In Love

There is a place in us, still and silent, underneath all our thoughts and emotions and sensory perceptions, a place where we do not have to be anything or anyone, where we do not even have to be ourselves. This is our refuge. When we let everything go, we enter that place. And just the other side of it, another step inward, is the realm of Light, the Sacred Light that casts no shadow and knows no darkness, the Light of ineffable joy. And just the other side of that is the realm of Love, the root of the world that unites us all with all. Yet neither of those realms is "over there:" both are everywhere, here and now, and in us. We need not reach out to them and we cannot summon them. Indeed, they call to us. We just need to open to them, drop our barriers and let Light and Love in.

We aspire to live in Love, Real Love, the kind that extends to everyone without exception. There are, of course, other kinds. There is the love that says: I love that, I love him, I love her. What we usually really mean is we like that or we like him. If he crosses us, then maybe we no longer love or like him. That level of love, inconsistent love, depends on externals and personal benefit.

There is the love that is physical attraction, sexual attraction, embedded in our genes with enough power to keep our planet populated. It depends on type. There is emotional love, where we care about a person. This often comes mixed with expectations and demands, such as for reciprocity, failing which this kind of love may wither or turn to anger, hatred, or self-loathing. There is the love that arises from shared intellectual interests, a brittle love subject to changing interests.

And there is also Real Love, which can come on its own or through the transformation of the other forms of love.

Real Love is the perception of unity. It is not an emotion. Emotion may follow from that perception as it descends into our ordinary centers: our feeling, our thought, and even our body. The barrier to the perception of unity is our unquestioned perception of separateness. Yes, when we look around us, we see the many things, all appearing separate from each other and separate from us. Yet behind all those many things, there is a deeper reality that unites it all into one great, seamless whole, all of it arising from one unfathomable Source.

Our perception of separateness is based in our assumption that we exist as an independent entity, that I am my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my patterns of action. But behind all of this that we call me, there is a greater whole, the same greater whole that is behind all the separate things we see. Behind all this that we call me, there is no separate me, just the whole of the great whole.[1] To come toward that, and thus toward Love, we need to let go of our separateness, our me.

Here is a method for this taught by the Buddha, as recorded in the Bahiya Sutta: "In seeing, let there be just seeing, in hearing, just hearing, in sensing, just sensing, in cognizing, just cognizing. When you can do that, Bahiya, there is no you in that, no you in this, no you in between. Just this is the end of dukkha."

We can engage with that approach, for one example, when in a conversation with another person. We just see them. We just hear them. Behind our seeing and hearing, behind our attention to the person, we let whatever thoughts there are come and go, without our being distracted by them. We let the inner emptiness be. We trust ourselves to respond appropriately, without the inner planning that separates us. No me separate from the person we are speaking to and listening to. In that non-separateness, the unity of Real Love peeks through.

[1] G.I. Gurdjieff; Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson; 1950, p. 353

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