Human Love
Love is our essential nature as beings of the earth, for without love all things wither and die. That it’s so rare for anyone to have realised love as an enduring state of harmony and joy can only mean that something has gone drastically wrong with love on the planet.
Human love is personal and attaches the man or woman to the object of their affection. Impersonal love can appear cold to the warmth of human love usually experienced between partners, family and friends. However, when love is personalised and based on sentimentality, it’s impossible to be honest in relationships. There’ll be a failure to discern the needs of a situation through consideration of another’s feelings. Feelings are interpretations of past emotional experience and create movement in the mind. This disturbs the equilibrium of love, which results in doubt and confusion.
Since emotional suffering is universal, why is it so rare for someone to come out of the other side of the emotional tunnel? The reason is that people become dependent on their feelings as a measure of their love and wilfully refuse to give them up. Love is not a feeling but a state of knowledge inherent within the being. To transcend the limitations of personal love is traumatic and extremely distressing. And this is the experience of everyone who’s ever had to be true in their relationships where dishonesty to love could no longer be tolerated.
Many people are hopeful that their difficulties in relationships can be intellectually resolved. So far in recorded history no-one’s succeeded. Although love is always beautiful and restorative, unless it’s supported by the knowledge of love’s purpose, the purity of the exchange becomes degraded in consciousness. Human love is ignorance of love’s purpose, which is why virtually everyone is shocked and bewildered when their lover leaves or dies. However, contrary to popular belief, it’s not the sense of loss that makes people distraught; it’s the absence of knowledge of why such things happen that attaches the person to their pain.
Love’s divine purpose is to connect us with the formless love within and to realise the source of love itself as a constant state that is not dependent on an outer reflection. Only divine love leads to the cessation of self-doubt and fear, which negates the need to ever suffer again. What’s usually unperceived is that it’s love itself being reflected in the physical presence of the other. The beginning of divine love is the conscious acknowledgement of the formless being behind the body. Unless this is acknowledged in gratitude for love’s benediction in sense, there will be emotional negativity arising periodically in relationships.
The truth is that love is a principle of supreme integrity. Love’s integrity and infinite compassion can be seen in so many people who help or care for others without expecting anything in return. This is love operating beyond any human feelings of duty, obligation or social conscience. Love is beyond the consideration of personal feelings or anything which would detract from its divine purpose. However, this remains elusive while it’s assumed that there’s something to be gained in a relationship to assuage the insecurities and expectations of the person. Love that is personal has the taint of self, which holds back and looks to take from the other, even though there may be intense feelings of love between people.
The great movement of life is towards a deepening realisation of love within us all. Through the experience of pleasure and pain, we’re all eventually compelled to confront what makes us continually suffer in our relationships. The spiritual life at every level is the gradual depersonalising of love and the realisation of Divine Being. And yet at a certain stage in the process, should an individual be willing, there can be a marked shift in the consciousness which heralds the journey beyond the threshold of human love – and the beginning of a conscious participation in love’s eternal mystery.