What is Love?

In her very important memoir, Anita Moorjani, who awoke to Truth during a Near Death Experience, writes: "Each of us, at our core, already is pure and unconditional love. However, when we express it here in the physical realm, we filter it through the mind, and it then expresses itself as human emotion."

This sounds right. But what is it, exactly, that happens when we filter unconditional love through the mind?

First, it enters the domain of duality. In other words, I experience that I love you, and you love me, or I hope you do anyway. In the absolute realm, we aren't separate, so love just is, but once we experience separation, it appears that love resides in each of us (or doesn't) and needs, therefore, to be transmitted to the other and "received."

The element of time also enters in -- this one is tricky. In the infinite realm, love just is. But once we have time, love is also subject to its passage. I love you today, and you love me, but will you love me tomorrow? And once we declare our love, the other person expects that that is how we will feel from then on out. But actually, it may only be what we felt in the moment. And we may feel we are betraying the other if we cannot find the love in us that we used to feel for him or her.

Yet, when I watch carefully what happens, it's more like I feel love in one moment, and the next moment I don't -- not because of any change in the relationship necessarily but just because feelings are transient. Just as thoughts move from one to another at breakneck speed, so do emotions, which are a mixture of thought and bodily sensations.

Thus, it is impossible that we will continue to have the same feeling we felt a few moments ago because every moment is completely new. But it's hard to accept this. We need stability in our self-image, and our self-image is composed in large part of beliefs about how we feel about people and things. So we need to bridge the gap between the discrete feelings of love that arise over time by telling ourselves a story:  I love you not just at this moment, but into the foreseeable future. We believe it; the other believes it. But it's all a house of cards.

Can we experience another kind of love, then -- the infinite, unconditional kind? For me, that happens when my ideas about myself and the other take a break. Then the love that we both are reveals itself. Then it's not a matter of giving or getting but being what we truly are. And this experience too passes as thoughts come back in. But once we know it, we know it doesn't change, even if our minds do.

Different Kinds of Love?

I've heard it said that there are different kinds of love:  romantic love, love of family members, love of friends, and love of all of humanity.  But is there, at bottom, a difference between these types of love?

It is true that they feel different. And people who are "spiritual" especially like to differentiate the last kind from the other, seemingly more limiting, types.  All-encompassing love, Buddha's love -- that is what we all want to experience, is it not?

But in my experience, the only difference between the more limited kinds of love and all-encompassing love (which includes love of self), is that the object drops away.  It's the same energy of life, but we don't need to focus on someone or something anymore:  we don't need anything outside ourselves to feel whole but rather we realize that we are ourselves the embodiment of love, that we are created as love, and that everything else is as well.  Love isn't so much something that we do as something that we realize we are and always have been.  And since everyone and everything else is also experienced that way, we can't help loving all else as we love ourselves.

Elizabeth Gilbert in EAT, PRAY, LOVE describes hugging trees in India when she had her awakening.  I had exactly the same experience:  anything and everything was embraced by my passion, but for some reason trees were especially lovable!  Maybe awakening makes tree-huggers out of us all!