Don’t blame Love
The only ones who haven’t experienced broken hearts are the ones who never opened theirs.
After suffering a broken heart, we often become more protective of our emotional vulnerability. Many blame “Love” for their pain and, consciously or unconsciously, resolve to harden their hearts against more “Love.”
Love is not a weapon in Cupid’s quiver. Love is not an accessory in our lives. Love is not a pastime, nor an exercise.
Love is our very Being. Love is who we ARE when the layers of thought, memory and identification are stripped from our psyche. You cannot keep a distance from Love without keeping a distance from your Self.
In fact, it could be said that the most basic gauge of a person’s spiritual evolution is the extent of their Love.
We may not be outwardly mushy and soft, but when our minds and hearts are open, we can’t exclude the rest of humanity.
Realization automatically expands the encompassment of the Heart.
Many people suffer from self-loathing. Some only love themselves. Some love their immediate families, or perhaps the extended family. For some, love expands to include countrymen, race, creed and so on. We divide the world into those we accept, and those who are “Other.”
Love is the most essential thing, the sweetest thing, and the most precious thing, even though Love is not a “thing.” Love brings color to a world that might otherwise seem grey.
Sadly, Love is one of the first things that becomes distorted in Life; love becomes the poison pill, the Mother of Pain.
Our deepest nature consists of Pure Awareness and a “Feeling Nature” that many have described as “Bliss.” Bliss is the pure Joy of Being itself. Our deepest level of satisfaction and happiness is an inseparable part of our Soul.
Our problems begin when the Pure Awareness that we are gets tangled in the stream of thoughts and ideas that form a constant mental dialog in our minds. We weave an ego identity out of our memories and self-reflections, and Pure Awareness forgets itself in witnessing the content of our minds and ego.
Pure Awareness doesn’t go away. It still illumines our whole existence and lends its reality to our thoughts and ideas, whether they are real or not. It’s in the background as the witness of all our thinking.
On this planet of other people and everything else, that “Bliss” that we Are becomes “Love.” Love is our Inner-Bliss-Nature reflected at an object. Love is communing Spirit Essence. The union of Awareness and Love is the sacred marriage that exists within every Heart.
The problem with Love also arises when our Spirit becomes aware of other individuals. We develop an illusory identity, a separate idea of ourselves. Love becomes something that we imagine that we can gain and lose. We go into the business of trading in love.
Pure Love doesn’t go away either. It becomes distorted though, and lends its power to our emotional states, whether they are real or not. It’s in the background as the power of feeling.
Instead of Love being something we experience within ourselves, as ourselves, it becomes a commodity we seek from others. We judge the validity of our lives and ourselves by how much “love” we think we are getting from the outside.
Our mentally created self-image is insecure and tenuous. It depends on continual reinforcement from outside events that we associate with being “loved.”
Do others spend money on us? Do they invite us to events? Do they say nice things that we want to hear? Do they endure unpleasant chores for our sake? Do they want to have sex with us? Do they express their appreciation and gratitude?
All these things pass for the perception of ‘love.’ They can be given or taken away. We have something to lose, and losing ‘love’ in our lives is a source of deep pain.
So while Love is the essence of our Soul, it becomes the external need that we can’t get enough of. Love becomes the drug that intoxicates us. To chase our addiction to love, we are willing to suffer abuse, to be exploited, and to pretend to be somebody we are not.
If we feel that love has rejected us, we are willing to cut the heart out of our life to protect us from the pain that threatens to negate our very self.
So while Love is our innermost essential nature, it becomes the elusive external goal that our confused self craves but can never get enough of.
That’s why:
Love where the Real and Unreal Meet
What you make of that is what you make of yourself.
How do you return to the Love within you, as you, that can never be taken away? How can you heal your hearts so that opening to Love doesn’t threaten you?
First let’s look at they ways that love becomes distorted in everyday life.
It often starts in the family.
A child naturally takes mother and father as God for all practical purposes. This link is huge and contains everything from Pure Love to the body’s basic survival programming. Before the child realizes that Mom and Dad aren’t Gods, the child will often blame itself for these Gods not answering baby’s expectations.
Love gets mixed up with meeting our needs and expectations.
Throughout the Family process, the ego-identity of each member trades in love for the sake of its needs and self-validation.
The feeling of dependency threatens the emerging identity of the child so it seeks power and independence. The child finally realizes that Mom and Dad aren’t Gods and perhaps that realization betrays the trust of its earlier love. The child wants better treatment and may trade in giving and withholding love as a strategy to have its way.
The identity of the parents is validated in having their children excel and adopt the parent’s values and beliefs. Parents may even project their own goals and aspirations onto the child and vicariously seek success through their kids. They often devise a variety of manipulations to coerce the child to conform. Unwittingly, they begin to trade in love.
The kids may compete with each other for “love” in its assumed forms. One child may be smarter, prettier, nicer or more athletic than another. That child may likely get more positive feedback, consciously or unconsciously.
A child who compares their self-image with their mental images of the other kids builds the wall of ego-identity higher and higher. This ego-identity is an illusion whether it belongs to a “successful” child who feels an increased drive to excel and receive more “love” or whether it belongs to the “Black Sheep” of the family who feels rejected and left out.
Perhaps the underachieving child will react by hardening their heart to “love” or seek negative attention through self-destructive acts.
Each family member uses implied threats of giving or withholding love. These manipulations destroy the potential for nurturing unconditional love. The trading in love breeds conflict. When we imagine that love is received in gifts and words as a reward for good behavior, we are making a shallow transaction to sooth the insecurities of our imagined selves.
All our emotional reactions involving our self-idea reinforce our illusory relationship with an imaginary self that always feels a lack of love.
Real love underlies all these family dynamics. We still have Love as our Inner Being. It’s just that it gets tangled and confused in the course of our lives. We forget ourselves and look for love in others. Our Inner Love lends power and reality to our drama with external love. Forgetting our Inner Love makes us vulnerable to the pain of loneliness and abandonment.
The question of Love is twice as tricky when romantic love is in question. Romantic love is one of the most compelling temporary forces on the Planet. Romantic love doesn’t last, it’s a time-release phenomena.
Blasphemy?!
Romantic love borrows it authenticity from True Love but adds an intoxicating mix of the body’s neuro-chemical imperatives. We also share life-force with a romantic partner, which creates a union that hurts to separate.
Our Spirit’s adventure on this planet comes through inhabiting an earth suit, a system of tubes covered with meat and skin that we call our body. We are ruthlessly wired to our body’s external perceptions and it’s internal chemistry. When we don’t have enough to eat, our bodies have a feedback mechanism called hunger that loudly proclaims its needs to us. We have feedback mechanisms for thirst, cold, physical pain, and all the needs of the body.
You might have noticed that sex is one of those needs of the body.
And sex goes beyond the act itself as the body has inherited the biological and evolutionary instincts for procreation and child rearing that perpetuates our species. Our internal feedback system of neuro-chemical feedback rewards and motivates our mating responses. It pushes us to come together, make babies, and stay attached to one another long enough for those babies to grow up a bit.
Then it lets us go.
Of course, our Real-Love-Nature underlies our romantic connection and our love isn’t 100% illusion, but when it is mixed up with our body’s responses, we can be confused and, in the end, hurt.
Next, our Love gets mixed up with our system of Life Force Energy.
Our “Energy Body” bridges the spectrum between our physical bodies and our Inner Spirit. When we feel choked up with emotion, that’s the energy center in the throat. When we feel compassion in the center of our chests, that’s the energy center of the Heart. When we have a sickening feeling of disgust in our belly, that’s also an energy center (chakra) that we’re feeling.
We get life force through our food, our breathing, and from Spirit Itself. Our Life-Force-Body reflects the totality of who we are as individuals. We can sense the energy body of those we meet on an intuitive level, consciously or unconsciously. Sometime we just feel good or bad about somebody just from his or her vibration.
