
IntroductionIf ever there was an overused and misused word in our language it is ‘love’. When we say we love this and we love that, we are more often saying we ‘prefer’ this and we ‘desire’ that. Preference and desire are not love. In fact most of us are extremely confused about love. This is due in large extent to the prevailing myth of romantic love which says true love is exclusive. Perhaps the most powerful illusion that grips our world is that love is attachment. And yet, if we are fully aware the moment our heart becomes attached to anyone or anything, we will notice that we distort the natural energy of the heart, which is love, into sadness, anger and fear, and then wonder where these powerful emotions come from. Then there is the idea that ‘getting’ who and what you want is the way to fulfil our need for love. The idea that love has to be ‘acquired’ is such a powerful illusion that most of us find it almost impossible to see the mistake we make. This little course on perhaps the biggest and deepest topic of all may help you dispel some of the illusions and myths about love, and allow you to glimpse the light of love for real in your life again. But then again, it may not!
1 Understanding the HeartLove is associated with the heart in almost every culture. But what is the heart? You are your heart. Human consciousness is the heart. You have two hearts – the physical heart and the spiritual heart. Your physical heart is not a source of love, it is simply a very powerful pump. Your spiritual heart is a source of love and you are it. Why? Because you are spirit. This is slightly important because it serves to remind you that you are love and you are a source of love in the world. In fact, you don’t need love because you already have it! However, you don’t feel it. In fact there is a good chance you won’t ‘see’ very clearly all that I have said so far. Why? Because you have simply forgotten who you are. You have been taught to believe you are made of non-spiritual stuff i.e. your body, and that love and happiness are therefore physical sensations. This teaching is fatal because it makes you seek and crave stimulation and thereby makes you reverse the flow of the energy of your own heart from giving, radiating and emanating to wanting, taking and grasping. That’s why attachment happens and our life becomes rather dry of real love. This illusion, that love comes from outside, eventually makes us turn our own our life into one big long echo which sounds like ‘gimmie gimmie gimmie’! It’s no wonder love is a rare experience because the moment our intention is to take we distort the energy of our heart into fear. The fear that we won’t get, the fear that if we do get it won’t be up to expectation and the fear that when we do get we might lose what we got! And we haven’t even got it yet! If only someone had told us that fear is the opposite of love.
2 Love is letting go of fearIt is no accident that the saying ‘love is letting go’ has become well known. It is the act of attaching to something or someone which generates fear. And fear is the breeze which blows the butterfly of love off course. Attachment is a mental state. It is a relationship we have with someone or something in our own minds. When we become attached to someone we use them (their image) to fill our mind. We find our thoughts are constantly coloured and shaped by their image and the memories of their behaviour. This is the process which distorts the energy of our heart (our consciousness). As the energy of our heart (the heart of our consciousness) passes through our minds, as it must, it is shaped, coloured and distorted by the object of attachment i.e the image on the screen of our mind. It is not that we should never think about others, it is more about thinking about others only when it is necessary, and as we do to make sure we don’t lose our self in their image. This will eventually free us of neediness and dependency. Symptoms of attachment, and therefore the distortion of the energy of our love into fear, can be found when there is any personal desire or expectation of the other person. These are the initial signs of neediness, dependency and self-forgetfulness. We forget we are already a source of what we have been taught to need and seek. Love never desires and it has no expectations. It doesn’t need to! As soon as you have any desire from others, or expectations of others, and your happiness becomes dependent on the desire or expectation being met, you are already giving birth to fear and anger, otherwise known as negative emotions, otherwise known as stress, otherwise known as suffering. Love never hurts.
3 Falling in LoveThere is no such thing as‘falling in love’. It is a
myth perpetrated by our entertainment industries not long after the
first stories were written and plays performed. Love doesn’t make you
fall, or result in a fall. True love uplifts and empowers, real love
is joyful and freeing. The love referred to in the idea of falling
in love is not love, it is obsession, it is the loss of self in another.
Sometimes we even say they are ‘love sick’. How can love make us sick.
