Loving Love Not A Person

The freedom to be ourselves completely mentally and physically and feel safe sharing our joy of being alive when in a relationship with another mind and body is a beautiful, powerful natural experience compared to some of the most beautiful experiences human beings can have.

However, believing ourselves to be a person that is separate from our environment and not at one with it, if we are unconsciously confused on this point, we may think that another person is facilitating this love we feel. We are in love with them as the object of our desire. We may sincerely believe that this mind and body we are perceiving is the reality we are in love with and not see that this mind and body is simply a manifestation of the same consciousness as we are and that is the actual experience we are loving. It is that consciousness we love, not the apparent form of the mind and body we perceive.

Forgetting this, the pure joy of love we may have felt is tinged with emotional attachment to another entity as we become confused about the source of this love. We come to believe we cannot experience love without this relationship with this other person, who is the source of love. We forget or fail to see entirely that we are experiencing the joy of falling in love with the love which is our essential nature.

But on closer examination, if we care to be honest with ourselves, we see that the quality of love always arises from within. Finding a partner releases it because we can relax physically and mentally (if it is a good match!), but it always comes from within. If we believe it is a result of the relationship, we will put undue psychological pressure on the relationship. This will disrupt the natural flow of the beautiful dance of two individual expressions of consciousness by trying to control this flow somehow. Many relational problems stem from this misunderstanding of the source of love, as this attachment and its associated fear distort our abilities to manage the inevitable practical, communication, and commitment aspects of being in a relationship with another. We end up putting too many expectations on the relationship, and in the end, this is all likely to increase the likelihood of a breakdown in the relationship.

Falling into this trap is painful, yet it reminds us, hopefully, to find the trustworthy source of our love and freedom, which is always from the Awareness that is our true nature. The pain of unrequited love is particularly poignant. It is the ultimate objectification of love. The results most of us have experienced, we know, is a frantic, exhausting and futile mental hacking of our characters to make them fit what we perceive is that of another. We should not punish ourselves if this happens to us because we cannot help falling in love with love; it's what we do and is always the underlying intention of life. As many poets have attested, unrequited love is often the cause of spiritual seeking.

So if it happens, and we end up in pain, we may try to be very kind to ourselves, either remembering or realising for the first time that what we are in love with really is the quality of love, freedom, creativity and other attributes and that the mind-body we are in a relationship with is a manifestation of these qualities, and not to become attached to the form. Then we can discover the constant joy and freedom of falling in love with the consciousness we essentially are and be in love with everything, not just one thing.

Love

Freyja