Love is pain and suffering
– Kings of Convenience in Love Is A Lonely Thing from the album Peace Or Love
In the English language, the word love famously refer to several different things. While in some other languages, like the Greek, there are different words for different types of love.
I find it helpful to use three main categories of love: caring, romantic love, and what we are.
WHAT WE ARE
Unconditional love comes from what we are, and it’s always part of us.
It’s not wrong that we are this human self in the world. And if we look, we may find that we more fundamentally are something else. We may find that in our first-person experience, we are capacity for the word, and what our field of experience happens within and as.
Any sense of boundaries comes from our mental overlay of images and thoughts. Our field of experience is inherently one. We are the oneness that this human self and the wider world happens within and as.
And this is expressed as unconditional love. It’s the love of the left hand removing a splinter from the right. It’s a love independent on feelings. It’s not based in any fleeting feeling or emotion.
LOVE FILTERED THROUGH OUR HUMAN SELF
Whether we notice or not, we are oneness and this unconditional love. And this unconditional love is filtered through our human self and its psychology.
And our human self and psychology is inevitably wounded to some extent. It has hangups, wounds, emotional issues, and perhaps even traumas. It may feel unloved, unlovable, unsafe, and so on. It often feels a hole in itself it’s trying to fill through love and acceptance from others, sex, money, status, and so on. It partially operates from a sense of lack, neediness, and reactivity to these parts of itself.
The more our human self is healed, the more we can perceive and live from this unconditional love. We have probably all seen or known people who seem especially whole and loving, whether or not they consciously notice what they are. And even they inevitably have unexamined beliefs and unloved fears that color their perception and life, and they may go into reactivity when these are triggered.
Our fundamental nature is unconditional love, and this can’t help shine through in our life in the world. Sometimes, the wounds and hangups are more obvious. And sometimes, this unconditional love.
ROMANTIC LOVE & OTHER FORMS OF LOVE
Romantic love is one case of this.
Just as we are rooted in unconditional love, romantic love is rooted in unconditional love.
And it’s filtered through our biology and psychology. It’s filtered through our hangups, wounds, emotional issues, traumas, sense of insecurity and lack, and so on.
The other forms of love we are familiar with are the same. The love for friends, parents, children, siblings, non-human species, nature, and so on is rooted in the unconditional love we are and filtered through our human self with all its messiness.
TRAINING IN GIVING OURSELVES LOVE
An important aspect of healing our human self is training in meeting our experiences with kindness and love.
When we grow up, we learn to relate to life and our experiences a certain way. We may learn to meet some of it with love, and some with struggle and reactivity. We may also not have been met with unconditional love, so we don’t give ourselves unconditional love.
The good news here is that we can learn to meet our experiences and ourselves with more respect, kindness, patience, and gentle curiosity, and this brings in love.
We can learn to give ourselves what we most want, and give the different confused parts of us what they most wish for.
We may even discover that these confused parts of us are love. They are confused love and were created early in our life to protect us. And that makes it easier for us to meet it with love.
When we create this new habit of meeting our experiences with love, and especially the contractions and what we previously didn’t meet with love, it becomes a new way of relating to all of life.
THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS IN AWAKENING
When we notice what we are, we tend to be more acutely aware of this dynamic between the love we are and how it’s filtered through our human self. The contrast between this love and how it comes out in our human life can be painful.
Also, there is often a transformation process inherent in awakening. We shift how we relate to our experiences to find more kindness, patience, respect, curiosity, and love. And the unhealed parts of our human self tend to come to the surface to be seen, felt, understood, loved, healed, and join in with the noticing.
This is a process of healing how we relate to life and our experiences, and it’s a process of finding healing for unhealed parts of our human self. This allows us to live from unconditional love with less distortion from unhealed parts of our human self.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
I wanted to add a few words about unconditional love.
For many, it comes with associations to shoulds and something impossible.
In reality, it’s what we already are and we can find this for ourselves.
It’s not helpful as an ideal since it will always be distorted through the wounds in our human psyche.
It’s helpful as a contrast with how we actually live, and to highlight areas we can explore and get to know in ourselves.
