Love and The Valentine's Day
02/20/2009 - Culture
What is love? How can we define it? There are no secrets or ready-made recipes for love. As Aldous Huxley put it:"There is not any formula or method. You learn to love by loving." Real love cannot be defined.
Defining is not the same as understanding.
Love is a beautiful feeling inside your heart and a deep understanding between you and the higher self, and then expressing it in a thousand thoughtful ways at the sensory level.
It takes courage, vision and sensitivity to be in love and to give and receive the most precious gift of life. No definition can ever define love or heart or its transformative power.
Love is like music
That springs in the heart
Gets arranged in the mind
Savored through the senses
And enjoyed by the soul
It must be composed by the ears
Guided by intelligence
Nurtured with patience
Cultivated by the gentle feelings
Cared with extreme tenderness
And played like a grand symphony
By a master conductor with utmost awareness*
(From: The Divine Perfume of Love*)
Love is probably the most ecstatic and a uniquely precious human emotion, the most potent elixir and perhaps the most intoxicating nectar gifted to mankind by nature, and paradoxically the most misunderstood.
Love is Transforming
Love is the bondless glue that holds the universe together. In every loving relationship, there is an opportunity knocking at our door, to uncover our real self, to change or transform ourselves.
The cornerstone of each and every relationship is love, or unconditional love. That is, a relationship based on the purity of the heart that will carry you through the ups and downs of life.
Conversely a relationship based on false expectations, untruth, hypocrisy and blaming others for the way you feel can only lead to bitterness and anger. Love that comes from the inner source of the heart, where there is only compassion, kindness, forgiveness and understanding, is lasting and perennially healing and unifying.
Love & Its Ethos
I am not talking of the love that stems from want or any physical need or lust.I am not talking of love that is give and take, the one that belongs to the realm of business.
I am also not talking of love that is convenient or needy. The world is full of so-called lovers who lie to their loved ones and make other empty promises.
There are others who profess love, who can't stop kissing and swearing in the name of love who are just love-puppets dancing on the strings of sensory love and cheap intoxication, and suffer from the pangs of delusive emotional love.
Love that binds or triggers jealousy, anger, greed or lust is not love. Don't follow the world - the world is doing a hollow dance, follow the beckoning of your heart, where the eternal springs of joy emanates.
Love is a verb-the feeling of love is a feeling of joy or bliss in the core of your heart. It is the fruit of love or the essence of unconditional loving that takes one to a higher realm.
What a boon it is to give and receive love unconditionally, without any kind of premeditated or expected responses.
True love is healing; it is a transformation from the heart. It is when the mind imbued with the pure spark from the heart, touches the Infinite and goes into a dialogue with eternity.
Once you are imbued with true love, it completely liberates you, it transforms you; you cannot go back to being an ordinary person; like the grape that turns into wine.
Experiencing the Elusiveness of Love
In the realm of human love, it is probably the most difficult and most challenging, and perhaps the greatest sacrifice you can ever make to love another human being unconditionally.
Most people are not ready to savor its eternal springs, its deep valleys and ebbs, or its invigorating touch, because they cannot know love by reading about it in books.
Knowledge of love, knowing, hearing and experiencing are not the same. Experiencing love, as loving and being in love, has its own mystical realms.
Vivekanand compares love to water being held in the palm of your hand. He symbolically compares love to the care and tenderness it needs to keep it holding there and any attempt to close your fingers around it and try to possess it, it will spill though the first crack it finds.
The greatest mistake people make when they meet love they try to possess it, they demand, they expect and just like water spilling out of your hands, love will escape from you.
For love is meant to be free, you cannot change its nature. If there are people you love, allow them to be free beings.
Give and don't expect. Advise but don't order. Ask but never demand.
True love between two individuals is a spiritually evolving relationship. In a spiritually based relationship we don't change or leave partners-rather we use relationship to know ourselves and others and the relationship gives us the opportunity to change ourselves and to evolve.
We are revealed to our true selves or true nature in dealing with our lover or another human being.
True love is the essence of caring; it is caring as in tenderness, it is caring as in the caressing, it is caring as in reassuring, it is in caring without expecting, it is caring from the heart and making the other feel wanted and whole.
Love frees us from the bondage of ego and brings peace, serenity, and integrity into our hearts. True love is an ocean where intellect drowns and ego floats...ego and intellect have no place; they both vanish.
As a great mystic once said: for those who are content to lose will find love.
Love has its own eternity sometimes it is in union and sometimes it is in the separation that we can savor all the different rasas of love.
It is in separation that you appreciate the bliss of union, when two pure hearts are longing to meet.
Life without the eternal springs of love from the heart is just an emptiness of soul; like a synthetic rose devoid of the perfume of eternity.
To know love you have to become love -like seeing the Moon in the light of the Moon.
They only know love who loves others and that too unconditionally the rest remain in the domain of ego just self lovers-they are not touched by the transforming perfume of love.
As Khalil Gibran said: You have to work. It is the only way you can make 'Love Visible'.
"But work with love and make your bread from the strings of your heart".
