Valentine’s Day is designated to be the day that we express love to our beloved/s. So I asked myself; why do we have a day for this purpose? For on this day it is expected that we go out and “do” the things that lovers “do” - get the flowers, jewelry, chocolate, etc. These things that we do and are expected to do, from our perspective, is suppose to be a gesture of loving or being loved.
From this perspective we see love as an act; as something we “do”. If we are ‘doing” love, then it is not love. When we “do” love – it takes effort, and we will eventually get bored and/or tired. We will want to relax and rest. And sometime we will even relax into hate – for we can only relax into the opposite. That is why, one moment we could be doing love with our beloved and the next moment we could be doing hate with our beloved. The same person becomes the object of both love and hate – that is the conflict of doing love. There is so much misery in our love life because our love is an act. Doing love is not real love!
The first thing we must understand is love is a state of being – it is not an act. We can “be” love or “be in” love – but we cannot “do” love. As I write this I am feeling the difference and hopefully as you read this you can feel it too. There is a fundamentally different experience from “being love” and from “doing love.” Doing love without being love is absurd. Yet that is how most of us on the planet live our lives.
How do we shift from doing love to being love?
Being in love is a state of being. This state of being may be focused on one person or it may be unfocused – on the whole. When we focus it on one person, we call it love. When it is unfocused, we call it prayer - agape. Then we are just in love – not just with one person, but just in love. We are then in love with ourselves, everyone and everything, in love with God. Love becomes as present as your breathing.
Have you ever heard anyone say “this is breathing day”? I am going to breathe today. No! There is no effort involve in breathing. If there was effort we could forget to do it, or we would get tired and we would have to relax and we would die.
Love is just like breathing, it is a higher plane of breathing. If we do not breathe our bodies would die. If we are not loving our spirit cannot flourish. Love is the breathing of the soul. When we are in love our soul becomes vital, alive, just like it is breathing.
Now what happens if I say to you, “Only breathe when you are near me and do not breathe anywhere else,” you would surely die. Likewise if I say to you only love when you are with me and love no-one else, then also you will surely die and your spirit will not flourish.
That is how we relate in love. We attempt to possess the love object. We say, “don’t love anybody else – only love me.” Then the love is emaciated and then the lover cannot love, it becomes impossible. This does not mean that we have to be in a sexual relationship with more than one person but we have to be in a loving state of being. It is just like breathing, even if your enemy is around you still breathe.
That is why Jesus say “love your enemy.” When love is a state of our being – it is not a question of friend or enemy. I am love.
To be in a state of love means being loving in a single moment. It means getting out of past and future and simply being present in the moment to life as it is occurring. You are therefore not wishing or hoping for something else other than what is so - right now! Right now! Right now! Life is ever changing and as it changes you go with the flow and love the moments as they present themselves. Here Now! Here Now! Here Now!
Only a single moment of love and we all know how to fill a single moment with love. Once we are able to enter a single moment with love we have entered eternity - time is no more. A moment of love is a timeless moment. This is real love that we will attain when we develop a meditative being. We get to the place where we feel oneness. Existence and I are one. We move beyond fear and death. Then loves flows from us. Love is then not an act, not an effort – we cannot do anything except love. That is when we become enlightened - we become the Buddha and the Christ.
In Love and Light
Courtney
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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6 comments:
Happy Valentine's Day to you too my Love.
This puts everything into perspective on this day dedicated to showing love. Hope you're in love with the one you're with at the moment
Love you.
Sharon
Thank you sharon.
It is great when we remind ourselves and each other to love the one we are with and the one we are always with is ourselves.
I love you.
Courtney
Courtney, your position on Love is interesting. Having regard to your view how can you say I love you to someone who you have had no emotional ties to? How can you love someone who is not part of your space and has not been part of your world? I agree love is a state of being and it is in this context that it warrants action but directed action towards the source.
For most people love is transaction - I give you this and you give me that is return - this for that. From this context I can love only people that I have a particular transactional relationship with. This I say is not love at all - it is a transaction. Love an the other hand is something that we are being. We give it to everyone and everything. That is why Jesus say "love your enemy." To a transactional person - this sounds contradictory, but to an enlightened being that is what love really is. The choice is to love the way the sun loves and shine your light on everyone.
Love and light
Courtney
Recognition that creative energy is the component of ALL creation(s), frees us from a "small ego" interpretation of the nature of love to the understanding of the inter-connectivity of energy. This very notion brings the awareness that "as I do unto you, I do unto myself". Like energy attracts so that even a non-loving thought projected unto you is reciprocating it unto myself. It is a life-long endeavor to cultivate this unconditional loving mind set as our conditioned thinking is to digest our experiences in personal terms, how it affects me.
God is love, is the reality that regardless of our human (mental) departure from our inherent nature, it does not change the fact that God "sees' us only as we were created... in the image of God/Love. Therefore, it ought to be our lifelong quest to re-connect with this level of loving consciousness which is the essence of who we are. It is very difficult to try and conceive what this love is because we have been so trained to see ours and our brothers human "sins" however, if we start with the premise that we are all Children of God created with and from the very same creative energy, then it gives us the starting point to "see" each other as a Spiritual being first... and everything else is learnt behavior.
PS: Welcome back Courtney : )
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