What Is Love?
What is Love? This is a great question asked by many. Through Hollywood movies, novels and personal experience we all have our notions about Eros, romantic love with sexual attraction. In contrast, platonic love is love for deep and intimate friends. We also have our experiences, one way or another of family love, parents love for their child, the child for the parent, brothers and sisters. grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. Agape is described as universal selfless love.
The kind of love I am talking about trying to live in and with is agape love. It comprises an attitude, a cognitive-emotional state, a spiritual state and a behavioral approach to life, a way of being with your self and with others, with life, with creation, with all being. It is a literal energy, a cosmic energy, an infinite energy of light that, through grace, is in all of us. In fact, it is the essence of our being beneath skin and bone and mental thoughts of who we are.
Love is expressed through kindness, through tenderness, through caring and generosity, through courage, through perseverance, by being responsible, through living in integrity. Love is compassionate, love is empathetic, love seeks win-win resolutions for greatest good for all, not serving ego or selfish interest. While our true nature is love, it takes both an attitude of acceptance and intention to cultivate that love, to grow it and to as consistently as one can, to live it out in all our relations.
We are love and our love is for giving, given without conditions or expectations of return. True giving is from the heart and is a gift for the giver for then we are honoring the truth of who and what we are and when we put our energy, our attention into thought-forms that are.
We are sacred, worthy, luminous beings of love and love is for giving. You can LIVE LOVE NOW.
When we remember this, we get stronger, healthier, more power-full. Juiced. We get lit up.
Of course the opposite is also true, when we put our attention into fueling thought forms that are not based on our true identity, that we truly are sacred, worthy, luminous being so love that is for giving, our hearts close, our pipes get congested and stuck, our immune systems are weakened and we suffer emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Thoughts that critically attack our selves and the being of others, (as contrasted with behavior) are actually violent acts because they are based on illusionary perceptions of separation. When we hold them as true, we separate our awareness, our consciousness, from the infinite cosmic light and love that is the ground of all being and the ground of all creation, the unitive, interconnected, interwoven Oneness that religious people call God or Great Spirit, or Holy Spirit or Tao, or Bhddha or Allah or Shekinah or Yahway or Orenda or Wakan Tanka or Great Mysterious One or whatever.
The love I am talking about when I say “Live Love Now” is an energy that sees beneath the membrane of separation into the place of connection that both are living in illuminating the truth that at the deepest level of our being there is only one relationship. It just manifests into the through different forms. Similar to the ocean, many waves of size and shape and intensity and color but all made of the same substance and always connection to the Mother Sea.
“God is love and those who love, know God” - 1 John 4:7-21
The more I can remember that truth, the more you and I can remember that truth. The more we can live that truth, the truth of our being, the sooner can we create a racially, socially, and environmentally just world. Love is a win-win world for all, wherein we are all doing our part, contributing positively and in balance with the interwoven web of life.
