On my arrival to India, my beloved was diagnosed with leukaemia.
It has been a roller coaster ride of reflection, and more powerfully of hope, transformation and growth. A shattering and re-piecing of life’s puzzle that has been mirrored in our business and family life.
We believe all things are for the good – and in ever knock down there is the promise of double the opportunity.
….. and there is the question of loves very nature …. what is love anyway? OK there is lust and attraction. But is that really love? Or is lust just another form of greed?
As we have rebuilt the shattered fragments of our lives I wrote, and rewrote to you. Still, I feel this message is incomplete.
So What Is Love?
i reallty want to know your opinion.
In the meantime, here are a few of my suggestions:
Infatuation is passive, a victim of attraction to an illusion.
Love is discerning. Love actively seeks to appreciate the intrinsic worth of the beloved.
Lust seeks fulfilment and excitement, it is heavy and focused on the object of desire. You are separate and dissipates in satisfaction.
Love experiences fulfilment and offers tranquillity It is light and restorative.
Greed seeks to possess yet paradoxically makes us a slave of the object we desire.
Love is also an oxymoron.
To love I must love, respect and care for a person. To respect someone I must love them as they are. Not who I want turn them into.
So I am faced with a contradiction. I want what is best for her and yet, she – like me – rarely show their best.
So love means accepting your beloved as she is while fully believing and supporting their potential.
Afterall, there is nothing virtual in love. You cannot love with only your head through the door – even if separated by distance- you must be fully there. You must fully enter the through door and into the world of the beloved – emtionally and spiritually.
You must be fully present and committed.
Love seeks to unreservedly give, and the spiritual incorporation of lover and beloved in their very being.
Perhaps these are steps from lower to higher planes of expression. We can debate whether love is a biological trick or a mystical seeking of union with the divine, however man does search for a life of meaning.
The passion for divinity has poetically been described like lovers.
Abrahamic faiths describe human life as a love affair between the soul and God. The Indian Bhagavad Gita claims when you love you know God.
Love is not seen as some abstract force out there – distinct from an objective world. We are all connected and separateness is only an illusion. Love, say the mystics, is a refection of divine unity in a world of duality.
Love is an all encompassing force. Love means loving all creation – and the divinity inside ourselves and all other created beings.
Mystics see Love even in gravity and other forces of attraction. The maternal instinct is another higher form. In humans love can go beyond instinct and be developed consciously.
Nature also teaches us the need for balance. If attraction is Love, then opposite forces of repulsion are a natural consequence. A good lesson, for lovers so hungry to connect – for Love to endure it must be complemented with an equal measure of restraint.
The yearning for connection is so powerful that it can distort and even destroy love.
Consider an electrical circuit with its positive and negative polarity. Electricity works because it is constrained in a circuit – it seeks the shortest possible route, but needs resistance along wires to work.
Like electricity, passion seeks the shortest route – and without resistance it short circuits! To last love needs boundaries – just as electricity needs wires (or silicon chips) .
Two sides of the same coin?
Since, the act of falling in Love is spontaneous and not the act of obligation, the rediscovery of a sense of what drove our romantic passion can ignite creative and intellectual contribution to the world.
However, since Love may begin an unreasoning animal, we often later see the need to think things through, then finally Love and reason may synthesise a unifying bond. To act consciously.
You can consciously develop love. Yet, the kaleidoscope of experience colours the quality of our love experience. True Love may be blocked by the lust, greed and infatuation that may drive us to say “I Love you”.
Lovers brings out the best and worst in us. Our strengths and weaknesses are appreciated and exposed. There are joys and tensions that force us to face ourselves. Intimacy can either help or hinder our spiritual growth.
Add to this, the challenge that I can only perceive life filtered through my past experience. However, what I see in my beloved is influenced by my experiences, culture and the differences between the sexes.
I may try to understand, but it takes time to truly understand another’s past and their traumas.
The obstacles to love and life can be seen as shells separating us from integration. Mystically, life’s “negatives” in an otherwise uniform plenum of divine light – the representations of God’s intellectual, spiritual and emotional characteristics.
You cannot just switch off Love.
It is to easy to seek quick fixes to relationship symptoms rather than address the real causes, our values and mission in life.
While short term flings seek pleasure without ever developing as a self actualising person, love forces us to look into the mirror of our soul. Or intimacy may sink into ‘a relationship’ – a thing separate to ourselves, rather than the daily experience of ourselves and our beloved.
Love makes demands and its links are varied and deep. As we grow within, our relationships mirror our soul.
So while we may meet our partner in love as well as lust, shared joys and sorrows force us on the path or realisation.
Are you prepared to cave crevices of your own soul? To face yourself? Either we face ourselves or our partners – and children – will throw back in our faces the qualities we try to hide in ourselves.
(How often do we see repressed parents have promiscuous kids?)
A life of love offers the creative tension and spiritual dynamic toward self discovery, solutions and oneness of being.
Once realised, real Love offers us freedom because it comes from a position of completeness. Undiluted lust comes from a position of lack – seeking illusory completeness in another. Love freely offered because it is not from insecurity. It is from honest appreciation of our and our lovers strengths and limitations.
We can start looking at the world differently. Rather than competing, we see that conflict is like an argument between two hands over which one is superior. Both are needed to get a firm hold on a life of Love.
So can we make love work? Or is it some abstract romanticised, spiritualised dream?
Love requires we grow from instinctual lusts, then a more refined affection based on conscious choice and then to a love beyond ourselves.
To grow from the physical through emotional mental and spiritual bodies. This the path of life referred too by the Huna tradition of Hawaii, and follows a well defined path from instinctive lust through to a maturing affection. To grow from unconscious to conscious and then to an unconscious awareness.
(In India it they might say from the Gross body, the subtle body, the mental body and then reach realisation.)
Isn’t that a little too abstract – to out there?
Love works in the real world.
But then isn’t that what makes love beautiful? ….. and so rare? When practical and sensitive caring meet in the beauty of real life?
In the European Middle Ages love was described as unreachable. The Cathar inspired doctrine of courtly love taught that “true love” was not the ordinary human love between husband and wife but rather the worship of a feminine saviour, a mediator between God and man.
It has left a twisted unrealistic view of romantic love, claims love historian Robert Johnson. For example, convict Australian women were described as Whores or Gods Police.
Natural spirituality describes a more holistic love life.
Kabbalah speak of bringing the divine into the real world. Huna calls it the Path of Mastery: when I bring take the higher than Conscious mind to the unconscious and then conscious mind.
We master Love, when we can bring it to the world of daily life.
To do that we need to follow the sage advice from Ancient Delphi: “Know Thyself”.
Only then can we be strong enough to offer our whole soul, heart and mind in the art of Love.
So, what do you think?
I want to know what love mean s to you.
Please share your thoughts!
I am particularly interested in publishing your own ideas – and articles – on what love is.
For example, what is love according to Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism or Judaism? In your part of the global village- how is love understood? What is its customs?
Do you share in unique marriage or dating rituals?
Do you have an opinion?
I would love to publish it.
LOVE? by ~xTwistofFatex
