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Monday, July 25, 2011

What is Love?

All you need is love.

- Lennon and McCartney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtS4ef0vqhU&feature=channel_video_title

Love like consciousness is ultimately indefinable. It can be recognized, experienced even talked about but not captured conceptually. Like consciousness, it cannot be objectified or measured. Essentially love is consciousness and consciousness is love. Love is the creative force of the universe, which is a drop from the limitless ocean of Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Hatred, fear, apathy, etc. are all attempts to retreat from love, to shield ourselves from its overwhelming force.

The individual ego has become a structure erected in defense against love. When we identify with the limited body mind vehicle through which consciousness explores this particular level of vibration, we tend to pull back, to contract ourselves. We retreat into “I, me and mine.” Then we set out to seek love, feel lonely and lost and otherwise indulge ourselves in our bittersweet misery. It’s a cosmic game of hide and seek. Unfortunately the game turns horrendous and ugly when we resort to violence, aggression and terror in our misguided searching.

Is love a feeling? Is it emotion and desire? Egoic love is where we start from on our journey back to Self. Eros propels us to reach beyond our boundaries, beyond our self-infatuation. However, if one does not love oneself. If one is tortured by self-loathing then that is simply projected onto the other. If one is narcissistically wounded and nurses beliefs of unworthiness, it becomes very difficult to enter into a loving relationship. True love, true healing means reconnecting with the substratum of loving awareness which is one’s own being.

A healthy loving relationship necessarily includes healthy boundaries, but the boundaries are porous. It requires structure but the structure is flexible, even fluid. It also requires a mutual relatedness to the greater being which includes and surrounds us. Not necessarily society, which is by and large collusion against love, but the greater Self found in meditation, contemplation, prayer, dance, play, work, devotion and true community.

Selfishness, jealousy and antipathy are bound to arise at times as long as we are identified with our human incarnations. Karma influences us only as long as we are identified with the body. Step outside of limiting beliefs and we are free. The show, however, must go on. As ego-clinging begins to loosen there is more room for humor, play and letting things slide. It is when the ego death grip begins to tighten that we are in trouble.

Ultimately the love between two people has to expand its capacity. I’m not talking about “open relationships.” It is not about and not not about sex. It is about bringing the shakti up from the groin to the heart chakra, swadhisthana to anahatha. The heart does not negate the genitals but transcends them. Universal love expresses through all of the chakras from Mooladhara to Sahasrara. At the crown it finds itself in unity, in the perfect union of Shiva and Shakti.

As we develop higher consciousness our ego boundaries expand and our love must expand to become all inclusive. We become love itself; discover that we are fundamentally loving awareness. In Sanskrit there is a beautiful mantra: Aham Prema, “I am love.” Love is our being, our truth and our goal. There is nothing but love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs-Cz0IYWz8&feature=player_embedded