In this springtime season of romance, I wanted to share a few wise words that changed my understanding of love. I hope you find these thoughts from Ram Dass and Rupert Spira as interesting and illuminating as I did :)
Ram Dass, from Be Love Now:
Our culture treats love almost entirely in connection with interpersonal relationships and interactions. Emotional love is based on external gratification, having our love reflected back to us. It’s not grounded in feeling love from inside. That’s why we keep needing more.
When we love somebody emotionally, that need for feedback creates a powerful attachment. We get so caught up in the relationship that we rarely arrive at the essence of just dwelling in love.
Love is actually a state of being, and a divine state at that, the state to which we all yearn to return. The outer love object stimulates a feeling of love, but the love is inside us. We interpret it as coming from outside us, so we want to possess love, and we reach outside for something that is already inside us.
Rupert Spira, from The Abode of Love:
The desire to merge deeply and completely with [another person] is the desire to lose oneself as a separate entity. It is in this merging, that the separate self sense is temporarily extinguished and this experience of the dissolution of the apparent self is, by definition, the experience of love or happiness. That is, it is the experience of Presence tasting its own Being.
You are already the love that you long for. It is the longing that veils it. Let the longing dissolve in understanding and you will find yourself as the very thing you are looking for. And this Presence that we are, that we share, is the element in each of us that is truly lovable.