What's Love Got To Do With It?

What’s love got to do with it?
What’s love but a second hand emotion?

Is love a second hand emotion? The first thing to consider here is that anything we attempt to define, love or otherwise, “is” experienced by each individual exactly as they believe it to be. My belief and corresponding experience to the contrary does not alter the personal reality of another. So, In order to meet the experience of the statement “love is a second hand emotion” you necessarily must first own the belief that it is. What then would be the first hand emotion? If we were to answer honestly, most of the time, we would have to admit that the clear 1st place winner in this race would be fear. The Reality 500, the ego at the wheel, scorching around the track in desperate fear of losing a race that the Soul knows really cannot be lost.

If you have the courage, and are willing to admit you may not have transcended completely yet and may have a few fear based beliefs left in the tank, observe yourself for just 30 minutes as you interact with your life and notice how many of your beliefs, emotions and actions can be traced directly to fear. Then consider that you probably take many of these “beliefs” as such absolute truth it would never even occur to you to question them.

Try this experiment sometime: ask a person what they are afraid of. Their answer to the question can reveal how much in fear they are and just how deeply in denial they are about it. The person who angrily responds, “I am not afraid of anything”, fears you getting a look at their fear and even more importantly, for them, fears knowing it themselves. The ego is driving around in rush hour circles again.

Seeing our own fear clearly for what it is, a belief that we hold, an emotion that we can change, is made immensely more difficult by giving the ego a license to drive. When we identify with the ego as who we are, we fear. Period. If the ego were truly who we are that would make practical good sense. We are not the ego alone and the belief that we are makes it all the more difficult for our Soul to take its rightful place as the director of the show.

Your Soul, the spark of consciousness within your physical body is who you really are. We are the creators of this reality. Our belief that we are the ego, our mind, or our body alone is the reason so many of us lead lives of quiet and not so quiet desperation. We never really find and sustain joy, hope and peace, as these belong to the realm of the Soul and, who you really are. The ego alone can only offer cheap imitations of the joy, hope and peace our Soul is fully capable creating and sustaining for itself.

The ego, the mind, and the body are essential tools and gifts of the highest order, that our Soul may navigate the physical plane and accomplish our purpose here. Listen quietly and you can hear your Soul gently re-minding you that the hammer, the level and the saw are not the house.