Loving Deeper than Romantic Love
Romantic love can lead you towards a deeper love, but the dualistic nature of romance- is a barrier to True love. We all view love in our own way. We have our own preferred love language. Deep conversations. Show me you love me by your actions. Make passion a priority. In truth, whatever idea we have about what love is- it’s not that. True love is the unknowable substratum upon which life moves. We cannot grasp the mystery because the mystery of love cannot be understood by the mind.
The closest we can come to knowing True love is new love. New love is wonderful because it gives us a taste of True love. We lose ourselves in each other. There’s no me. There’s no you. The egos have been left by the wayside. The innate sharing of deep Silence overflows with bliss. Words don’t need to be spoken. Actions don’t need to be taken. Whatever is happening is enough as long as each remains within this shared Presence.
So why is it so hard to make a relationship work?
Why does new love eventually fade? We sometimes say we just drifted apart, but that’s not really the truth of what occurs. It would be more accurate to say we drifted back into our dualistic egoistic identities.
In order to understand this, we must first understand what an identity is. How did we come to act in the way that we do? As Halloween is approaching, we could say that each of us is a uniquely styled Frankenstein created by a combination of society and our genetic makeup. Society consists of all the family, friends, education, religion and cultural conditioning imposed upon us from birth until death. Depending on our upbringing, we can carry many scars with us into adulthood. The mind IDENTIFIES with what has happened in the past and takes ownership of the good, the bad and the ugly. We each have become a zombified collection of habitual programming and have little control over how we end up interacting with others in life. We are just creatures of habit who mechanically project our expectations about how others should behave within our relationships.
Egos cannot know love, because love cannot be programmed. Love doesn’t impose expectations. Love doesn’t require an exchange. Love just IS. Love is the Loving Awareness of What Is and accepts What Is as It Is because What Is can only ever be What Is. Two individuals within a relationship are actually two multi-layered fragments of society. This poses difficulty because the fragments may have conflicting preferences and the fragments themselves are fluid, always changing as new experiences collide against past conditioning.
Once we are past the honeymoon stage of a relationship, the egoistic and conflicted parts of ourselves resurface in their full ugliness.
We start to gauge whether or not we are getting back the same amount of love that we are giving. We compare. We start compiling a list of complaints and issues. The pressures and anxieties of life start to creep back into our lives and we begin to project our frustrations out upon our loved ones. What we mostly fail to see is the difficulties with the relationship begin to change our own identities. We become the “not loved enough”, the “underappreciated” or the “taken advantage of”. So our problems become embedded within our own personalities and we begin to resent and grow apart from our loved ones.
So as we find ourselves caught up within our own mind’s projections of what should be, what to do? In order to take love to the next level, we must take ourselves to the next level. Sustainable love is a love in which we drop our egotistic tendencies. We practice working on revealing the biased depths of our own conditioned patterns of behavior and we use our discernment to let go of the damaging influences of the societal mind we’ve been subjected to. We stop identifying as our past experiences and we Realize the Loving Awareness in which life is moving.
If only one within the relationship is willing to explore the higher levels of Consciousness available- the relationship will most likely run into difficulty. If we are letting go of our past conditioning and releasing habitual patterns of behavior- our personality IS going to change. If one partner is only interested in continuing to have a relationship with their projection of who they want us to be, then they will come to resent the changes we will go through.
If both partners are willing to grow together Spiritually and help each other in discerning where they are still caught within egoistic trappings, then the relationship can become the ultimate expression of True Love.
When both partners dissolve into the Loving Awareness of What Is, life becomes a sharing in the Loving Wholeness that is our innate birthright. We may say that this seems like such a difficult task to achieve. Yes, it takes two individuals willing to surrender themselves while finding their way to each other. The deck may be stacked against us and the odds may seem slim to none. And yet it is not as bad as it may seem, as this type of love is not actually dependent on the relationship.
The love always available to us is the love we were all born AS. We are the substratum of love upon which all of life moves. We just need to Realize what is already within us. Keep an earnestness within your Heart to know your Truth and Truth will set you on a path to Realize the Loving Awareness You have always been.
