Most of the time we look for love outside ourselves. We are looking for a partner in our lives, who will offer it. We desire children, to be perpetually loved until death, because children will never leave us and will love us until we are old and worn out, so we conceive. We feel a longing and a great want for the affection of another human being. The logic behind all this is the fact that we are missing something inside of ourselves. Something is missing and it has to be procured from the outside. If it is not being procured, we become angry and annoyed: 'why am I not loved? I have every right to be loved! If they are not loving me, they are so incorrect.
When you care for love to be coming from the outside get ready yourself for several great disenchantments in your life. People will leave you. People will feel the essence being immersed out of them. They will feel shackled and entrapped in the chains of all your love claims. They will wish to come out of it and be released. They will even define love as to be liberated from you! Because you love is truly no love at all. It's nothingness further than self interest. Some bargain you want to make with benefits for your sake. This kind of love has great claims and hopes. This love is not trustful but demands to swear and agreements written down. This love is a love stemming from fear, which drives individuals to the city hall to take their pledges in front of a civil official, as if their love will not endure if they haven't sworn in public.
This is the love of panic, the love of isolation, the love of long night falls waiting beside the phone, the love of anger. It is really no love at all. It's the misery and unhappiness of the heart, which needs to be confounded from its misery. It's a lack of self confidence, which wants another human being to say that we are good and worthwhile humans. Love in this situation is nothing more than an effort to enhance up the ego.
When we start loving out of fear and loneliness, out of a need for aid, out of an emotion of being incomplete, then our love will always be adulterated. We can only love one another if we have arrived at a certain amount of completeness in ourselves. First we have to love ourselves, because we cannot love if there is no love in us. We first have to find the well of love. However, this 'loving ourselves' is most of the time misunderstood by most people. They think that they have to love their ego first before they can love different. They think that they first have to intensify up a strong ego. They think that they first must get a clear drawing of all their needs and claims, before entering a love affair. They first want to be powerful in 'having their say'.
This is a wrong perspective towards love. Love means surrender. It means giving yourself over. It's not about building up the ego, but on the adverse, it's about losing it. Pure love doesn't ask 'what am I to profit?' but will only search for what's good for the other. Pure love is always objective and looks at the other in complete detachment. There is no ego involved, but on the contrary, it tries to dissolve its ego into the other person. That's why we are always thinking about our loved one when we are inlove. This is avery beautiful and avery mystic tendency of nature, that we are every moment of the day preoccupied with our beloved when we are inlove. It's as if nature says: 'Be your loved one if you want to be happy! Forget your old ego, it was nothing but a sorry business full of desires, greed, anger and all sorts of disillusions. Step out of yourself. Melt your soul with the soul of yourbeloved, because in melting you will feel yourself becoming part of the spirit of all persons. You will feel divinity and ecstasy, if you let yourself be taken over by yourbeloved. Get rid of yourself, as soon as possible!'
This is the great sagacity of Sufism, the mystical knowledge that teaches us in what manner to fuse two opposites into one, after what precedent to surpass the obvious dichotomy of the sensual world that is only illusive. For the opposites male and female are nothing but a mirage, a wrong recognition with a limiting attachment. In the very profoundness of our soul, there is only God, only the Almighty creator. When we reach the core of our being, then the male and the female melt into one. There we have become inseparable again, like we were at our conception when the male and the female became one. Rea llove is about this mystic vision. Real love is about becoming one again.
So let me draw a picture of a mystic kind of love, starting with the love between man and woman because this kind of love is the deepest and the most serious. For nature is very serious about extension and has possessed it by creating a very profound bond of infirmity between the two love partners. For only inlove has propagation the finest chance to get on. The personification is this: imagine yourself a lady, who is to the very depth of her heart inlove with a man. She imagines about him daytime and night-time. He never leaves her heart. Her only purpose in life is to make him happy, to make him feel comfortable and secure. Because she wants him to be the father of her children. She wants to be with him day and night. If he wants to be alone she will respect him in his solitude, for she never doubts her love. She knows that her lover will always come back to her. Since she knows her love, this love, such a deep and immaterial love, to be unavoidable for any human being.
