I read something very disturbing this morning in the newspaper about love. It was a feature on the so called ‘season of love’ with Valentine’s Day just around the corner. Christian counselor and author, Gary Chapman, offered his advice on how to love. Top on his list of ways to love was: “Saying things that makes one feel special; a way to boost the other persons’ confidence; feeding the ego.” Now, I am no Christian; I am no author. I am no expert, but “feeding the ego”; you have got to be kidding me. That is for sure the misunderstanding of love, and a recipe for guaranteed disaster in matters of love.
This is what I am thinking, based on my little bit of experience, love is only about ego in as much as it is about a unity of being between your spirit and your ego. Love is a self-centered emotional current. It is the divine energy existing in all things and connecting all things. When we are present to this energy, we express our selves (through our egoic-self) authentically and are able to share enlightenment, healing and creativity with others. We delude ourselves into thinking love is something we have to do to please others or to satisfy some external motive. This is another misunderstanding of love, guaranteed to be unsustainable.
Who we love is almost irrelevant, because when you are expressing authentic love for yourself, you experience love for everyone and everything. “Love is always waiting to express itself, to be nurtured, to expand, but it is the conditions of our minds that determine whether love will flourish, or whether it will be stifled, retarded or inhibited.” This was my concluding thought in my entry: Perhaps the sociologists were wrong about love.
As far as intimate relationships are concerned, when two, firmly-rooted, free-standing pillars – masculine and feminine – are united, with present awareness of the divine energy, love, there is an eruption of enlightenment, healing and creation. When two weak pillars, leaning dependently on each other, are united, with a misunderstanding of love, there is an eruption of darkness, hurt, dis-ease and destruction.
The challenge of relationships is to walk in the light of one’s own radiance, to be responsible for your own pillar, to be free of blocks preventing divine energy from being fully self expressed. In essence, when you tell someone you love them, from a position of authenticity, you are saying I am able to love myself freely in your company, or I am conscious of the love flowing through me and through you.
Be love and you will experience the love of the universe.