Energy is like electricity; it flows from one polarity to another. We each express many levels and flavors of energy. There are also flavors of energy that we don’t express as much. When our energy compliments (or even triggers) the energy of another, the power flows back and forth and we call it “Chemistry.”
Energy chemistry can draw us to people whose attitudes and lifestyle don’t otherwise suit us.
As we spend time with people, we share energy with them. The more intimate we are with them, the more of their energy we share. At some time, our energy becomes so intertwined with our partner’s that the energy gets equalized and the flow isn’t as powerful anymore. We feel like we lost our “magic.”
Romantic love sometimes ends in separation. Perhaps one partner leaves to seek new magic. The abandoned one is used to having the partner’s energy to feel complete. They are wired to a circuit that’s now incomplete. It takes time to heal the energetic wound and learn to live on our own energy alone once again. It hurts. Don’t seek a magic cure, it heals with time and through returning to your Real Self.
How could that intoxicating love that seemed so real abandon you and negate your very worth? How could you have loved one who now seems so vulgar and distant? The romantic-love-drug wears off. The magic chemistry fades. Our egos take the defensive. Denial and anger eclipse what beauty was shared.
If you have developed a Real Love that’s beyond the love-drug-chemistry, then you have a Real Relationship. If you don’t, you are left empty, disappointed, and finally angry.
Romantic Love borrows its reality from the Love that We Are in our Hearts but becomes stupefied in our egos and the body’s sexual-feedback-soup of desire, need, and instinct.
These many levels of communion and interaction in relationship are a part of life. I’m not condemning them. Just don’t lose the Center of your Inner Self and think that Love is outside you. You are an Ocean of Love and nobody can take that away.
Romantic love evokes the high and noble sweetness of drowning oneself in the sea of union, and yet comes crashing down on the hard shores of our individual insecurity, vulnerability, and self-image.
Of course, our egos receive a brutal beating in attempting to feel good about ourselves in all our relationships with other confused humans. The humans at home, at work, and in the street tend to live in their own inner worlds and fail to love us properly.
The power of the Love we’ve lost within ourselves makes the pain of losing imaginary love feel real and devastating.
So we blame love for our pain.
We numb ourselves from caring to protect ourselves from further hurt. The pain we think love is causing us is actually our ego-identity suffering its attachments, fears, and insecurities.
Don’t blame love.
You can never make a phony idea of yourself into the Real You. The imagined self can never receive enough love because it is based on illusions. It can never really ‘be loved’ even by you, because it’s just a collection of ideas, concepts, imaginations, revised history, and mental ramblings. It can’t “feel’ the love, only imagine it.
You are not the collections of thoughts that you think you are. The Real You is Love itself; go BE.
Please don’t think that I’m saying that you don’t love your family or your spouse. Our Pure Awareness is always illumining our experience and our Pure Love is always at the center of our Being.
Consciously or unconsciously, we experience the Peace and Love of our Real Nature to the extent that we’re not consumed by our attachments and mental/emotional chatter.
As long as you think you are such and such a person, with a particular set of good and bad qualities, who is seeking something called love in the responses of other confused humans, you are asking for drama and disappointment.
We live in-between confused love and Real Love. Most of us have a taste of each. Coming Home to True Love is our spiritual path.
Until we get Real with Ourselves, love will always contain illusions and pain.
Return to your Center in the Here and Now. You will discover that that Love is an inseparable expression of your very Being.
Love can never leave you. You will taste its sweetness in every moment, with every person.
Real happiness is celebrated in the communion of Love.
It is experienced full of Life and Heartfelt Presence.
It happens when you share your Essential Being from your heart with the Heart of another. You experience the Love and it cannot be taken from you.
It still nurtures and uplifts you even if the receiver isn’t capable of understanding it. You give it without condition because it is who you Are.
Everyone looks perfect and enlightened to an Enlightened Heart. Sadly, they open their mouths and prove otherwise.
Every person harbors an infinite potential of Peace and Love. If you speak to that Inner Spirit in someone, it brings out the best in them.
Know yourself, Free your Love. Let go of your pain.
I wish you All the Love in the World.
Baba
