This Is The True Meaning Of Conscious Love
1.
One awakens to love in rare moments of exquisite agony — facing births, deaths, and moments of crisis — but otherwise we succumb to the flow of days in a state of numbness. We know nothing about love; our culture is devoid of it.
To live in love is to live in a state of upheaval, of continuous death and rebirth. Most of us expend the power of every thought and impulse to avoid love and its complications, its intensities, until life provides a crisis to disrupt the complex strategies we employ to shield ourselves from pain.
The path of love prescribes pain, which our instinct for self-preservation seeks to avoid at any cost. When painful feelings arise, the intellect creates a story of righteous martyrdom or abject victimhood to buffer our sensitivity to pain and prevent us from learning anything from it.
2.
What we think we know about love is a set of complex attachments that prevent us from loving. The feelings commonly associated with love come with the satisfaction of desires or expectations met through our relationships.
We say we love our partner, but at best they merely buffer the discomfort of our dependencies. They become an accessory to our crimes against love, or they become a slave to the stories we tell ourselves about love.
We say we love our pets and children, but in truth they are merely tools for increasing our self-appraisal and sense of moral aptitude. If we show them generosity, it is only to fuel our pride. We are devoted to them until they disappoint us, and then we get mad at them.
We say we love our work, but that is a great deception that we practice to mask our attachment to the stories of wealth, prestige, or utility that attend it. We say we love our friends, but that is only to trick ourselves into not feeling lonely. We say we love the earth, but that is only so that others may think that we care about something grander than our own interests.
3.
When somebody is awake to love, even just a little, they are living with pain that nothing in this world can assuage. Once the pain subsides, most people forget about it and return to business as usual, unchanged by their experience.
Others turn to religious or mystical inquiry, seeking a way to understand love as a vehicle to what is real and true. Whilst this is undoubtedly saner than living out the tendency to self-preservation and relentless satisfaction of one’s desires, it is not without its pitfalls.
Spiritual ecstasy — which is often mistaken for love — reorients one’s concept of love away from outer attachments and towards inner experience. It is a useful navigation tool; for anyone who has lived through a process of recovery, such experiences signal a turning point.
Ecstatic experiences affirm the infallible truth of one’s will to heal, giving purpose to the pain of the recovery process. But ecstatic experiences are also replicable, brandable, and marketable, and therefore far easier to conjure up in a consumer economy than genuine miracles.
So when people with wealth and resources get a taste for them, there is no shortage of ‘authentic’ rituals, ceremonies and retreats that ‘awaken’ this excuse for love. This tendency presupposes that love is a commodity to be gained from somewhere, by doing something.
However, if we get too attached to states of ecstasy then they inevitably fail us, being transient phenomena. The pain of despair naturally succeeds an ecstatic experience, the trough that follows a peak.
Again, this has nothing to do with love; it is another, more refined excuse we make for love’s absence.
4.
I have lived out the painful consequences of these delusions enough times to understand that love is neither a feeling nor an experience, that the feelings and experiences I have mistaken for love are most often the temptations that lead me astray from it.
Love, in my world, is a quality of consciousness that awakens through will and intention. When love is allowed, it creates the world of my experience and the meanings I make of it. It is the strength of spirit that allows me to surrender.
5.
Conscious love is the willingness to remain unconditional in our relationships and in our habits of living. When a commitment is made to love over time, states of bliss flow naturally into ordinary experience.
In partnership, in the presence of a most familiar companion and amongst the ordinary vicissitudes of the life we share, a space opens up between our hearts—an intimate knowing of holy nothingness, of the infinite context that creates all the possibilities emerging between us. We see this in each other.
In prayer, when it is an act of true communion, the transitory and limited sense of self dissolves in the bliss of pure being, as a single grain of salt merges with the ocean. This state of consciousness eclipses the concepts of giving or receiving; for there is nothing to bestow, nor anything to collect, only love revealing the truth of its own perfection.
But bliss is only one of love’s many languages. The language of pain is the one I know better, for it challenges me to remain unconditional when life gets intense.
It is painful to love the world as a mother bereaved: nothing I experience brings any consolation for my loss. Sometimes it feels as though I am half-alive, living out my days restlessly between this world and the next. Succumbing to this void of love, I should sooner or later lose my will to live.
To continue loving at such times is the true measure of my powers. For in loving, a presence awakens that knows what is real and what is not. And what is real is not what lives and dies.
The wisdom of that love guides my purpose; it is the presence that moves me to write these words.
“When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet