Do YOU Know Love?

There are four common confusions about LOVE which most of us will assimilate at an early age. They are innocently passed down from generation to generation, strengthened and magnified by Hollywood in particular and by marketing in general. They are built into our language and our culture and yet they only serve to take us further from love as they create stress within our self and conflict within our relationships.

 

1. Love is mistaken for DESIRE

When you go to the movies and watch the classic love story there is usually a moment when he says to her, “Darling, I love you.” But what he really ‘means’ is, “I want you. I want to be with you. I want you to be mine...tonight!”.  And of course she reciprocates with an, “I love you too.” Which often means, “I’ve got you!”  But true love doesn’t desire or possess. True love doesn’t want anything. Authentic love is already complete and its only intention is to connect and to give, not acquire.

2. Love is mistaken for ATTACHMENT

When we say, “I love my football team or I love my new car or I love my garden.” It’s not love. What we really ‘mean’ is, “I am attached to my football team, I am attached to my new car”. And love is not attachment, if for no other reason than all attachment causes fear, and fear in this dualistic world is the opposite of love. Fear is love distorted by attachment.

3. Love is mistaken for DEPENDENCY

When we say, “I love my cocaine. I love my morning coffee. I love the food they serve”… this is to confuse love with dependency. Love is not dependent on anything. We are really saying we believe these things make us happy. They seem to, but it’s not ‘authentic happiness’, only a temporary stimulation or relief from suffering. 

4. Love is mistaken for IDENTIFICATION

More commonly some say, “I love my nation, I love my country.” Again, this is not love it’s identification. We are identifying with a nationality, which in itself is a mistake. The self has no nationality. Love does not identify with anything that is not itself, which is everything! As soon as we identify with something that we are not the ego takes birth, suffering arises and love is impossible.

It is these illusions that keep us searching for love. In our search for love we will look in almost every corner of the world. We seek love as acceptance and approval in our many relationships.

We desire the ideal love in the fiction of the perfect romance. We expect to find love in what we do, what we acquire and even in the places we go. There are always temporary satisfactions on these roads, but disappointment is also inevitable, until we realize they are dead-ends.

 It may take us a little time to realize that the jewel in the crown of the human spirit cannot be found anywhere but in our own heart. It was, is and always will be there, which is ‘here’!

To search for love is to avoid love. And yet how are we to know this when the habit of searching is so deep and, in many ways, a perverted comfort in itself. How are we to know love, when we continue to mistakenly believe that we need to acquire it, earn it or even win it? Intuitively we know that it is only by opening our own heart and in the giving of our self, without condition, that love can start to flow into and through our life.

Only by acts of selfless kindness, unconditional forgiveness and limitless compassion is love felt. Only by the intention to benefit ‘the other’ before the self, is love made real and realized. And yet, even this is only possible when it is not a deliberated act, when motive is innocent. The motivation ‘to love’ is not love, for love needs no motive.

It is the satisfaction of all need. When love is realized, there are no needs. In ‘reality’, there never was.

Only when we can bring an end to wanting, taking, keeping and even giving in the ‘name’ of love, is the jewel in the crown able to shine again. And when its light is seen it is found to be in the place where it cannot be sought and can never leave, which is here, and in the only time it can ever exist, which is now.

In that moment, all the accumulated mythologies of love fall away. In that moment the words most used in the affairs of humankind, “I love you,” are transformed from an illusion into something closer to the truth, “I am love for you.” And then into the deepest truth that words are inadequate to describe, “I am love.”

And then on to the final enlightenment, free from the need to describe, free of all concepts, simply “I am.”

And even then, beyond enlightenment, into the ‘silence of being’, a silence that both embraces and enjoins all and everything.

Such is the nature of love.
It is what ‘I am’ and it is what ‘you are’.
It is.
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 Ross Galán, NLP Spiritual Life Coach

at the SpiritualLife Coaching School