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Love is the only thing in life for which we don’t need to find proof. It is the very basis of our existence. We are all made up of a substance called love, yet we seem to spend our entire lives searching for it.
It’s like a doll made of candy asking, “What is sweetness?”
What would you do if a sugar candy doll told you, “I have never experienced sweetness. What is sweetness?” You’d have a big laugh.
This is just the way we are with love.
How to recognize love
As a child, when you first opened your eyes and looked at your mother, your very first interaction with this world was that of love. From then on, you fell in love with everything!
You looked at the light, and you were amazed and loved the light. You looked at your fingers, and the expression that came out of you was love. Our life is synonymous with love. All of the expressions in life are part of love.
If you’re angry, the anger is because of love. You love perfection, so you become angry at imperfection. If you love objects too much, that’s called greed. If you love a person too much, that’s called attachment or entanglement. If you love the past too much and your mind gets stuck in the past, that’s called delusion, which makes you unable to fully experience the present. When you love someone too much and become possessive, that’s called jealousy. Lust is when you love the body too much, and you don’t see the spirit behind it.
So all of these negative emotions like greed, lust, anger, and jealousy, are nothing but distortions of love. If there was no love, none of them could exist. They’re all born out of love.
The quest of human life is for an experience of love that’s free from these painful distortions, and for this we need self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge keeps love from fermenting into negative emotions like hatred, anger, jealousy, or greed. It preserves the pristine purity and clarity of love.
Spiritual inquiry and self-knowledge can be beneficial to anyone on this planet. They help us to be more childlike (not childish) in processing negative emotions. Babies and young children may get angry, but their anger lasts only a few seconds and then disappears, unlike in the adults who may harbor those same negative feelings and suffer their whole lives.
Spiritual knowledge liberates us from this suffering.
What is real love?
Real love is that which is in your very nature. In fact, there is no such thing as false love. Love is love, but there’s love that changes colors, and there’s love that doesn’t change. This type of love runs deep underneath the current.
Love is not an emotion or a relationship. It’s not saying, “Oh, I can’t live without you.” In relationships, love needs to be there, but love is much more than this. Love is our very existence. Love is what the whole creation is made up of.
Love is the nature of our consciousness, our very nature. Like our bodies are made up of amino acids, carbohydrates, and proteins, our spirit is made up of love. When you go deep in meditation and become quiet, that state you are in can be called true love. Once you experience that love within yourself, then your behavior, your actions, your relationships, and every aspect of your life reflect that true love. Anger, jealousy, greed, and other distortions of love begin to disappear, and you start to see yourself for what you really are, a manifestation of true love itself.
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Editor’s note:
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