I approach the topic of Love with hesitation. Although we speak of it so often, our understanding of love leaves much to be desired. Perhaps we can begin by agreeing that there are two fundamental kinds of love – personal love and essence love.
Although the first, personal love, may take many forms, it is characterized by the love of one person for another within the scope of our usual mind/body life. That love will vary in character and quality following the psychological development of the individuals involved. The most rudimentary personal “love” is needs based, transactional. I meet your needs and in return you meet mine. That’s the stated, or too often the unstated premise. Such relationships are characterized as co-dependent transactions.
With psychological development personal love evolves. There is a diminishing focus on one’s own needs and an increasing focus on the other. Self-cherishing shifts towards other- cherishing. My happiness is increasingly derived from seeing the happiness of the other. Kindness, care, patience, open communication, and emotional intimacy characterize the increasingly mature and relatively selfless personal relationship. The poet Rainer Rilke describes it in these words:
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most
difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the
work for which all other work is but preparation.
The work he is referring to is the progressive maturation of the personal ego self – the shift from “I ness” to “other ness.” However, there are limits to this shift. By its very nature the individual self is experienced as distinct from other individuals and similarly is by design self-cherishing, defensive, and self-righteous. Even the most highly evolved personal consciousness – which is to be affirmed as a major achievement – will remain subtly subject to these tenacious egoic forces.
The second kind of love is what I have called essence love. It exists outside of the realm of personal identity, outside of conventional consciousness. It exists at the source of our being. It is the source of our being. We cannot actually know or describe it, as we can personal love, because it cannot be known through our usual sensory or mental capacities. It can only be known through direct experience, by being one with it. It then knows itself.
Essene love is not one entity loving another. The word love as used here is more a sense of wholeness and oneness, existence itself, the treasure house of human life. We have all had this experience at one time or another. As indefinable as it is, Rumi speaks of it this way:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
Beyond “rightdoing” and “wrongdoing,” beyond our personal ego self, there is a field. That field is the experience of being, wholeness, presence, timeless awareness, love. It is there that essence meets itself. We call that the love of which there is none greater. It is perfect peace, harmony, union, and communion. Although we call it “love,” it has no name. How do we arrive there? Rumi goes further:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek
and find all the barriers within yourself that you
have built against it.
This second kind of love cannot be gained through effort or will. Why, because it is already there and complete in each of us. It is the perfume of our natural self, of pure awareness, of presence, and beingness. It is our essence. And that we can only experience when the ego barriers that hide our natural state dissolve. And that is where meditation can assist.
In the great traditions meditation is not a relaxation or stress reduction technique. It is a contemplative process which allows us to observe and dissolve the barriers to gaining access to our true nature. There are no techniques or methods necessary, just a shift in attention from the objects of awareness to awareness itself, from the wandering mind to its essence. Watch your mind. Observe that it cannot easily sustain awareness or witnessing. It is rapidly drawn, like a gravitational pull, into all sorts of mental and sensory experiences. And this entanglement is what we let go of in meditation. We learn to once again be the knower, the awareness, the seer.
Without methods or techniques, we drop into a state of being. Nothing to do. No goal or destination to aim towards. No one to be. We remain in the here and now, in our natural state. Of course, the dynamic energy of the mind will manifest all sorts of appearances – thoughts, feelings, images, sensory experiences – but we don’t grasp onto, elaborate, or become involved with these movements. They are not who we are. We remain in the continuity of our natural state of presence, awareness, beingness. That’s who we are. With practice and persistence we will increasingly be able to sustain a state of natural and easeful awareness, and the gravitational pull towards mental appearances will progressively diminish.
When we rest with ease in our natural state, absent a personal identity, we will increasingly experience the perfume of our natural being. That includes the perfume of a natural, whole, selfless, and indescribable embrace that we can call love. It cannot be described in words, as it is not cognitive. However, we will know it when we see it, and be filled by its energy, pervasiveness, and naturalness. From this direct experience all lesser forms of love lose their interest. From this perspective all love becomes selfless, joyful, and filled with grace.
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