Love?

This thing they call love. I have been trying to understand it. I’m concerned about our understanding of it and am trying to correlate what I’ve been hearing with what I’ve been seeing. There’s so much heartache to go around, but not much love it seems. There’s more misery and anxiety than there’s true joy. Though when you listen around, you hear everybody claiming he is about love and is giving it. So how come the world is still short of this glowing and ever-flowing energy? How come we hardly feel it in the air?

If you look deeply enough at the situation, you would find that there seems to be some misunderstanding about the whole thing. Or not. The latter signifying some conscious perverted use or manipulation of the emotion.

My confusion stems from the fact that a lot of people appear to be miserably in love. When love is supposed to be synonymous with joy.

And the incongruence between the actions, the words, and the feelings/energies.

Could it be that the rules of the relationships and of the society have rendered the whole thing topsy-turvy?

For one thing, it has become a game. About who’s got whom. The acquisition of a relationship or lover, like of wealth, power, and toys. The emphasis is on having someone. That might explain the disappointments, the hurts, and the disenchantment – the basic misunderstanding which has given rise to wrong expectations. As when one couldn't accept that his beloved toy could take off just like that and become another's in an instant. Why do we find it so romantic to be owned by somebody else, by the way?

We seem to have conveniently fitted love inside the win-lose frame of mind.

Too, we seem to have used the word love just to get us a relationship. The promise to love, and the promise to keep on loving, till the end of time. We buy a relationship with a promise. However, coming from a promise, loving becomes an obligation. Robs the love and the gift of their essence.

How well do we really understand love? Let’s see:

There is the love that just loves and needs nothing. And there’s the other version, which wants, needs, possesses, demands, and fears. One is complete, whereas the other needs another to complete. One gives freely, the other computes returns. One is effortless, the other is toiling. One is at peace, the other is at war. One is calm, the other stormy. One expands, the other restricts. One is healthy, the other not quite so. One is rich, the other a beggar. In terms of energies, one is flowing out, the other sucking in.

I love you. I need you. Do these two statements mean the same thing?

The emptiness hurts, the wanting aches, the neediness demands, and the fear torments and accuses.

But love, on the other hand, inspires, frees, heals, enriches, and transforms.

Is it just semantics? Or is it our love of illusions?

What are we about really? My challenge is about calling the spade a spade. If you say you are loving, is that what you see happening inside you? You're not coming from need or fear?

Coud it be that our cry is for the lack of love inside us then? Why don’t we look at that squarely instead? And not kid ourselves that it's something else?

Then maybe we can enter relationships with a view towards exploring love instead of promising it. With only a few basic agreements along the way. Must we start with proving? When we haven't probed our feelings yet?

Maybe truth is the way. By looking deeply at what really is going on. Maybe our minds need to be free of the lies and the wrong ideas first. Begins with truly seeing what really is there inside us. Maybe the truth will set the real love within us free. Free from that impostor that calls itself love when…

Sniff, sniff… is that really love? Or isn't that fear?
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Give love to know what it feels like to do that. Try it. Expecting something in return seems to forfeit the whole idea. Although it is given, as the law, that what you put out there comes back to you, don’t make a case of it. The law takes care of it itself. You have no business taking the law into your hands. Your business is to pay attention to your own experiences, and to your own feelings and choices/ decisions, and to your world. You watch them come and you watch them go.

To give, to love . . . What you are after is the feeling in the doing. What happens to your gift is not as important as knowing what giving is all about. For the feeling leads you to yourself. The feeling takes you to your true treasures. You are rich. You can only give naturally. Love works naturally through you.

In the meantime ask, why do you feel you need love? How did you lose your richness? Observe, can you claim you are loving when you are needing the love? You are only human, you would say. Perhaps you misunderstood. Being human is the tall order. A human being is part divine and part beast. And being human is when you’re more divine than beast. Choose to come from your higher self then, and it becomes a different story.

Anytime you tire of the dramas and the strong emotions – the thrills of the new highs and the new lows – there’s that road that beckons us. May not be easy. But it’s worth it. The true calling. The real things: real peace, real treasures, real security, real respect, real intelligence, real love, the real you.