BELIEVE IN LOVE
BELIEVE IN LOVE
Do you believe in love? Most of us would say that we do. In fact, I often ask people what they consider to be the most important thing in the world—and one of the most frequent answers I receive is LOVE.
If you have some kind of spiritual practice, you may have even had an experience of a kind of Divine Love, a spiritual love, that was not merely sentimental love for another person or an animal, but a recognition that love is woven into the very fabric of reality. A sense that the true nature of God or The Source of Creation is love. And that your own true nature is deeply imbued with love.
Love is not a scarce commodity. It’s always freely given and available. The universe is held together by a source of infinite unconditional love that’s always present in every moment. There’s never a moment and never a place where love does not exist. When you get a taste or glimpse of this, you will see that there was never a moment in your life and never a moment in all of life where love was not already present in abundance. As love is abundant and unconditional, it’s not something you have to earn, work hard to win, create, become worthy of, purchase, or prove that you are good enough for it. The whole universe is filled with the energy of love from beginning to end. As Sant Darshan Singh, great Indian poet and spiritual teacher said, “Love has only a beginning. It has no end.”
Just take a moment now to focus on your breath and become present in your body. Just relax completely and allow yourself to remember what you have experienced about love. What was clear to you about love? Maybe you can remember a moment in your own life when you knew, in some clear undeniable way, some aspect of this Divine Love. When you knew it was never far away.
Now, notice that I didn’t ask you how that experience felt. It has occurred to me, over the years, that when we think of love, the first thing most of us think of is that it’s a feeling. We think of it as a really warm (and fuzzy!?), positive, uplifting, soothing feeling
that we want to have more of. Even though love does have a lot of beautiful feelings associated with it, love is so much more than a feeling. As long as you hold onto the belief that you need to have a specific special feeling attached to loving in order to have more love, in order to be loved, you’re missing the whole point of love.
It means that, at the level of the ego-mind-body you may not fully believe in love. If you were to believe that love is ever-present everywhere, at all times freely given, never lacking and that every moment is full of that love in every corner of the universe, that it is the very nature of who and what you were created to be, then why would you ever need to desperately seek it out to feel it again and again, work hard to win it again and again in order to simply rest in love and eventually become love itself?
Imagine a person who, every time the sun shines, gets all excited and starts running around saying “The sun is shining! I feel so great! I feel so warm! The sun exists! It’s a miracle. There’s a sun and it feels so warm and wonderful. Look at this glorious sun that fills our world with warmth and energy and fuels this whole amazing world that we’re a part of. Celebrate the sun.”
But when they wake up on a cloudy day, they say, “I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday. Obviously, there’s no sun. Look up at the sky. There are only clouds. That’s what’s real.”
You might try to reason with them, saying, “Wait a minute. Don’t you know the sun is still there? The clouds are just covering it up. You know the sun exists. In fact, you saw it yesterday and you were celebrating it. You felt its warmth on your skin. You knew it was real without any doubt.” And they just look at you blankly and say, “I’ll believe it when I see it and feel its warmth. Oh, how I long to know the sun. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a sun?”
Now, this might seem silly, but it’s actually not that far off from how most of us relate to Divine Love. You could choose to believe in love even when rarely ever experiencing it for yourself. You could simply say, “I can understand the truth of the presence of
love everywhere and I’m going to try to relax into that understanding of reality even when my ego-mind-body chooses to create and maintain separation and suffering.”
That’s all wonderful, but, if you’re like me, you at least need a little taste, a little proof of it, because you probably don’t want to just believe something somebody else tells you, or something you read about in a book (or in an email!), or see on social media. And it’s really difficult to just reason your way into a belief. So, even given all the cognitive difficulties and barriers in embracing a belief, haven’t you ever had a little taste of love, just enough to know it’s real?
What if, instead of wistfully waiting, trying, seeking, striving, winning, or working hard to feel more love, you decided instead to just simply believe in and have faith in the all-pervasive presence and power of love? How would you live if you believed in love? What if, instead of waiting for some version of God, The Source of Creation, parents, or a romantic partner to prove to you that love is real, your job was to relax into the truth that love is real by demonstrating its existence every day? Great Spiritual Teachers throughout history have taught that demonstrating the existence of love every day is the great evolutionary and spiritual calling.
