Love is your experience of another being. If you actually experience another being - human, animal, or even plant - and not merely your own thoughts, ideas, preconceptions etcetera projected onto that being, that's love. Love is your natural experience of all beings; you had to be taught how to be anything but loving. Failure to love the beings you encounter is failure to be fully human; love is your natural state, your birthright, part of God's original gift to you. Loving the beings you encounter is an essential characteristic of all beings, part of being itself.
All humans go through a necessary developmental stage - exile - in which we become alienated from the natural characteristic of loving. Before and after exile, love is a given. Before exile, love is natural and automatic but limited by the undeveloped state, and easily distorted into hate. After exile, love becomes increasingly universal and unlimited. Only humans have to bear exile; it's part of the curse of becoming, the possibility of development.
An exile gets taught how not to love, explicitly and by example. An exile will draw other exiles (if the parents can't fill the bill) to teach how not to love. The core of the teaching is distrust as a ruling principle rather than a sensible precaution. Instead of "love unless you find there's a reason not to" - a recipe for a rich, fulfilling life - an exile learns "don't love unless you're sure it's safe" - a recipe for misery and isolation. Exiles also usually learn not to love certain kinds of people, for instance black people, white people, fat people, loud people, smelly people, people with certain accents, Republicans, liberals, or whatever.
Once you've escaped exile you begin to learn openness. Love can exist only in your openness. Openness makes it easy to overcome all the "reasons" for not loving; distrust, mental categories and other reasons for not loving become meaningless once you experience openness. If you're open, how the other being is and what the other being does or doesn't do is irrelevant; the other person doesn't have to be aware of you at all. They just have to be there with you. Love is your experience of another being, and when the one you love leaves, you no longer experience that being, so the love goes away. You can literally only love the one you're with. Love is an experience, not a memory, and misunderstanding this simple distinction can have serious consequences.
The desire to be open and love is universal, but in exile it's very elusive; the exiled state wars with love and openness. A great deal of confusion about what love is and isn't arises from this.
All kinds of mental junk gets attached to love: contracts, expectations, memories, emotions, attitudes, and so forth. Almost everyone does it to some degree; only exiles take it seriously. Love is real; mental junk isn't. Mental junk you can simply forget, and it disappears without a trace; it was never really there to begin with. The purpose of the mental junk is to tie love down, to create the illusion of stability and security: so-and-so will always love me, I have it in writing. But the experience of love is moment to moment; it can't be solidified, formalized, controlled, institutionalized, or in any way made predictable. Your love lasts as long as you stay open; close down and it's gone. On some level, everyone knows this; if you're in exile, love seems so scarce that knowing that makes you panic and you fasten on the mental junk to try and capture something that can't be captured. Love, like being, is absolutely unpredictable and uncontrollable. Mental junk has nothing to do with love.
Love isn't at all scarce; it's all around you. It's also not fleeting, fickle, or unreliable; that's you. You say "our love faded away" because you don't want to say "I closed down to so-and-so." Love will never fade or turn sour; love is your experience of another being, and experience can't be worn down. If you're not as open as you were before, your love will diminish or disappear, and sometimes that's necessary or prudent. But it's important to know that's you closing down, not love going away; don't think your limitation is "just how love is." Love is always perfect and unlimited; we're the ones with the limitations, at least for now. But love never gives up on us.
It's easy to confuse love and need because we're all helpless as infants, and love and being taken care of are all mixed together. Infants have an unimpaired ability to love; they're wide open and naturally love every being they encounter. Mostly they encounter mother and other caregivers, the beings they also absolutely depend on. It's natural for love to get mixed up with being taken care of, and that's fine for an infant. But an infantile relationship like that isn't appropriate for an adult; lover and caregiver are entirely different roles, and usually incompatible. It's natural for your lover to take on the caregiver role in an extreme moment, but best to keep it extremely momentary. Relying on your lover for care, or worse yet expecting your lover to take care of you is always injurious to love and usually fatal.
When you expect someone you love to take care of you - an infantile expectation - you burden the love affair with infantile fears and insecurities; your love - your openness - is not likely to survive that kind of treatment. Even if your lover is saintly enough to accept such ham-handed expectation without hating your guts - even if he or she continues to be open to you and love you - the love affair is still probably doomed because you're occupying an infantile part of yourself and retreating from the openness required if you are to love as an adult. Love asks nothing of the beloved. That's not pie-in-the-sky idealism, it's simply the inescapable truth about love. If you're asking or expecting something, whatever you got going's not love.
Love is all about finding that special someone and settling down together. Sure, it's OK to love friends and extended family, sorta, but the real deal's reserved for that special someone, and then kids if you have any, right? Sorry, love doesn't work that way; it can't be put in a box. Restricting your love to the nuclear family guarantees failure. Your love is the love you carry down the street and greet the world with; if you've shut that down, you won't magically be able to love the strangers living in your house.
