What is love?

"Death reminds the livings a true measure of life is not how well did you do, instead, it is how well did you love."

The pandemic had a life-changing impact on many people around the world, out of my own struggles during the lockdown came a breakthrough in my quest to crack the code of love. I discovered Sufism, an ancient mysticism founded on love: God is love. Love created the world. God is in everyone and everything--Love is in everyone and everything. I made a final leap from self-help psychology into the world of spirituality after a realization that all spirituality teachings since the dawn of time are all about love, there is a rich body of wisdom and teaching on the mystery of love that modern psychology has just begun to draw from. This is a sequel to my previous account on my journey to crack to code of love (“True love begins with you”) In that article I promised to share the lessons learned about Unconditional Love, I hope to fulfill that promise here.

Michael Singer is an American spiritual teacher based in Gainesville, Florida (website). His book, "The untethered soul" has largely inspired me to dive into the sea of spirituality. I am roughly summarizing the lesson I learned from his teaching here:

Love is an immense source of energy, a universal life force that runs deep within everyone's heart, and it longs to reach out to connect with the love that is alive in other people's hearts. To love unconditionally is simply to keep our heart open to every person and everything in our lives. Spiritual teaching revolves around connecting our mind with this love within ourself, and to look at life from the perspective of this love. Love will hurt at times. It takes courage to love unconditionally without controlling or possession. It is easier to dwell in fear, resentment and suffering. As a wise person once said, "pain is unavoidable, suffering is up-to-you." Like a snake bite that hurts but is harmless, it is the poison we carry in our heart that becomes fatal.

Like most people, I went out into the world in search of “The Love of my life.” To my amazement, I learned that The Love of my life is not out there. And it is not a person. It is the Love for my life I carry within me.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
- Rumi -

Fear erects walls that trap and bury love deep in the depth of the subconscious. Our minds are conditioned, trained, educated to embrace fear as the guiding force to navigate thru life. Our conscious minds are addicted to fear. Fear permeates all our thoughts, beliefs, and values. Fears become the backdrop of every aspect of our lives in various shapes and sizes like anxieties, worries, resentment, anger, restlessness, loneliness, hatred, guilt, shame, .... Once in many moons, we come across a person that triggers our heart to open and we can feel love swelling up in our heart. We confound that person to be the source of love that fills up our hearts and declare that we have found "The Love of our life." We actually mistake the person that rubbed the magic lamp and let the genie out, to be the genie himself. We became dependent and possessive for fear of losing the person that is able to trigger our hearts to open for us to feel love. We resort to every possible strategy to keep this person for ourself: seduction, deceit, manipulation, promises of our undying love, baits like fame, money, attention, sex, affection, power, excitement, the moon, or the world,.... We plead, beg, threaten, guilt, shame, or coerce their loyalty. We promise everything except one, their freedom to leave. Hence, the age old saying: "If you truly love someone, set them free."

The great wisdom of spiritual teachings can be loosely described as there is a benevolent and mighty genie name Love who is trapped by Fear in a magic lamp: our heart. We can learn to open our magic lamp to let the genie out. We can learn to open our heart to let Love into our life.

Keep breaking your heart until it opens
- Rumi -

This Love that is a mighty immense source of energy alive within everyone, is a difficult concept to wrap our minds around. It is the Tao in Taoism, God in Christianity, Sufism and Islam. Compassion in Buddhism. Do you know what "Aloha" means in Hawaiian language? It means, "In the presence of Divinity"

Spiritual teachings ask us to listen to our heart because the mind was not designed to understand love. Love is to be experienced to be known, it can not be explained, or understood intellectually. I can try to offer a modest example in the experience of abundance. We experience abundance when our hearts are filled with love, we become selfless, generous, and forgiving. Otherwise, we would feel fearful in our heart, and lacking in our life regardless the size of our material wealth, it will never be enough.

Love is a sea where the intellect drowns
- Rumi -

On my journey to reconnect with this love from within I am learning and practicing Self-love, Meditation, and Spirituality:

Love yourself to experience and know what love is, and know how to love another person. If you don't love yourself: no one would be able to love you, your heart is closed to all the love in the world. And you would not have the first-hand knowledge of what to do to love another person when your heart is clouded in fear.

The quality of a person's life is a reflection of what is alive within themself. When there are joy and love in their life, it is a result of the Joy and Love in their inner-world.

What do you do to love yourself? One of my favorite spiritual teacher, Louise Hay, spent her career teaching people the following process of self-love:

• Stop criticizing, judging, or blaming yourself

• Take care of your health: nutrition, sleep, exercise, supportive relationships

• Accept yourself as you are, with all your qualities and flaws

• Be kind and cherish yourself

• Be patient with yourself

• Forgive yourself for all the mistakes you made

• Stop scaring yourself with worries about the future

• Find support from your close relationships when you need help

• Practice meditation to connect with your true self

Meditation has gained a wider audience in recent years. It helps people to turn inward to listen to their body, to their emotions, and to reconnect with the personal truth in their heart unclouded by the distractions of the outside world.

While self-love helps to release the grip of fear that represses love deep down into our subconscious, like in "The magic lamp", a powerful force trapped a genie inside a lamp, and meditation is a skill to pick the lock to free the genie.

Thanks to Youtube's recommendation algorithm, I came across spiritual teachings that put me on a new path, out of confusion and spinning my wheels the self-help world. These teachings came from different teachers from different cultures and different parts of the world. The underlying wisdom remains the same: to connect with this universal love we all carry within our heart.

I invite everyone to look at spirituality teachings as models of the world of emotions and relationships. The same way Newton's laws and Einstein's theory of relativity are models of the physical world. The difference with spirituality is it can not be understood intellectually, instead, it can only be experienced by trying out the teaching in your daily life to discover its laws. I believe what drove people away from spirituality were, in part, the mis-interpretation of spirituality by organized religious institutions to maintain power over people--you might be interested in a re-interpretation of Christianity in "A course in Miracle" listed below. The other factor is the advancements of science and technology that have had great success in elevating the standard of living, and became the new religion with its own churches. Yet, the world has reached a point in time where the need for Love can be felt globally since science and technology are not equipped to elevate our collective consciousness, or our relationships with one another and between communities.

Below are some of the teaching materials that make up the corner stones of my journey so far:

• Michael Singer's "The untethered life"

• Ellif Shefak's "The forty rules of love"

• Louise Hay's "You can heal yourself"

• "A course in Miracle"

• Dr. Joe Dispenza's "Breaking the habit of being yourself"

• Ram Dass' lectures

• Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent communication"

The first line of the Dao De Jing, the bible of Taoism, says: "A Tao that may be spoken is not the ever-constant Tao." Does this sound familiar to you? ...I bet my money you have seen this before. Yes, you have!! ...Remember this? "Love is a sea where the intellect drowns." ...Have I drowned your intellect in this article? ...I took on this impossible task of explaining Love, or speaking about the Tao in a few hundreds words. It is the tip of an iceberg of infinite size. If this article stirs in you a little curiosity, it is a success, and I feel warm in my heart.

I leave you with a little fun fact:

Going around talking about Love is a health-hazard. This is what happened to three folks in this business: one got nailed on a cross, a second had a dream and got shot, the third said "All you need is love," and you know what happened....

As a personal health insurance policy, I think I would need to write about Fears in an upcoming article. Stay tuned!

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."
- Leo Tolstoy -