In this deep and overwhelming love, the woman is possessed by her lover. She is taken over. There are no more thoughts about herself. She has become the man, she is in love with. She has grown fond of the communications he uses. She dotes on the way he dialogues and the way he moves. It has started to show. Her words have changed. Her activities have changed. She is a different person anymore. Something very mysterious has happened to her. She has found her love.
The same with the man who is in love. He is different man as he was before. His thoughts have changed. He has become more gentle, more loving, less egoistic. He feels himself to be more responsible for his fellow men, more caring. He has lost his harsh traits. Because he is always filled with love. Every moment of the day he feels her caring and selfless love protecting and strengthening him. He is so grateful in his love ('who am I to deserve this?') that he wants to do everything in his power to make her feel happy.
Imagine these two people making love to each other. Wouldn't their mutual love make them a spiritual unity? Will this not be sheer ecstasy, their souls having mingled into a mystic union? With this kind of love their sexuality has become a religion. Because their love is the love of God.
One may object that this is a very hypothetical and idealistic kind of love I am picturing here. In regular life love invariably has some egotistical traits. We never want to surrender ourselves completely. And best we don't, we say to ourselves, because love is only a brief emotion. It's good to be always on guard and not to lose oneself in it. Lest we may end up frustrated, cheated and misused. 'Don't let yourself ever be possessed by anyone. You will be dominated and you'll lose all your dignity.'
This is the kind of philosophy that stops us from having mystic love. It's fear that prevents us from completely giving ourselves to our loved one. In the past, we've had some traumatic experiences in our former love relationships. We have formed ourselves some theories based on these presumptions. So now we think it is better not to give ourselves completely. We've become hardened by our past. We do not want to make the same mistake. However, by doing, so we are missing the joy and the ecstasy of love.
We must open up our hearts. We must live in the here and now. We must enjoy life by not letting our past or our future interferes with our happiness of the moment. Who is to say that this love will be like our former loves? One must have certainty that love is meant to be. If one doesn't have the trust love will never happen. Real love starts with two individuals knowing the importance of self surrender in their relationship. This self surrender will give nourishment to their love. It will diminish their fear and by doing so it will increase their ability to surrender themselves. Even so, first the insight must dawn on them that love is nothing more than self surrender, then letting the ego go.
Nevertheless, it must always be remembered that love between man and woman (or any love between human beings) is nothing but a deduction from a higher type of love. This is the love spelt with a capital. It's according to the highest Idea in the universe. It's the form at which all the objects in the world, be they material or immaterial, partake. It's the basic energy from which the world originates. It's God dwelling in the depth of things. For Love is God (rather than vice versa). So in order to know sexual love, one first has to experience spiritual Love. One first has to enhance the roots of the sapling in order to have beautiful branches and rewards.
Informal question every individual heading towards seeking love (and aren't we all?) must first, before he comes in a love relationship, study the root Concept from which all love stems. In this case, a mere object preparation won't do, because love is something experiential. Love is a matter of life and death. It's the affair that will decide if one's proceeding to be happy in his life or not. One now has to research love subjectively. A mere book won't do. Since a mere intellectual knowing of love is not enough. In order to have love in his life one has to be love. One has to fuse his whole being with the divine Love first. His subject must become one with the object. Onlythen will one radiate pure love. Only then will his love be selfless.
The question in the start of this composition can now be answered: 'how can one love?' One can only love, if love has become a basic trait of one's character. This is not very hard to accomplish, but at the same time it is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. It's not very hard because love is the original state of your character. So the only thing you have to do is be yourself. You don't have to work hard to become someone. Just be what you have been all along. If you could have a brief look at your character in its purest, most normal form, you would see that your character is love. Just be it.
However, what makes it so difficult to accomplish? All sorts of veils are covering up your true state. There is the veil of your upbringing, there is the veil of your culture, of your desires, of your fears, of your opinions and prejudices, in short of all the conditioning that has taken the position in your lifetime. You have never heard to your true self. You have always 'worked on yourself'. You have never let go. You've never floated along with the Great River. That's why you haven't found love yet. Once you'll encounter your true inner state, love will come your path.
