Millions obsess over it. Thousands have died for it. We all seek it. Few will find it. Even fewer will live it.
It is LOVE.
It seems we are compulsively obsessed, yet slightly confused…about love. While many of us think we know love so well we often find it hard to be unconditionally loving. So what is love… actually? And where is love…exactly? Is it something that should come naturally? Do we have to earn it? Or will it just show up? Can we expect to be loved? Or is that just the fortune of a fated few? Should we ‘feel’ love all the time or just occasionally, in some ‘emotional high’?
In what is NOT another ‘relationship manual’, nor a guide on how to be a ‘better lover’, the author takes us on a journey to the highest territory of the human spirit as he clearly reveals in very down to Earth language:
- How to find ‘real love’ in life
- How to bring the light and power of love into all your relationships
- Why you are not aware that your heart has been broken, blocked, frozen and poisoned!
- Why happiness is impossible until you know the ‘truth about love’
- How to eliminate the one and only barrier to the discovery of love
- The secrets of how to ‘feel’ love anywhere anytime
- Why, in truth, you can never ‘fall’ in love
“Infinite and yet indestructible, it is only when you understand LOVE that you will fully understand your life. Unlimited and yet invisible, it is only when you know LOVE that you will know how powerful you really are.”
Excerpt
Myth Three
“You Fall in Love”
Afraid not?
This is a tough one to ‘see’ as this myth has permeated almost all forms of romance for centuries. But the truth is you cannot ever ‘fall’ in love. True love is never a fall; it can never be a descent. Infatuation, obsession and attachment are usually what happen in reality, and then given the term ‘falling in love’.
Some of the proofs of love’s presence in a relationship include an absence of infatuation, obsession and absolutely no attachment. There isn’t the feeling of falling, but an ‘uplifting’. There is no sense of
confinement but a real sense of freedom within the relationship. There is no ‘heat’ but a coolness and strength that endures through all circumstances and events.
confinement but a real sense of freedom within the relationship. There is no ‘heat’ but a coolness and strength that endures through all circumstances and events.
You can never literally ‘fall in love’ as you are already, and always will be ‘in’ love, because you are always and already ‘in’ your self. Love and the authentic self are one and the same. But if you are not aware of this, and most of us aren’t, it can feel like you are falling back into your self, your true self. But it’s not a falling, more an awakening to a true awareness of your self. Sometimes it’s called self-realization. Three things can happen when you ‘believe’ you have fallen in love with another. Not necessarily in this order.
The first happens entirely within your consciousness. You create an idealized image of the other on the screen of your mind and then lose your ‘self’ in the image. That’s why you can’t think clearly about anything other than them. That’s why you lose your appetite, why you don’t really want to talk to anyone else, why your sleeping patterns are affected for days. You become habituated to giving your attention, your self, to the image of the other in your mind.
Losing one’s self in the self-created, idealized image of another is not love, it’s just attachment, which often becomes infatuation. Th ere is nothing more certain than this illusion coming to an end. It normally happens when the other does something that contradicts your perfect image of them. But even then you will go on idealizing them, despite their failure to live up to your image. This is why you may notice, somewhat curiously at first, that you love some people more when they are not there! But of course it’s not real love, it’s simply ‘idealization’.
Th e second dimension to the myth of falling in love is the feeling that while you may be miles, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, it is as if you can feel them right next to you. This is an effect that is caused by an exchange of mental energy, a subtle communication between two people, two beings who are radiating energy. Each one is thinking intensely and frequently about the other. Each one is picking up the mental vibrations of the other.
Sometimes this can be extremely accurate where specific thoughts of one are crystallized in the mind of the other. Or it can be a strong feeling, a powerful sense of the other’s presence. Nothing new here, in the sense that it’s possible to transcend the limits of physical communication to higher, subtler levels of communicating and connect with another at a higher, subtler level. Pets are much better at this!
The third dimension to the illusion of ‘falling’ is known as the ‘intimacy of physical presence’. There is a level of comfort in the other’s company that allows you to be totally open and vulnerable. That means you feel you are able to collapse all those walls that you have been erecting around your heart for all those years.
