Love is
a frequency of energy that’s always available to us. More accurately, love is the fundamental
energy of the universe – the energy that creates, sustains and evolves all
life. It’s a generative and evolutionary
force that’s little understood because it doesn’t obey mechanistic laws.
Love can
never be objectively measured, demonstrated, or quantified. The existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
recognized this when he observed that “to love someone is to believe that they
are loving.” Kierkegaard knew that love
requires belief because it exists at the level of essence rather than at the
level of form. Things that exist at the
level of form can be measured. Things
that exist at the level of essence cannot be measured or seen.
The more I love you, the more I
trust that you are loving. My love for
you is my trust in the love that you already are.
A little-realized fact is that
this trust has the quality of evolving the one on whom it is bestowed. In other words, the more fully you trust that
I am loving, the more likely I am to express lovingness and goodness to you,
because your trust is nourishing for my heart.
It builds me up, it draws me out.
It makes a safe space for my love to grow. On the other hand, the less fully you trust
that I am loving, the more likely I am to withdraw from you and express
coldness or rigidness, because your distrust is chilling. It shuts me down, it keeps me at bay. It
makes no safe space for my love to grow.
This dynamic of trust works at the
personal level, and it also works at the level of our relationship with all of
life. The more that we trust that life
is essentially good and loving, the more it responds to our love by showing us
goodness. The more we believe that life
is essentially dangerous and brutal, the more it shows us hardness and brutality. Life and other people can only offer us as
much love as we’re willing to believe that they have.
Most of us can only experientially
feel love when we’re in a sympathetic resonance (or we’ve “fallen in love”)
with someone or something. Sympathetic resonance happens when there’s a
soul-level similarity between us and another person.
When we’re in sympathetic
resonance with someone we feel like they truly “get” us. We might have experiences of reading one
another’s minds and of feeling one another’s emotions. The transference of thought and emotion
happens between two people in a state of sympathetic resonance just like the
transference of sound vibrations happens between two strings on a guitar that
share the same harmonic overtone.
It can be quite amazing when we
discover someone else with whom we
resonate with in this way. It’s a great
relief to finally feel in harmony with another person after a lifetime spent
feeling alone. It’s extremely freeing,
because the condition of sympathy makes us feel free to relax with the other
person, and as we relax we sense and express our identity with the love that
sustains everything.
Yet even the most beautiful
harmony between two people can’t be sustained unless those two people are also
willing to help themselves and others grow in relationship to that fundamental
love. This is because that fundamental
love contains the energy necessary to support the ongoing harmony. Just like the strings of a guitar need to
receive energy from the hands of the guitar-player in order to vibrate.
The mistake that most people make
in their relationships is in confusing sympathetic resonance with the basic
energy of love itself. Sympathetic
resonance is beautiful, but it can end.
Each note (or in our metaphor, each partner in a relationship) only
resonates sympathetically only as long as it has energy vibrating it. The energy that vibrates the notes (or that
uplifts the partners) has to come from somewhere – it either comes from divine
love itself or it has to come from one of the finite energy sources available
in the physical and chemical world – prestige, dopamine from sex, food,
caffeine, etc.
Many originally romantic
relationships devolve into platonic friendships as each partner stops getting
energized from the sexual chemistry of the other and so instead seeks outside
the relationship for energy – from recognition at work, from flirtation with
others, from alcohol and drugs, from pleasure from masturbation, from feeling
important at church – whatever. We can get
finite energy boosts in a thousand different ways. Some of these ways are more socially
acceptable than others, but they’re all less that what we’re designed for.
We human beings have infinite
longings in our souls because we’re meant to be in relationship with infinite
love. We’re meant to get our energy
directly from divine love just like plants get their energy directly from the
sunlight. Most of us have forgotten,
though, how to energize ourselves with divine love because it’s not something
we’re taught to do in our culture.
The process of learning how to
gain energy from divine love rather than from finite and false sources of
energy is a deep one. It’s the essence
of all mysticism and it takes years to master.
Yet it doesn’t take years for this kind of work to show stunning results
in one’s life – that can happen in a matter of weeks with the focused
application of principles and practices designed to cut through what’s false in
us and heal our wounds.
For this reason I’m working on
putting together a course designed to help support the evolutionary force of
love in all of us – and I’ll keep you posted as that develops.http://www.awesomelifelove.com/