Love is a day-to-day experience, in many contexts; it's something that takes you by surprise and you find your breath taken away by your love for a being you never saw before. If it doesn't happen like that, it won't happen at home either. You cannot love selectively. End of story.
Love is your experience of another being, not an inanimate object or an abstraction. You can love a dog or a geranium, but you can't love money, your country, or your stamp collection. Love is one being's openness to another being. The spark of being in animals and plants is not the same as ours, and not as bright, but it's still there, and love is possible. The spark in animals is more similar to ours than the spark in plants is - we being animals and all - so we find loving animals to be richer and more fulfilling. But "love" of things and ideas is a dead end; it gives you nothing, and the delusion of it gets in the way of the real thing.
In the early stages of becoming, love is natural, thoughtless, and pure. People who are working in the early stages simply expect for everyone to be their friend and ally; they come to life with a pure open heart. The problem with this is that in the early stages you don't have the inner resources to deal with all the things the world throws at a pure and open heart: heedlessness, deceit, treachery, indifference, callousness, etcetera. Undeveloped being reacts to this inevitable disregard with fury and hate: love turned inside out. This happens over and over again in the early stages, because the human heart is immensely resilient, so the person recovers from rejection and loves again, only to be rejected again.
On its own, the heart will never give up, never stop trying; our natural ability to love is that powerful: external rejection will never be able to wear it down. But at a certain point a being enters the middle stages of development, and a new element is born in the heart: longing for something deeper. In the early stages, love is the deepest experience, and when you first begin feeling the longing for something deeper, you naturally assume that love - the right love, the perfect love - will give it to you. But the longing isn't for love, it's for being, for a deeper experience of life, so no matter how perfect love is, it can't satisfy the longing. So begins the alienation of love that the exile is cursed with.
The exile has to learn to give up on love, because clinging to love as some kind of answer, some kind of remedy or relief from the pain of living is a key element - for many people the most important element - keeping them from reaching full acceptance that life is just as bad as it seems: the bottom of the pit. And until you reach that point and give up on everything and turn to God, to being, you can't be saved; you can't enter the protection and encouragement of God's grace. You can't choose to participate in creation if you're still hoping to find salvation in the perfect love affair.
Only after you've escaped exile can love of other beings take its rightful place as an important part of your daily life, of the work of contending, and not any kind of answer to anything. All the agonizing tempering you've gone through - having your love rejected in the early stages, being alienated from love in exile, and finally giving up on love at the moment of salvation - give you deep and powerful resources to deal with whatever comes your way when you open yourself to love. You're finally able to love as an adult, without requiring or even expecting anything in return. Your experience of love gradually becomes consistently rich and fulfilling.
Love reveals being. Your love will show you exactly where you are in the process of becoming like God. God loves all beings perfectly and unreservedly, and all beings experience God's love, the comfort of God's presence. The more like God you become, the better and fuller your loving. Most teachers and most people who write "spiritual" books don't understand the connection between love and being, and their students and readers suffer because of their ignorance. Love can never be a tool. You can't use love to whip being into shape. Anyone who says that you should love more or be more loving or be more open doesn't have a clue what love is. Love can never be commanded; love blossoms or it doesn't. If a teacher tells students to "be devotional" or to "be more loving toward other people," the teacher's bogus. That's like telling a poor person to "be rich," or a cancer patient to "be well;" it's arrogant, insulting and can be harmful. Of course that kind of consequence doesn't faze a shallow self-help human potential charlatan with a product to sell.
As you develop, love will become more natural and universal to you. You'll see that the selective, restrictive limitations culture puts on love are irrelevant. Love will take you by surprise day by day; you'll be struck by love for beings who pass you by and you never see again. You'll find that love is easier when the one you love isn't aware of being loved; if someone becomes aware of your love, they may respond with fear and suspicion, mistaking love for a desire to get something from them or make them do something. Better to keep it hidden; you'll discover that hidden love is a source of profound joy and delight. Mutual love is the hardest of all; the fears, suspicions and insecurities in you and your lover tend to exacerbate each other.
To experience another being, you have to open to that being. If you open, you experience love; it's that simple. Also as simple as no open, no love. You have the capacity to love all the beings you encounter; your capacity to love is limited only by space and time. You can only be in one time and place (sorry cosmonauts, it's true), and you can only love beings there with you. But within those bounds there's no limit to your capacity to love; it's part of God's gift of being.
OK, so what's openness?
Openness is emptiness. It doesn't matter how cool and easygoing you act, how well you fit the picture of what "open" people are supposed to look like. If you're full, nothing gets in, and love never has a chance. This is particularly true of people who are full of it, i.e. self-absorbed. Self-absorption is one of the defining characteristics of exile. But getting beyond self-absorption is just the first step toward openness.