Crazy isn’t it? When we fall in love with someone we gain nothing,
we simply lose ourselves in another person. This is almost impossible
to see as we are so absorbed in the other persons image and energy we
cannot see anything, and this is why they say ‘love is blind’. But actually
it is not love that is blind simply the self that has allowed itself
to become blinded by the image of another. The self becomes blind to
the self and sees only, thinks about only and desires only the other.
And amazingly it all happens in the mind. To lose oneself in another
is not love. The loss of one’s self in the other feels uplifting only
because it is a temporary reprieve from one’s own inner unhappiness,
lovelessness and peacelessness, which in themselves are illusions!
4 So what is love?Understanding love can be assisted by understanding energy. There are two energies at play in the world – physical and spiritual. The physical energy of your body or matter, and the spiritual energy of you the soul, you the conscious being which animates your human form. Where there is love there is unity, because love always unifies and sustains unity. There are no barriers, defences or separation where love is present. We may say ‘I love the flower’ and in that moment it is as if ‘I and the flower are one’, and yet we are separate. The energy of love connects and unites, but does not merge, two distinct entities. When two people love each other (not desire each other) each party does not lose their self in the other. They retain a full awareness of themselves and do not fall into each other. They therefore do not lose their dignity or their self respect. They need nothing from the other and yet are fully open and available for the other. To get a sense of what true love is contemplate what creates unity. What unifies the physical energies of the world. What unites our forms at a physical level. Air and water. We breathe the same air and our bodies are made mostly of water. The common ingredient in both air and water is oxygen. Oxygen is the subtle invisible element which unites us all, but only at a physical level. Love can be seen as the oxygen of the soul. Remember we are not our body, we are the being in the body. The soul. (You don’t have a soul, you are a soul) Love is the pure energy which emanates from the heart of every human being, every human soul. The heart of our consciousness, is like the lungs of our spiritual life. We breathe in love and we exhale love…but only when we don’t want something from others or become dependent on others in any way for our self-esteem and self-respect. In fact it could be said that the reason we are here is to know and experience all forms and all expressions of love through our spiritual breathing in life. So what is love? Love is the radiant energy which emanates at every moment from every human heart, where the heart is the soul ! And when we act with love towards another, in that moment we consciously unite with that person, but only if they are open enough to fully receive our action, our love.
5 How do you know love and know that it is love?If love could be defined in action it might sound like this. “Love is the action of giving where there is a total absence of any desire for anything in return and there is the intention to benefit the other”. This of course has to be tempered by wisdom regarding what brings true benefit to others and what doesn’t. This is the ‘out breath of love’ in action in the context of our relationships. The ‘out breath’ of love is any action done for the benefit of another free of wanting anything in return. The ‘in breath’ of love is to embrace another, not physically, but mentally and spiritually, which begins with accepting them exactly as they are at this moment now. Unfortunately our conditioning and our mental patterns are so full of the habits of desiring, demanding and expecting, so imbued with patterns of judgement, prejudice and bias that it’s quite challenging to act with true love and not pollute our intention with the subtlest of wantings based on our neediness or the slightest of judgements based on the past! The restoration of love in our life is at the heart of any authentic spiritual path and lifestyle. When we decide to pursue enlightenment in any form, love will demand we become crystal clear…about love! When we realise that we have been asleep to the true meaning of love and decide to wake up, and stay awake, we will need to be extremely self-aware. When we decide to remain true to the true meaning and authentic expression of love we will need to be vigilant !
