Carlos, I have a question regarding a sentence you repeat in several of your articles: ‘Love what is’. Can you actually feel this kind of love everywhere, for everything that happens around you? Is it really possible to actually FEEL IT? How can someone practice this type of emotion regularly and in the same time being authentic?
Bianca
Hello Bianca,
Beautiful question. Not so easy to answer in a few words… not so easy to answer in words! But here is my attempt…
First of all, I feel I need to make a distinction between love as we often think about it and what can be called ‘real’ love, for lack of a better name.
Love as we usually think of it has mainly two aims: to propagate the species and to make us feel good. This is not the kind of love I will be talking about in this note. (99.9% of what you find anywhere about love—how to find it, how to keep it, how to make it grow, how to understand it, etc.—is about this kind of love.)
‘Real’ love, which is what I will be talking about here, is the knowing/the understanding/the vision that nothing is separated from yourself. That the table, the tree and the person in front of you are not objects separated form you but that you and the table and the tree and the person are all one same thing, one whole. This is Love.
This of course is not a common vision, and it is actually very rare in everyday life. This is a spiritual vision which is often referred to as awakening, or enlightenment, or the vision of God or many other names throughout history.
It is not so much that you feel it, otherwise again you would have the duality—you and the feeling. It is more that you ARE it. You become the recognition that everything is love, that there is nothing but love.
Can this be practiced? Yes and no. It can be practiced but the actual ‘experience’ of it is not the accumulation of the practice but the final living recognition of its truth. But, yes, practice may be an aspect that brings about this final recognition.
How to practice it? One way to start—and there are many others, but considering the space of the note I will only go in one direction1—is to realize that whatever you are doing, you do it because you want to feel good.
Think about what you do, anything. For example:
I can go on indefinitely. Whatever we do, we do it because we want to feel good.
Now, one definition of feeling good is harmony. Our desire to feel good is our desire to find a sense of harmony. So whatever you do, you do it because knowingly or unknowingly, you are looking for harmony. And what is harmony? In Wikipedia, harmony is used as a synonym to peace and unity. Harmony comes from the Greek word harmos which means to join. Join what? The apparent separation we seem to experience in the world into the whole which is the truth of life. To join the pieces together into a whole, which is Love.
So, whatever we do, we do it because we believe that it is going to make us feel better, which is a search for harmony, peace and unity, which will take us to the experience of wholeness, which is the experience of Love.
Whatever we do, we do it because we are looking for harmony, we are looking for Love.
Let’s return to your question. ‘Loving what is’ is seeing that whatever happens is a search for Love. It may be completely and absolutely wrong, mistaken, missing the point (which, by the way, is the definition of sin: to miss the mark), but if you look deep enough, you will see that the essence of whatever is happening, sinful or heavenly, is Love. And so, ‘loving what is’ means that you embrace what is because you understand that what you are seeing is not what apparently seems, but is a search for harmony, for peace, for Love.
I’ll give an extreme example: Can you see an earthquake as love? Not easy, is it? But think about it… Of course from our own, little point of view as people, an earthquake is nothing but destruction. But on a bigger scale—on the scale of the Earth or even the scale of the Universe—an earthquake is nothing more than a search for balance of the planet, not different from a stomachache, which is nothing but the body’s search for balance. Balance, equilibrium, well-being are nothing but ways of Love.
Or can you see a murder as love? It’s as difficult as before. But again, think about it… Why will somebody commit murder? Well, there can be a thousand and one reasons. But any of those reasons come down to “I do it because by doing it, I am going to feel better”. It may be a completely and absolutely mistaken reasoning, and it probably is, but in the moment, in the moment of committing the murder, the vision is that by doing what I am doing I am going to benefit from it. It is going to help me feel good. And again here’s the need to feel good the need for harmony, for love.
And so, does understanding that even murder is love mean that you should cross your arms and do nothing else but be a passive spectator of the world? Well, if you feel that is your calling, then yes. But if you feel moved to do something, to change something, to improve something, then that is your calling. The difference is that you don’t create war. You SEE that there is no evil, that nobody is doing anything because they are bad. What we are all looking for is a sense of wellbeing, of harmony, of love. It may be pursued in a completely wrong way, missing the mark, committing sins, creating disharmony and pain and suffering, but in your vision, in what you see, you are able to go behind the surface and see the real motives. You ‘love what is’ because you only see love. At the same time you do what you have to do to bring the harmony back. That is also love. But there is no hatred, there is no negativity, there is no fight. You love what is, you accept what is, and you act according to your vision.
This is the practice. Start to SEE love everywhere. Start to see that there is nothing but love. Start to see that the table is made out of love, that the tree is nothing but love, that the cheater or the criminal or the murderer are acting out of love (definitely not something easy to do, but that is why is called a practice2). Start to see love everywhere and, in time, you may discover that there are no separate things. That there is not a me and a table and a tree and a person, but that all there is is love.
And then of course, you will have no option but to ‘love what is’.
