Whole

(excerpt from REAL, getting real with being yourself)

 

When we look for love or try to inspire it in others, we play all sorts of games.

We might try to become what we think someone wants.

We might play hard to get or wear our hearts on our sleeves.

We might try to be more like him or her. We might stop doing the things we love to do.

We might try to get the other person to change.

We might try whining, crying, shouting, needling, begging, cajoling, tantrums, gifts, tricks, new clothes, sulking, manipulating, bribery… ad infinitum.

And nothing seems to work. It always looks like there is something missing, that this love is not quite secure.

This is because we are searching in the wrong place.

How about going on an adventure to the place where there is nothing but love?

Let me tell you about this adventure.

Firstly, you distinguish between what is permanent and what is transient.

As you explore this distinction you realise that all experience of yourself and other people changes constantly.

With this insight, the belief in a fixed objective self and fixed objective others starts to lose its power. The idea of attaching your well-being and security to something that changes all the time no longer makes sense.

You realise that this other person is created in experience through thoughts and beliefs. And when these disappear, what is left? An apparent form that seems to have its own unique indefinable essence, a miracle just as you are a miracle.

There is simple, profound love for how life expresses itself in the creation of another human being.

Any thoughts about what you need from other people in order to be happy or how they must be in order for you to love them start to seem ridiculous.

You are in love already. You want nothing from anyone.

You walk around in love with the world and with everyone in your life. You know that everything is brought alive in the consciousness of which you are part.

Then your thoughts tell you otherwise. Your thoughts tell you that you need to do something to secure love. They tell you to worry about losing it.

Because the loving, connected state is becoming so natural, blissful and easy for you, there is no desire in you to entertain those thoughts. They pass through quickly.

Then you have a shocking insight – you realise suddenly that it is exactly the same for everyone else. The only thing stopping other people from living in this same deep love of life is what they are thinking and believing from moment to moment. Just as you experience, on and off, day in day out, in yourself.

You realise that underneath the mental chatter, they, just like you, are pure unconditional love.

They love you, they can’t not love you. They just don’t yet live from that knowledge all the time or even some of the time. Because you don’t need anything from them, you can bask in the knowledge of that love without wanting to change what they think about you in any way.

And so there you are. Deeply in love with the people you are with. Loving and appreciating them exactly as they appear to you.

With you, they realise their simple perfection. They feel this in the depths of their being. You are the safest, most beautiful space for them because you are them, you are love.

There is no possibility they could not be in love with you.