3.4. Love

Love is the most ecstatic experience we have available to us. However "falling into love", loving blindly, or being thrown around by feelings of love, may be very hurtful indeed. For love to be truly ecstatic several things are needed, the most important of which is to understand that what we love can never be taken away from us, for the only thing we ever loved was love itself.

How does this translate to practice? First of all if you love someone this generally implies both a desire to be united with her and a desire for growth in freedom. The desire for unity generally has two ways: we want to give and we want to take or to possess. The combination of the two generates the unity, "two bodies and one soul" or something in that line. Pain generally occurs when we give but the other one does not come. We cannot understand the reluctance, since all we want is give, and make grow, and happiness for the other. So we pursue the other and try to make him/her feel miserable when not with us. We find it difficult to understand how the loved one can be happy without our love, our delightful light. He/she is our love. It is the love I find in her/him. In her smile, her willingness to help others, her want to be more, I find her to be my love. Therefore I want to be one with her. It is like I found a lost part of me. And the world looks so new and fresh and full of love because there is at least one more spot in the world where the light of love emerges.

To be entirely honest, we should love everyone and everything, for that love, the one that makes you so special, the one that makes you who you are, is all around, in the flowers and the fields and the persons young and old. It expresses itself in infinite varieties, through pain and anger, through smiles and embraces, through knowledge and skill, through pleasure and well-being, through the attempt to be more, and through the attempt to dissolve into existence... everything is an act of love. But we are just men and women, we cannot really understand things from such an impersonal point of view, and so we only love that to which we can relate. We love a particular person in a particular state of mind with a particular set of goals and attitudes. When the person changes we sometimes cease to love her. We cannot conceive how the wonderment that we saw before can still reside in this apparent stranger on our house, on our life.

In a very strong and deep sense, love only hurts when it is blind. More precisely it is because we cannot love totally that we suffer. If we were capable of seeing behind the shadows and masks, we would understand that what we love in that person is in fact her love. And that her love and our love are in fact just two different shapes or flavors of a single love. That's why we want unity so much, we want to reunite what has been stranded, we want to encounter, to live love again, in full. Here is another part, in this wife, in this kiss, in her hands and heart and acceptance, and so I delve deep into it, to savor it, to nurture me, to give it, because I have love inside too. And the two of us grow, our sense of love more fulfilled, more in tune, we grow into and out of love and never leave it completely.

The reason we cannot loose love is simple to understand: what we love is the beauty of something or someone. For instance we may love one Mozart's music, but what that means is not that you love the particular physical notes, but whatever great beauty they transmitted to you in such plentifulness that you loved it. How can someone take your love away from you? If you love something you have to know it, if you know it, then it is within you. The physical notes were just a way for you to get to know that beauty in the first place. Once you knew it, it is yours for as long as you love it. If we are immortal souls capable of keeping our love then it will remain with you forever. If we are mortal beings and if our love will die with us, then, for as long as you love what the music brought to you, you will keep it with you. When you cease to be there will no longer be any "you" to feel apart from the music. So, when death comes (supposing we, as consciousness, do indeed die), all separation fades away.

In any case as long as we are alive and able to love no one and nothing can take away what we love. But we must distinguish quite clearly the objects that introduced us to our loves from what we actually love. What we love is not the body of that woman (just like it wasn't the notes of the melody), but what that body speaks of... Just like we cannot really say what a Mozart melody speaks of (we understand it in our hearts, but there are no words that came close to explain it), so we can also not entirely explain what that body speaks about, that beauty that attracts us so much. Nevertheless, we understand it, at a non-linguistic level, we understand its beauty, we understand so many things that we are unable to explain about what we love. Including the understanding that it is not the body, not the face, not what someone said, or did, or will do, by itself. Once again, all these things are just open doors, or trampolines for something that we find much more valuable, incomparable more valuable than its physical reflection. That which we love, nothing can take away. No physical distance nor even death can take apart, just like the destruction of all the physical instruments would not destroy our love for a melody. Although we would be unable to heart it with our physical hears, the beauty that it had unraveled in our hearts is still with us.

The only thing that could kill love is lack of love. It ultimately depends on us.