It’s probably fair to say, love is both the cause of our greatest joy and greatest sadness writes Simon North.
Is this because we go through life without really understanding love?
Do we ever sit and contemplate what love is means to us personally?
It’s likely to mean something subtly different for everyone, yet we can fall into the trap of adopting the same patterns for expressing our love to each other.
This often leads to confusions and misunderstandings in relationships because the majority of our feelings about love may come from our conditioning.
Perhaps our emotional structure means we have misunderstood the true meaning of love?
It’s quite easy to see how humans have distorted what is love. Just take a look at the language used in any advert for a dating app. Here you will find prime examples of the misinterpretation of love for the sake of sales. Love becomes regarded as a personal possession and labelled as a commodity.
In the dating game people set out their credentials for love and outline what their perfect partner might look like. It even goes as far as reducing their declaration of looking for love into abbreviations!
One helpful way in defining love is to get away from seeing it as personal with a purely human identity and seeing love as an eternal force of creation.
Before anything existed in the universe there was chaos energy. Then love mysteriously arose to turn chaos into coherence. Once this occurred the creation of life became a probability. It follows, therefore, as everything in existence is alive everything originates out of love. This theory can be found in the majority of spiritual teachings and forms the basis of nearly all religions.
There is much evidence that early humans believed everything is alive and therefore lived harmoniously with nature. Perhaps they had a better understanding of love? Maybe they considered love as a way to describe all things? If so, it is entirely possible they lived in a permanent state of universal love.
Early humans were the first people who worshipped nature and therefore had a very different relationship with the world around them and with each other.
Over millennia this state of oneness with all things has largely been lost. Oneness has been replaced by separation from the natural world and is probably the cause of a lot of pain, suffering and illness.
The human race has come a long way away from our wild roots. The rise of organised religion brought with it a misguided belief that humans can control nature and bend nature to our will.
This is proving to be a catastrophic belief system. Saving the human race from extinction is now a number one priority, yet we are not seeking a closer, loving relationship with nature.
There is no widespread call to return to the state of co-creation we once had. Our problems with climate catastrophe appear wrapped up with our cultural conditioning.
So where do we start with trying to put this right? One way would be asking ourselves ‘what exactly is love if it doesn’t belong to me’?
If we go back to the premise that love is the universal force of creation, then we can liberate ourselves from self-limiting belief systems and cultural patterns.
By embracing love as meaning something existing outside of oneself, it takes on a new dimension becoming a life force that makes everything in the universe alive.
Holding onto a new meaning for the quality of universal love will also help us to avoid confusion when we meet somebody and make an intimate connection.
We can avoid false expectations. I’m not ‘falling in love with you' rather ‘I’m entering the same higher frequency of feeling universal love as you.’ This leads to a belief that we are sharing a state of bliss together but it’s not based on an individual aspect of love.
So what does it mean for partners to both believe love is the universal force of creation? In the context of intimate relationships, it becomes possible to completely change the basis of their loving interactions.
In this sense we free love from the bonds of human thinking. It becomes something that we feel and therefore returns us to a place where we are using our innate intuition. The basis of an intimate relationship changes completely into recognising that we are forming a deep and meaningful connection with each other but we are not making the other person a possession.
This is a profound change to the paradigm of love. Humans have come a long way away from relying on intuition to make decisions or find guidance through life and it is only by returning to this state that we can discover the purity in ourselves and in all our interactions.
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