I know that when we think about what it would mean to demonstrate love or be a living expression of love every day, we tend to bring images to mind like Jesus, Buddha, Nanak, Mother Teresa, St. Francis, Kirpal Singh, Kuan Yin, Mother Mary, etc. We imagine ourselves giving all of our time to relieving suffering in the world. Or maybe we decide that our mission in life is to make everyone we meet feel personally loved by us. And certainly, that represents one level of becoming love. Of course, there is a dark side when the ego-mind-body creates a narrative that says: “Until these suffering people get happier, I can’t be okay.” That’s not alignment with Divine Love. That’s codependency. You may have encountered someone who is selflessly devoted to serving others, or unconditionally loving everyone they meet. Those individuals are demonstrating a certain alignment with Divine Love.
What does it really mean to believe in love and to stand up for love in the world? If you allow into yourself the possible reality that love is never lacking in any moment, that the most important thing in life is always already here, then that means that the most important thing in life can never be taken away from you. You don’t have to look for it, earn it, create it, win it, or go seeking to find it. And most importantly, you don’t have to worry about losing it.
What does that mean? It means you can let go. You can let go of anxious grasping after things of this world that represent being loved. You can let go of living in fear of lack or loss of love. You can let go of trying to get something that’s already a part of your own true nature.
It seems to me that this is what faith and living a life of faith really means. Faith means that whether or not you feel particularly loved, or loving, or feel anything at all today, you have an understanding that love is what it’s all about and you’re going to choose to stand up for that. You don’t need to doubt that love is always already here or demand that someone or something prove it to you.
The Great Spiritual Teachings throughout history tell us that we are called to learn about love, practice loving, and ultimate to become love itself even when our ego-mind-body rebels against the idea. This means we no longer need to hold onto our little grasping self with all of its narratives and stories about what we need, what we don’t have, or people who need to love us for us to be okay.
A life of faith means that when the noisy voice of the ego begins asserting that you need something else to be happy or complete, you can say “No. I’m not going to believe your story of suffering. I’m not going to listen to your narrative of separation. Love is here. It always has been here.”
What happens to you when you make the choice to live a life of faith, to believe in love? One of the most miraculous things that
happens is that suddenly your ego-mind-body narratives from the past are softened and become much less of an issue in your present life. It’s not that those trauma narratives and stories of insecure attachment necessarily utterly cease to exist. It’s just that when you choose to believe, have faith, and stand up for the eternal presence of love, all those stories, narratives, fear, worries, and doubts get softer, more quiet, less frequent, intense, and of shorter duration. The truth is that if those things you’re afraid of happen, there wouldn’t be any less love available. The most important thing in life would still be here. The true nature of life and of yourself would still be love. As your attention is freed from being so intensely self-absorbed, you realize that you don’t need to protect your heart. You can let it expand to include more of the people and world around you.
Now, here’s another somewhat mysterious thing that might begin to happen to you when you begin to live a life of faith and belief in love. You may begin to sense and know love more often even in unexpected moments. It doesn’t mean that you always feel a warm, fuzzy, gentle, nurturing glow. Not at all. But in a mystical sense, when you make the decision to stand up for love, not doubt the truth of love, love begins to become a more frequent companion on your journey of life. This is tremendously liberating. It means that being an expression of love doesn’t depend on anything other than deciding to be an expression of love. It doesn’t depend on you feeling any particular way. What a relief! You can be aligned with the most important thing in life no matter how you feel. Finally, you don’t have to be so intensely worried about the inner world of your ego-mind-body: “How do I feel today? Is my worry, anxiousness, depression, pain in the body, addiction, fear of the future, regret of the past overwhelming me today? Does he, she, it, they, them love me? Am I in touch with God? Is there a God? No. Yes.” On and on and on. You can let go of all that and just relax into a deeper alignment with love in this present moment. Love is the only reality. All else is an illusion.