We Are Love

From everything I have read about self and reality over the years, all the teachings I have attended or watched I’m going to take a punt and say that the only thing that seems to be acknowledged across the board is our true nature of unconditional love.

Everything else — consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, non-duality, nothingness, being-ness, formless, form, ego, spirituality, reality — all of that is either under some degree of dispute, or different teachers have different ways of talking about them.

Yet, they all, every single one, come back to the ultimate truth being unconditional love.

Unanimous.

And yet this is an area that can be so confusing, so veiled, so confronting.

The word love has been completely taken and claimed by the conditional, by a world of romantic love, familial love, love of our pets or our surroundings.  It’s claimed by the objective: it’s a love of something or a love from someone.

It looks like it depends on the behaviour of someone to us, how we’re perceived, the regard that we’re held in.  It looks completely conditional.

Love is perhaps the ultimate blurred space in a conversation about what we are.

The knowing of our true nature as unconditional love does not stop the mind-body from delighting and flourishing in family, friendship, romance and sex.

But to use these relationships to find our true nature and in the attempt to end the suffering of separation is where confusion lies.

The self identity arose in that blurred space between the survival of the physical and the survival of the idea of me. Our relationships and the people around us in the moment that the self identity is forming create a blue print of separation between the self and another. This blue print becomes the lens of lack through which the world is viewed.

Love looks to be the way in which we can return to that remembered space of Wholeness before the idea of separation arose.

The desire to stabilise what we are to be whole, to be someone or something looks like it is related to love, somehow.

This is true in the sense that the ultimate stability is the recognition that we are love.  But the conditioning of lack sends us out to try and find our Wholeness from a fractured place.

It looks like the way to remedy this lack is to find the thing that will make us whole, to be loved enough and then we’ll be all right.

But this search to be loved enough that we become whole is a wild goose chase because it is the search, the looking out there that veils the fact that we are love already.

Let’s look at what this means. What is unconditional love?

It’s impossible to define it of course but we could say that it is the combination of pure presence, perfect organising intelligence, the juiciness of being, completeness and imperturbable Peace.

All of this wrapped up in the utter kindness of the design. A design that continually brings the mind home.

It often doesn’t seem, though, that the design is kind. When the mind is fighting its own creations. When the concept of self and other lies heavily. The more the thoughts get stuck revolving in this idea of me  as vulnerable, a victim, hard done by, isolated, separate, then in those moments the world is unkind, there is no love.  It’s a harsh unkind world.  And in those moments, I am not love; other people aren’t love; other people are out to get me, or ignore me, they don’t care.  The resistant mind can never experience beingness as unconditional love.  It can’t because resistance is only about conditions.

But in those moments of no resistance…  in the moments of no mind really…. and these moments might even happen when the circumstances are dire… there might just be the purest experience of being. A moment in which everything, everyone in that moment is lit up by love. It comes from a falling away of the idea that it should be anything else but this.

Even in the most intense anxiety or depression, the deepest grief, the most thudding rejection there is a glow of light. And that light is love.

That light is not hope. It’s not the idea that everything will be alright. All of that is just a construct of future and resistance to now that hides the glowing light.

The light is presence to this right now, this is all there is and this is love.  The kindness of the design is that it allows for a mind that can create anything, that can get utterly lost fighting its own reflection and that the way home is illuminated in the suffering.

All of us will have had moments of everything falling away. Depending on the grip of the mind and identification they may be so fleeting as to be unnoticed. It might be a moment of looking into someone’s eyes and seeing right through, seeing the love that we are in them. It might be in nature or looking up at the night sky. It’s an alive electric space of love, however fleeting, however unbelievable for the mind.

The appearance of separation and the feeling of isolation it inevitably brings is the way back to the unconditional space of no requirements, no resistance, no resentment, no self, no other. Just this.

It is empty of content because content has no truth but it is empty bliss. It is not the harsh bleak nihilistic emptiness that a mind fully lost in separation will create. It is empty warm vibrant aliveness.

The rediscovering, or the return of the mind back home is unconditional love in action. From that truth the mind and body can move back into the world. And now the world does not have to change for us to be ok. There are no conditions imposed on other people. And ironically this is the only space of change. The mind is no longer in battle with its own projected beliefs. There is just absolute intimacy with what is.

The entire purpose of our lives is our return to the knowing of ourselves as unconditional love.

And this is done through the people who have hurt us most, whose behaviour, whose words to us, whose actions towards us largely created and reinforced that sense of lack, that fragility of self identity.

This is a return back through these layers to the truth of Wholeness and to the truth of unconditional love in which even the people who have done the worst things to us are understood.  Their behaviour could not have been any different.  Their behaviour, no matter how terrible, came from the search for Wholeness, from the desire to return to love.

This is beyond forgiveness. It is a place in which all conditions have fallen away. It is a meeting of the other in the full knowledge that they do not have to be different. That their behaviour has nothing to do with the love that they really are.

The is the end of resentment. It is the end of that poison creating disease within us.

Our life, every interaction, every relationship in which we’re seeking love, in which we’re trying to be loved, so that we can be whole, is saying “No. It’s not out here.  There will never be enough out here to make you whole.  From that perspective of lack, you cannot ever find Wholeness”.

Every interaction when really we’re desperate for love, desperate for recognition, to be held by someone, the kindness of the design is saying “No, not there.  Come back, come back, come back, come back.  Come back to that glow, that tiny, alive, vibrant sliver of unconditional love that is truth and is freedom and go out from there.

From truth, everything is love.