The mutual transparency is a relief from the pressure of keeping all those walls in place. A pressure you only fully notice when you stop trying to hold the walls up. Now you can share all that is in your heart, in your self, in your consciousness, all your secrets and all the experiences that have been buried away. This is not only a relief but as you share you start to see how small and insignificant those things were, you start to understand your self with a clarity that is not possible until you reveal your self, until you express (press out) your self to another. This absolute openness to the other, reciprocated by the other, co-creates what you may then perceive as a special relationship. It is an intimate relationship. A relationship where the idea of intimacy comes fully and energetically alive as each one is implicitly saying to the other, “Come in (in) to (ti) me (ma) and see (cy)” me. And as each allows the other into the other, each enters the energy of the other, which is the same as entering the love of the other, which feels like falling into the love of the other, which in a sense it is, which is then swooningly called ‘falling in love’. Only it’s not a fall, it’s more like a relieving, perhaps a clearing, some resolving, much revealing, so it’s probably more accurate to call it therapy! Which is also why it can’t and doesn’t last. Which is why there is always the ‘honeymoon period’. The end of the honeymoon period is usually signaled by one of three events.
The first signal is when you start to re-erect the walls around your heart when ‘they’ do something that you either don’t like or didn’t expect. Or perhaps they push you to go a little too deep into your self, to a place where a wound is still a little too tender, a memory just a little too painful. But of course you won’t realize it’s you that is the source of your own discomfort, as you are likely to also fall back into the old but fatal belief that they are ‘making’ you feel this way.
The second ‘end of honeymoon’ signal is simply the calming of the relationship. And what’s left is the ability to be at ease in each other’s company at all times in all places. Like finding a shoe that perfectly fits your foot, you have found someone with whom you feel entirely comfortable. This ‘fit’ then becomes a comfort zone. A zone where not everything is perfect but it’s the best so far and why would you want to be with anyone else and go through all that ‘revealing’ again. Or maybe with someone new you wouldn’t go through all that again so you would not have such a powerful ‘together story’ to cling to and identify with. Some people do stay together simply because of a history that have created together. This story includes the original therapeutic effect, which in itself is remembered as a kind of liberation that seemed to have been granted by the other, but was in truth only facilitated by the other.
The third signal of the end of the honeymoon can be the realisation that love is much bigger than two, that the Kingdom of Love is not called Coupledom. When true love is fully realized it also becomes obvious that it’s much bigger than just two people being together. It’s much bigger than the limitations of one special relationship, even if that relationship expands into a physical family.
Love is ‘the’ universal energy and it awaits universal application if it is to be fully known, its full power understood and its beauty seen. Th is seems to be an innate awareness that we all carry but lose in the routines and struggles of daily living. If this universal sense of loves presence is allowed to bloom, the exclusivity of any particular relationship may become too confining and claustrophobic to live within. There may ultimately be a parting of the ways as one or both feel called to be more ...unlimited. Or there may be an attempt to stay in the relationship and still realize the universality of love together. This could be ‘challenging’ as any attachment is like a denial of that universality, and a new set of walls can easily be created. Or it could be that one recognizes that ‘this’ is bigger than the two of us, and the other doesn’t.
As almost everyone who believes they have fallen in love can verify, honeymoons never last. The ‘falling’ has to end. There has to be a landing, which often feels like a crash landing! Sometimes that fall is
a complete separation, or there is simply a return to a previous reality with a new insight into the other, “Ah, now I see, now I know, what you are really like.” An image is shattered and an illusion destroyed. This is the moment when people either go their separate ways or the shoots of true love emerge in the form of unconditional acceptance of the other, regardless of what they say or do or have said or have already done. But as we shall see it’s a hard to maintain that unconditional acceptance when we have spent our life learning expectation, judgment and dependency.
a complete separation, or there is simply a return to a previous reality with a new insight into the other, “Ah, now I see, now I know, what you are really like.” An image is shattered and an illusion destroyed. This is the moment when people either go their separate ways or the shoots of true love emerge in the form of unconditional acceptance of the other, regardless of what they say or do or have said or have already done. But as we shall see it’s a hard to maintain that unconditional acceptance when we have spent our life learning expectation, judgment and dependency.
It is the presence of these and other learned habits that give rise to the modern cliché about the intimate relationship that we call marriage when we say, “Ah, but you have to work at a marriage”. But perhaps it’s not the relationship that requires the work. What takes work is not allowing these habits to interfere with the energy that we bring to any relationship.
These habits signify the absence of love and the presence of anger and fear. These inclinations toward judging, criticising and blaming the other indicate there is still an expectation of the other to be a source of love for the self. A common mistake that can eventually turn any relationship into what feels more like a battleground.