Most of the time, when we think of love, we think of romantic love. Our hearts flutter, we only think of the One, and we do everything we can to be as close to this One as possible.
The Greeks differentiated between erotic love, platonic love, and divine love.
Helen Fisher wrote a book about her groundbreaking research on love, entitled Why We Love, in which she describes that we have three different areas of the brain that can often play very different love-related programs at the same time.
For example, we can feel an erotic need or lust for one person, while we have romantic feelings for another person, and at the same time lie happily and peacefully next to our long-term partner in bed without our brain experiencing any difficulties.
We may personally feel remorse, but our brains are designed to handle this simultaneousness of our different levels of love.
Our history is full of tales and poetry on this challenging matter, and to date, no society has fully made sense of why we love in the many ways we do.
All three areas: Eros, romance, and long-term attachment are associated with love. Each can rear their heads at any time, even simultaneously.
Helen Fischer says that these three programs are meant for the survival of the human species, and technically are not mutually exclusive. This knowledge alone has helped many people forgive themselves for their many contradictory loves, and needs, whether lived or just imagined. We are in fact only serving our survival. -:)
And we also all know that there are many different forms of love, not just sexual or romantic love, but also parental love, love for the country, love for an ideology, and love for God. Love is a force that exists beyond the confines of mortal emotions of bonding.
Let me tell you a story of a type of love, that allowed me to enter ever deeper into the very nature of reality and the structure of time and space.
At the age of 18, I discovered the book “The Lazy Man´s Guide to Enlightenment” by Thaddeus Golas, which for me has provided the most comprehensive description of what love is. Because of this, the book is still my little Bible to this day.
Where two or more go into unity, love arises.
That is the quintessence of the book and a piece of wisdom that has accompanied me to this day.
Even in difficult life situations, this book has helped me to master the challenges with the following sentence.
This too, you can learn to love.
They say we have two choices: To experience fear or love
1. We can either contract, get smaller, get tougher, feel fear or anger.
2. Or we can expand, become softer and wider, and penetrate the energy field that surrounds us, embrace, and feel love.
When we learn to love something, then we are free and become bigger than the something, from which we were withdrawn before. We can embrace it. That is a feat in and of itself and is an expression of love.
The ability to embrace something usually requires a little bit of inner work and development from us, because when we are opposed to things, we cannot see the good in it at first.
In one of my books, I describe how I sat as a stewardess on my first official flight in a five-star hotel in London at the age of 19, tearful because I was in a 180 ° different film than the one I actually wanted. I wanted to be a poor Cambridge student studying philosophy.
Contrary to my ideal dream, now as a high-paid stewardess, not as a poor philosophy student, I was sitting in a luxury hotel, not at the Cambridge University, but in Downtown London.
When I opened the book ” The Lazy Man´s Guide to Enlightenment” to an arbitrary page to get a little Cosmic Wisdom about my dilemma, I noticed this special sentence: This too, you can learn to love!
Immediately I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried to find a way to love my circumstance, just as prescribed in the instructions.
Unlike the human love we feel between people, I opened my heart to that which I found hard to love: my luxury circumstance.
It was so contrary to what I had wanted at a deeper soul level. But deterimined to follow the books prescritiption I tried as best I could to take this luxury situation into my heart, to love it and accept it, because this, as it said in the Enlightenment book, was one of the many possibilities of the universe that one could experience, and all experiences were within the Great One Mind of God.
I went into a unity and harmony with my surroundings instead of rebelling internally against it.
Entering into unity with something, and being in harmony with something can take on different degrees, we can embrace sth a little or a lot, and thus can experience different intensities of a feeling of love or warmth.
Here in the five-star hotel room, surrounded by teak furniture, I began to embrace my environment of luxury and entered into harmony with my circumstance. I began to radiate love for this situation, saying to myself: “This too, you can learn to love “.
Almost 40 years later, in Bali one day, I found myself sitting in reverie in our new home in Ubud. I took the same little book “The Lazy Man´s Guide to Enlightenment” off my coffee table in our home and opened it to a random page, to see what bits of wisdom it could share with me this time.
To my surprise I opened to the same page as back then and I read the same message as I had nearly 40 years ago in London:
This too, you can learn to love.
I looked around our home here in Bali and was amazed at the meaning of this sentence in my new context.
Baffled I noticed that again I was sitting surrounded by teak furniture. This time however I was seeing only beauty and perfection surrounding me. The teak furniture after all was made of recycled old teakwood, which had been restored from old Java houses and had not required prescious trees to be cut.
Tears welled up in my eyes because I could clearly see the evolution I had gone through the last four decades. Many times had I used the very same message that THIS TOO YOU CAN LEARN TO LOVE as my guiding light.
This simple sentence had created magic throughout my life. I had learned to love luxury too! We can object to many different things. But in the end we are only masters, when we can hold the two opposites in the two palms of our hands, so to speak.
Now I am happy and in tune with the beauty of the world that surrounds me, and I appreciate the part in me to which beauty is important.
This teak wood also reflects the deeper values I hold, such as that this Teak wood was recycled, had not required for trees to be cut, and I was living in a community, of conscious beings, in a country that was the choice of my heart and soul.
