What Is True Love?
Love must be the number One experience that we are longing for in a human life. We cannot live without it, we wither. And we will never stop searching for it until we find it. Everyone is in love at some point in their life with someone or at the very least something and everyone yearns to be loved. But what actually is true love? Does it exist?
Many of us have experienced relationships that come and go... times where we were so in love that we could not imagine to live without that person... and some time later we might not even remember their name. We get to know them better, start to get annoyed by their little quirks or tendencies or simply realise that they also are a human beings trying their best with flaws and needs and it is not quite what we wanted. Our feelings change, our aspirations and goals in life and this is why many relationships end. Falling out of love therefore happens probably as often as falling into it and it is a natural part of life.
But at our core we still keep yearning for this love that never ends and that unites us for better or for worse. No wonder it is the best recipe for a successful movie or book or story of any kind. But does it only exist in fiction?
There are different levels or frequencies of this Love that we all long for. When we perceive ourselves as a person, the way we experience love is limited. It is reserved to a small amount of people and based on conditions. Family by nature, friends because there is something we like about them. Lovers because of a physical reaction in our body at first and then also certain things we like about their character.
But as we said before our character changes and so do our feelings.
But there is a love that never changes and that does not exclude anyone. It is the love that we are at the core of our Being.
In the Bible Jesus says: ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. A lot of people struggle with this idea. How can you love someone who might do things that you don’t agree with or that annoy you?
How can you love a stranger? Without building a relationship first, getting to know them? It is definitely not something we can achieve with the mind...
It is our true nature that Jesus is pointing to, but for many of us there are layers of wrong identification that get in the way. We are Brahman the Absolute, the Great Consciousness. It only appears that we are different people who live their independent lives, but when we start to meditate and contemplate on the nature of our true self we realise that we only imagine this.
Where else would the feeling of love come from? It connects so many strangers from all sorts of different walks of life seemingly randomly... we can’t plan who we fall in love with nor explain why. And yes, some relationships fail when ego gets in the way but this initial feeling of love gives us an important indication. We care about each other naturally ... we suffer each other’s plight, we rejoice in each other’s success and we want to help. Because deep inside we feel that we are connected.
All our longings, that for Love but also that for Happiness, Peace and all other things come from the desire to find our true Self... Which is all these qualities by nature… For a while we content ourselves with lesser versions, the Love that comes and goes and is based on conditions, the Happiness about something that comes and goes and the Peace that depends on outer circumstances.
But there comes a time when this is not enough. And we start stripping away all these illusions until we find what we were really looking for.
We didn’t come to this Earth to be mucked around and disappointed. We came here to find the real deal... more than we could ever wish for... Our true self.
And as long as we defer this discovery, desire will keep nagging at us. God, our True Self, will not leave us in peace until we come home. All of our experiences in life happen for this reason.
So for a moment, can we commit to this Highest Calling... and leave aside all the distractions... You cannot do this and something else at the same time. So whatever else you are doing right now, leave it for the moment. Bring your full attention here: inside of you... to what actually is and to what you truly are. Thoughts may come... but they simply pass by if you don’t give them any attention...
There is something behind the thought...that can watch them come and go. What is this? A field of Awareness. Can this Awareness be affected by the thought? Has it ever been affected? What qualities does it have? It must be very spacious... because not only do thoughts appear in it but also emotions and even the body... What is it in this Awareness that is not you? Is it not all in here: the people, the plants the animals the universe? A you that is not confined by this body but this body like all other things appears inside of it.
It is vast, calm, not involved. But also not uninvolved. It simply is... The more you guide your attention here, the clearer this will be for you. It might be a little effort at first because it seems new and different from our ingrained conditioning but because you were meant to find this it is impossible to fail. So stay with it and then when you look at the world from here you see that there is no separation.. there is no you or I but only the one Awareness that is, and everything in it arises out of the Love that it is. Love that has no reason, and doesn’t select. It simply cannot be other than what it is...
This is True Love.
Julia Maria Seemann