To open to someone you have to get out of the way. That means not simply getting past self-absorption, but getting over all the rest of it too: expectations, fears, obsessions, ideals, comparisons, all that tiresome dreck. Openness is turning to another without your mind or feelings interfering and letting the other being act on you; you have to engage the other being. Being is naturally open, naturally empty. The content of your life is of no interest to being.
Cultivating openness is a subtle, lifelong discipline. As you clear away the crap that keeps you from being open, you discover another layer of crap beneath it - maybe crap you used to think was really cool & spiritual. The effort required to open becomes more delicate and more intense with each layer, and combining intensity with delicacy is subtle effort. The only way you can work on openness at subtler levels is to turn the process on yourself. Work on love by loving yourself - being in you, not the crap. Work on openness by opening to being. That work is prayer.
If you don't love, you wither and decline. That's one reason we need each other to contend with: life does not go on if you fail to love. Being loved is irrelevant; it's nice but it doesn't do anything for you. What's absolutely necessary for you to survive is that you love other beings, or God. You have to open yourself to survive.
How much love you experience (love is quantitative, not qualitative; there's no better or worse) depends on how open you are. Love doesn't depend on anything about the one you love. The one you love cannot diminish or limit your love; only you can do that. Circumstances cannot deprive you of love; you can only deprive yourself. Love is absolutely necessary for life, but development requires abundant love, i.e. abundant loving. By failing to open, you deprive yourself of love, and life closes in and becomes meager. Lavishing attention on inanimate objects or wealth and other abstractions likewise diminishes you, and the moment all your attention is withdrawn from other beings you die. That's how some people are able to choose to die when they find life unbearable: they simply withdraw all attention into themselves.
To develop, you have to love freely and openly. Groundless fear and suspicion of others prevent development. If someone means you harm, you'd be an idiot not to protect yourself. But otherwise your duty as someone interested in development is to look for a way to love. You don't have to find a way, you don't have to love everyone. You just have to set your fears, suspicions, dislikes and prejudices aside and consider the possibility of love, of openness. Just set your bullshit aside - find it to be a bit of a bore. Believe me, that's no stretch of the imagination.
When immature people experience love, they tend to get lost in it - oblivious to everything else. That makes the situation go downhill fast, because love is insufficient nourishment by itself. The love affair begins to feel confining and inadequate, and then "love fades away" - somebody closes down.
Love is necessary for survival but it's not enough for development; development comes as the result of living well. Love is an important part of contending, but by itself it's inadequate for development. Many things in your life can block development - self-absorption, apathy, self-pity, politics and causes, entertainment - and in those cases and many others you're stuck unless you see what's going on and do something about it. But overfocusing on love cures itself: you end up closing down to the one you love. To develop, love unreservedly, but in balance.
Prayer is loving God. To pray, open yourself to being, to God in you and draw close to the flame of God, the love of God. The teaching "God is love" is a profound mystery that no one can ever communicate to you but that you can approach in prayer. There's a lot of bullshit to be heard and read about God is love; the bullshitters have no idea what they're talking about, none of them. To paraphrase Laozi, he who knows knows better than to try and talk about it. Jesus had the unenviable task of drawing people's attention to this mystery; it was part of his work to point to a mystery than can never be communicated. Given the impossibility of the task, he did a profoundly good job. Everyone else should just keep their yaps shut on the topic; they have nothing to add.
Once you've cleared away your self-absorption and other barriers to loving, loving God is the only route to opening up and loving other beings more fully and deeply. Your love of God is where your capacity to love exists; you can't cultivate it anywhere else.
The universe is an expression of God's love. God becomes the universe, moment to moment; that's what creation is. God didn't wind everything up and then withdraw to the highest heaven to watch benevolently; God manifests as the universe every single second. The universe is a continuous act of manifestation, a continuous gift from God. Giving is the universal principle that everything is based on. God expresses love by giving existence.
Giving is the general operating principle, the way things work, the universe's modus operandi. God gives everything all the time; if you want something - anything - to work, you better line yourself up with how things in the universe work. If you want to develop, to move in the direction of inhabiting being, you have to operate within the universal current of giving. You don't develop by grabbing things for yourself, you develop by giving them away. Your goal is to give away the truth of God in you.
The universe is a one-way flow of manifestation from God to all that is; your love is a one-way flow from you to the one you love. Grasping, expecting, wanting back, bartering - those all dam up the flow and love is gone, just like that. If you want to love, you have to imitate God; that's the only way love works. With infinite mercy, God is showing us how to do it, how it works. We have to pay attention and follow the simple instruction: give it away, give it away, give it away.
Universal love is the love of God for all being. God is in all places and all times, and God is open to all beings; God never shuts down or turns away. The love of God for all being overflows as God's grace, which you enter when you turn your attention to development. If you were isolated from all other beings, you could still receive the vital nourishment of loving via prayer.
We all want to become like God, to love like God; that's the deepest truth of who we are.
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