6 Learning about loveAs we saw earlier one of the signs of the presence of love is unity. Love is unifying and where there is true union there is love. As human beings we have the capacity to unite at four levels – physical, mental, intellectual and the spiritual. When we unite at the physical level it is called sex. A ‘meeting of bodies’. This, like all physical movement is a form of self-expression. Sex may be an expression of love but sex is not love. If there is any form of intention towards self-gratification in our motive then love will be absent and lust will be present. When we sometimes pick up the thoughts of others and vice versa we experience a unity of thought or a ‘meeting of minds’. This can be love at a mental level. A little cold perhaps, but once again our intention and our openness will be the measure of the quality of our love. If our intention is to seek understanding of the other so that we may be able to help them this is love in action. But only when we are free of seeking any recognition for that help. If we mind read to entertain others, that is not love but the attraction of others attention towards ourselves because we want their attention and applause. Once again we are back in neediness. Sometimes we encounter another who ‘feels’ exactly the same as we do, at least they seem to, and so we have a ‘meeting of hearts’. And finally there is the highest form of love or union between two souls. This meeting is not possible unless both souls know and experience themselves as spiritual beings, as souls. Unfortunately, at this time, very few do. Most of us experience ourselves as bodies and that’s why we are so obsessed with the form, shape and look of our own body and the bodies of others. And that is why we confuse sex with love little realising that we are simply indulging in lust. And lust is not love. The deepest love is spiritual and it happens when two souls are able to walk in and through each others worlds with total freedom. There are no barriers, no avoidance, no expectation, no desire for each other…at all…ever. There is complete transparency and each one is so strong within themselves that no matter what the other may say or do they can never be hurt. Once again this high spiritual destination is not easy to see, let alone reach, simply because our attention and energy has become almost constantly anchored ‘down here’ in the physical. All this can be neatly summed up in one question. Do you want to be a rocket or a car? Do you want to continue to mess around down here or raise your conscious awareness up there where the true love is both seen and experienced?
7 Loving your selfIt is often said that you cannot truly love others until you are able to love yourself. But what does this mean? Does loving ourselves mean constantly saying to myself “I love me”? Does loving the self mean giving our self lots of presents and treats? Does loving our self mean we become narcissistic and self obsessed? Fortunately, the answer is no to all of the above. Loving our self is comprised of knowing, understanding and nurturing the self. We need to know someone before we can express an appropriate love for them. And so it is with our self. We need to know our self as we truly are, as a spiritual being. When we realise we have been asleep and under the illusion that we are only physical, almost instantly we see that it is this illusion that has filled our thoughts and feelings with fear and anger i.e. the many forms of suffering which we have given to ourselves. This understanding of our self allows us to transform our consciousness and to give our love for the self its first form, which is self-acceptance. We can accept where we are now without regret. Loving ourself is also the practice of self-forgiveness which is forgetting, dropping, letting go of all the things we thought and did in the past which are causing any suffering to our self in ‘the now’. Self-acceptance and self-forgiveness are acts of love towards ourselves. Love for the self also takes the form of care for the self and nurturing the self looks like time spent in meditation and spiritual study. Not all day, but some period within each day. Only when we have learned to shape our love within our self, for our self, in these ways, will we be able make love visible for others in our day-to-day relationships. And when we make it visible, when we give it expression, it is only then that we know love. Love isnever static. Love acts, love does, love reaches, touches and transforms.
8 Drawing from the source of pure loveThe highest love is Gods love or, if God is not an easy word to bear, then Divine love or pure love. This is the love of the perfect spiritual being, the perfect parent towards the imperfect child where the parent odes not see the child’s imperfections. Just as the flower turns each morning to absorb the light and warmth of the sun we too need to turn each day to absorb the light of truth and warmth of pure love from God, from the Source. This is not the God of a religious belief system, but the personal god that we all share, the one parent and friend that we all share. This is not a conceptual God, nor is God a belief. If we hold God just as a concept or belief in our minds, which is perhaps what we learned as children, we will never know God, never experience the greatest and deepest love. We cannot receive love from a belief just as we cannot have a real relationship with a concept. Instead, it is necessary to cultivate a personal relationship with God through a silent conversation of thoughts and feelings. (to begin with) Hence the need to practice stilling a busy mind. The need to free our feelings from emotional disturbance. God is available to everyone but few of us know how or where to direct our attention. The connecting and absorbing of the love of God is a personal process and requires no go between, should never cost anything and can eventually become a natural part of living each day.
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