But what does that have to do with love?
Being able to unite with another THAT is the art of loving.
It does not matter whether this OTHER is a circumstance, a value, or a belief, a life situation, a person or an animal. Unifying with another, whatever that is creates a field of unity, harmony and is felt as love.
Love is the ability to be in harmony with something, and to flow into one another, eventually even entering total unity.
Union is what creates the feeling of love.
Now let’s look at this union in relation to human love:
We can unite a little, as is the case with friendships for example, or more strongly, as is often the case between parents and children, and even stronger, as is experienced between romantic partners.
Also, love can be powerfully experienced by going into union with the divine alone, as well as going into the union with the divine together with one or more other beings.
Over the course of my life, I have come to understand, that the universe came into being as an expulsion of its unified essence, to expand and then return into union, back to itself. In the process it is becoming a more complex structure, experiencing itself through a multitude of individuated forms, which eventually all long to return to the Origin of Oneness.
This return to Oneness is embedded into the structure of all that is, as is the drive to bifurcate, to differentiate, and to individuate.
The drive to return to the union is what brings us together in love.
Two people can become One in different ways: In sexual union, in emotionally coming together into one unit, in spiritual union with one another in the apex of God.
In experiencing union, love arises in our hearts.
We do know that we feel love when we are taken into the folds of the arms of another.
BUT the feeling of love not only arises with others but also when we connect ourselves with our soul core diamond, which is one of the most important steps in the development of our ability to love.
When we open ourselves to our innermost core and we drop our ego, our human structure, our self-concept and open ourselves to our soul diamond, then we also experience a feeling of deep love.
Although it may sound like a paradox, unity arises from duality and duality arises from unity. It is the dance of eternity with itself.
We continuously open ourselves to the deeper, finer, or higher aspect in us.
People who have experienced this union with their soul core diamond can love with greater intensity, because they have experienced the basic feeling of self-love.
We can only experience this union and the love that goes with it, if we let go of our identity, at least to a certain extent, regardless of whether we are in union with our own soul core, or with the soul core of another person, or connected with our soul’s core, or even united as two or more beings such as a family, nation etc..
To the extent that we enter into Oneness, we experience the intensity of the union as love.
To the degree to which we allow ourselves to be penetrated, to that degree we feel love.
When we can absorb another being, a thought, another essence into our essence, at that moment we experience union, harmony and love.
When we have expanded our energy field and are interwoven with one another, this then causes the feeling of love.
The physicists have recognized that light can act either as a photon or as a wave.
• As a wave, light creates a field and flows into one another.
• As a particle, the photon hits objects like a billiard ball on a billiard table.
In the same way, we humans can be both: particle, or wave.
We can be as hard as a billiard ball and feel offended by anything.
Or, we can be as soft as the light of a candle, which envelops everything with its warmth.
Thaddeus Golas writes that we can only reach this waveform if we perceive ourselves to be and become energy beings.
I would add, that, in order to experience love, we have to let go of our separate identity and step into the field of energy in order to experience unity.
It is in the surrender or the dissolution of identity, whether only for seconds or for an eternity, that we then experience love on the many dimensions and levels of beingness.
In my many seminars around the world, I have accompanied people on journeys to the center of the universe through guided meditations. I asked them to choose a being, a person, an angel, even a dolphin, with whom they wanted to unite.
In the ascent through the different dimensions of existence, from being a particle to being an energy being to the ascent into the purest consciousness, I accompanied people in the feeling of rising more and more intensely into unity, of getting closer and closer in the center of the universe, until the two entered into unity in a great crescendo, and dissolved into unity and there experienced the greatest form of love and enlightenment.
I describe this journey to the center of the universe in my book Dolphins, Love and Destiny, and I teach it in many meditations.
In hundreds of these meditations, with thousands of people around the globe, I have seen that we humans are remarkably similar in the encounter of our soul cores and the unity of God:
In this ascent to the center of creation, we become brighter, and as we get closer and closer we begin to spin around each other in a spiral dance, until, at ever greater speed, we move toward each other into a unity, often explosively merging into Oneness, where we dissolve our identity and experience the greatest form of unity, enlightenment and love.
In Tantric Buddhism, it is said that the union of two into unity is the quickest way to enlightenment.
Whether it is the practicing monk who focuses on and achieves union with a divine entity, or whether it is two lovers or a person who focuses on an angel; whenever these two beings (or more) merge in perfect unity, there the feeling of love arises, which at times is experiences also as enlightenment.
The Greeks spoke of Eros, erotic love, of platonic love, and of agape, divine love, selfless love.
But basically, all forms of love have this one thing in common:
The ability to come into harmony and unison, to dissolve the boundaries of the self, and to immerse oneself in a larger communion.
When two beings unite, a synthesis occurs, which becomes a new, living structure.
No matter what form this new structure is, a marriage, a momentary connection of two souls, a family, a nation, in this unity we feel the feeling of love, the magnetic force that holds this structure together.
Love is the magnetic force that holds everything together, that calls everything together.