_____________________
¹ To practice love, you may also want to:
² By practice I mean practice your own understanding. It has of course nothing to do with repeating like a parrot: this is love, this is love, this is love. It is about seeing a situation, in particular a negative situation—and with a clear mind, with a mind that has space—by going beyond the first ‘natural’ impulse to call it by any other name, like bad, hatred, jealousy, stupidity, egoism, etc, etc, and instead, using your ‘higher’ intelligence to see that in reality, it’s nothing but love. This is the practice. The practice of using your ‘higher’ intelligence.
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I had this question in my head about how is this kind of ‘love for what is’ manifesting and now I have an answer to think about. Thank you both!
It is certainly the most beautiful, fascinating, vast subject, love. The formula is very simple: LOVE= EVERYTHING. So, give exactly what you want to give herself to you, with the same intensity, sincerity! Be love, breathe love, live every moment in love. But be careful about true love that connected to the Universe. Cosmic Love!
I thought alot about identifying with love both good and bad things.
In the end I think my questions are:
If we see love in all bad things (like murder, revenge, rage and all voluntary bad actions/thoughts) doesn’t this minimize the real beauty of love?
If murder can be justified by the need of love, are we justified to punish an act done in the name of love?
What should be the reason of a corrective action? To love different? To love more?
Hello Andreea.
You say:
‘If we see love in all bad things (like murder, revenge, rage and all voluntary bad actions/thoughts) doesn’t this minimize the real beauty of love?’
You cannot see love in ‘bad’. If you are seeing bad, you are not seeing love, the way I refer to it. Love and bad belong to two different levels of existence and they are never found in the same place. If you see bad, love—again, the way I refer to it—does not exist. And if you see love, there is no bad.
Love IS the vision that there is no bad. In the word ‘bad’ there is implicit intention, premeditation, volition and will. But in the vision of love, there is none of it. All there is is ignorance; ignorance of love. Badness is like darkness. In reality you can never find darkness; you can only find absence of light. This is the vision of love. There is never badness; there is only an ignorance of love. ‘Forgive them father, for they know not what they do’. You can say, and most people actually do say it, that the people that put Jesus in the cross are bad people. But that was not the way he saw it. He did not think they were bad, he thought they were ignorant.
The real beauty of love is that it does not see badness, but only love.
Then you say:
‘If murder can be justified by the need of love, are we justified to punish an act done in the name of love? What should be the reason of a corrective action? To love different? To love more?’
Murder is never justified. Nothing is ever justified. Things just are (if you really want to find the cause of anything, you need to go back to the beginning of time. There is a quote I like very much that says: ‘if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe’). If you are cold, you put on a sweater, and you are not punishing the cold by doing that. If you are hungry you eat, and you are not punishing hunger. If somebody hurts you, you try to get out of their way. You just do what needs to be done according to the need of the moment.
To put somebody in jail, for example, is just our society’s conventional way to get away from something that is, or may be, hurtful. It is no different than telling your kid he cannot watch the cartoons because he behaved bad at the table. You love your son, and you still don’t let him watch the cartoon. Why? As a corrective action? To love differently? To love more? Yes sure, and may be more… You just do what needs to be done according to the conventions of the moment and your own intellectual, emotional and physical possibilities. These possibilities are actually nothing more than your own potential to express love.
Of course, this potential can grow…and actually I believe that this is our most important task in life, our real destiny: to re-discover the full vision of love.
I think that we should not minimize the “bad” or finding it the excuse of love for it. We are destroying slowly the planet (and life) and that has no ‘love’ intentions behind. How we call things it is a matter of semantics or a philosophy. We can call a pen – pen or we can call a pen – bread, but that will not change that thing from what actually it is. So, calling murder – “love” will not minimize the bad behind it but only creates confusion or chaos. I think that we need some clear principles of what it is ‘good’ and what it is ‘bad’, that’s how we educate our kids and how we keep the planet or life in good conditions. Imagine how it would be to teach our kids that hitting someone it is ok (another form of love) or even killing some it is ok (because it is a form of love sometimes). Where are we heading to like this, keeping the things that flexible…?
Yes, I understand what you mean, but I really don’t believe we can find so easily clear cut principles of good and bad.
You know, I have two very good friends, a couple, living in a different country. One of them came back last week. We met, and he told me all the problems they had together and why they could not be together any more.
Yesterday she came back, and told me her story…exactly the opposite of what he told me.
What for me is amazing is not that their stories are so opposed to each other. What really amaze me is that they are both really beautiful people, and I really believe they are both telling the truth…their truth.
Who is good? Who is bad?
Really, the only place where I believe you can find clear cut principles of good and bad is in Hollywood. Anywhere else, it is not so clear.
Having said that, yes, I agree whole heartedly with you that we cannot educate children by telling them that a criminal did what it did out of love. But this article was not meant to educate children but to try to point out a forgoten truth: nobody does anything out of badness, but because of disharmony with oneself.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
Rainer Maria Rilke