love
Love is something I have struggled with understanding most of my life. I am still learning about it. I’d like to look at love from the personal perspective and from the boundless perspective, and then see how they fit together as one.
When we step back from the sense of being the personal separate self, we back into the boundless. Here it is noticed that everything arises in the Boundless; thoughts, emotions, separate bodies, even the one that notices these appearances. Sometimes when we step back there is stillness, sometimes spaciousness, sometimes emptiness, and sometimes love. Whichever quality we step back into everything is appearing within that, and therefore is that. When we step back into the boundless and all is love, we are that love. This is not the limited personal love that can only love a few people, this is love that the entire universe is compose of. When I have backed up into the big love I tend to refer to it as an aspect of the Divine, instead of the boundless. We are all born from the love. One way to understand this is that we came from love and have a spark of love within our hearts. When we feel love from another, it touches the spark of love inside and activates it.
All children need love in order to survive. Some of us got a lot, and some of us not so much. In most cases the love we got was from people that had a limited understanding of love, so the love they were able to share was conditional and incomplete. Even when love is limited it is from the boundless or the divine.
We can think of ourselves as having an open portal that can receive the flow of love. At the bottom of the portal is the original spark from the love of the boundless. If this portal is wide and open love can flow through freely igniting the spark within into a flame. If the portal is small and clogged just a small amount of love can flow through. This is also true for giving love. Love flows both ways, if our portal is small only a small amount can flow through, to be shared with others. This is a metaphor, but it can help us understand. When we are in the process of expanding, letting go of limitations, we may feel like our hearts are opening, this can feel very physical.
If as children we received just a small amount of love our internal flame will be small, and we will feel the need for more love, and it will seem that we can only get this from another person. So we begin looking for someone that can fill us with love, and make us complete.
If we had parents with a limited capacity to love we often blame ourselves, believing that if we were more lovable they would have been able to love us. Not understanding that they were not loved enough to have a strong enough flame to share with us. For children, the world revolves around them so whatever happens is somehow their fault. This becomes a shadow belief. It lurks in the background influencing us to look for people like our parents and try to get them to love us. With the unconscious hope that if these people who are like our parents can love us then we have fixed the problem, we have become lovable. On the personal level it seems that the problem is that these new people also have a limited capacity to love. Which implies we have to find people that are more able to love. On a deeper level the problem is that we are looking for love in another person, rather than understanding how to connect with the love from the boundless.
Most of us spend a large part of our lives looking for love from another person. Somehow when we first fall in love we feel full, and complete. The promise that this person can fill us and we can fill them is intoxicating. It blows open the heart portal, igniting the spark into a flame, so that more love can flow in and out. This love is actually from the divine, but because it seems to have been activated from this other person we become focused on receiving it from them. When the other person is distracted, or angry and we can’t feel the love our portal begins to close. Now we have less to share and can only receive a small amount. Some of us become obsessed with trying to get this person to love us more, so we can feel full again. Some of us leave and go looking for a new person. Throughout this process there is an attempt to either remake the other person or to remake ourselves in order to recreate the formula that originally seemed to opened the heart portal.
The solution to this very painful process is to stop looking to get love from another person. We may hear that we should look inside for love instead of outside. This can be confusing. We may start to look for qualities that are loveable about us. Maybe we are kind, or creative, or smart. This doesn’t work because we will invariably notice the unlovable parts of ourselves; we get irritable, we aren’t pretty enough, we need to lose weight, etc. Someone may say, well you need to love those parts as well. None of this will ultimately work.
This kind of pain can lead us to want to know the Truth about life and ourselves. This exploration involves letting go of beliefs and identity. As we empty out there is more space, we begin to feel less solid, less separate. Our boundaries become porous. The love that is an aspect of the boundless begins to flow in. We begin to be aware of the other aspects as well; stillness, consciousness, spaciousness, etc
This may begin by stepping back and watching the process. Wanting to be loved, feeling unlovable, etc. Noticing that all this arises in you. You are the one watching, so you cannot be the one that is unlovable. Then another step back and we are the boundless, and all of this, the longing for love, feeling unlovable, the watcher, is all arising in this spacious emptiness.
All love is divine love in nature. As it flows through us because we believe we are separate people, the love mixes with our human beliefs, traumas, identity. This mixture creates a kind of love that is sticky, not pure. It comes with conditions, and limitations. Peeling away the identity, releasing the beliefs, will allow the love from the boundless to flow freely. As we recognize that we are the boundless, the divine, there really is no separation, we know that we are love itself.