And although it’s often presented as a should and directed at how we relate to others, it’s more an expression of what we are and directed towards ourselves and our experience. What we want, and what these confused parts of us want, is to be met with love. And we are the one who can do it. We are the only one in the perfect position to give us this love, and to meet our experiences and wounds with love.
(As I wrote the last sentence, I heard another lyric from the Peace or Love album: It’s love that heals the wound.)
PEACE OR LOVE?
So do we need to chose between peace or love? It depends on the type of love.
If it’s the love from what we are, then that comes with peace.
If it’s romantic love, it may not always come with peace.
And in real life, there is inevitably a combination of who and what we are. Independent of labels or setting, it’s the love inherent in what we are filtered through our human self, including the hangups and wounds of this human self.
INITIAL OUTLINE
- peace or love
- the word love refers to several different things
- greek language, more differentiated, and probably many other languages as well
- three main categories, love as…. caring, romantic, what we are
- romantic – from biology + psychology, including sense of lack, wounds etc.
- which is why drama, suffering etc.
- what we are
- love from oneness, from noticing/realization not emotion
- filtered through who we are, with our psychology (hangups etc.)
- romantic – from biology + psychology, including sense of lack, wounds etc.
- always all of it
- all of these types of love typically combine all of it
- love from what we are, since cannot escape (although can cover up)
- filtered through our human self w. hangups etc.
- care
- the love of a friend, sibling, parent, child, animal etc.
- often more from what we are, although also mixed in with our psychology
….
Peace or love? Different meanings of the word love
…
The more we notice what we are, and the more our human self is healed, the more we can perceive and live from this unconditional love.
That’s easier said than done, and it’s a lifelong process.
….
tends to shift how we relate to life and our experiences. We are invited It also invites in a transformation of our human self. Whatever is not aligned with oneness and love tends to come up to be seen, felt, loved, examined, healed, and join in with the noticing. This is a lifelong process
….
a transformation of who we are so less in our human self distorts this unconditional love we are.
….
Noticing what we are is something we only can do here and now, we cannot do it in the past or future.
….
Noticing what we are tends to set in motion a process.
….
So do we need to chose between peace or love? It depends on the type of love.
If it’s the love from what we are, then that comes with peace.
If it’s romantic love, it may not always come with peace.
And in real life, there is inevitably a combination of who and what we are. Independent of labels or setting, it’s the love inherent in what we are filtered through our human self which includes the hangups and wounds of this human self.
…..
An important aspect of healing our human self is training in love and giving ourselves love.
When we grow up, we learn to relate to life and our experiences a certain way. We may learn to meet some of it with love, and some with struggle and reactivity. We may also not have been met with unconditional love, so we don’t give ourselves unconditional love.
The good news here is that we can learn to meet our experiences and ourselves with kindness and love. We can shift out of the struggle and into befriending
….
The good news here is that we can learn to meet our experiences and ourselves with kindness and love.
We can learn to meet it with more respect, kindness, patience, and gentle curiosity, and this brings in love.
We can learn to give ourselves what we most want, and give the different confused parts of us what they most wish for.
….
Awakening brings in another dimension to this. When we notice what we are and find ourselves as oneness, we also find we are this unconditional love. And the contrast between what we are, and how it comes out when it’s filtered through this (perfectly) imperfect human being can be painful.
….
THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS IN AWAKENING
Awakening tends to make us more acutely aware of all of this.
When we notice what we are and find ourselves as oneness, we also find we are this unconditional love. And the contrast between what we are and how it comes out when it’s filtered through this (perfectly) imperfect human being can be painful.
….
Awakening tends to come with a transformation process. The parts of our human self still operating from separation consciousness
….
It’s a process of healing our human self, and allowing the unconditional love we are to be lived with less filters. It’s a very human process. It can be challenging and messy. And we are often just along for the ride.
….
It’s true that due to wounds in our human psychology, it’s impossible to live from it always and in all areas of life. We can just move in that direction.
….
We may even discover that these confused parts of us are love. They are confused love and were created early in our life to protect us. They were created from the psychology of a child, and now can transform within what’s here now.