This morning someone told me that their experience of love gives them a feeling like falling: that as their heart is moved, it is like falling from a towering building.
My response to this was not what one might expect. Spiritually speaking we might think this story of falling in love only represents the ego’s encounter of love rather than the liberation of rising in love.
Yet as I really listened and felt into what this man was saying I became aware of the energy behind the experience. When we encounter love we move to a place of no boundaries. We leave our so-called closed or fixed footings and encounter a dimension of existence that departs any static or definable point. This could indeed be described as a sensation of falling.
For me it is a state of endless expansion. It is the wholeness of a unified state and an interaction all in the same instant.
However, for most people, love is a sentiment, an act, an event, a relationship or a series of these. And it is a story that requires certain conditions. This is understandable considering that the way we usually encounter love is directly related to events. Yet dependence on these conditions is a limitation, a misplaced perception – like seeing a well as the whole ocean, simply because we may draw water from it. If we mistakenly think the well is the source of our water then, of course, we will get attached to that well! And if the well collapses or is taken from us, we will cry and say we have lost our water.
In the same way, humanity mistakenly identifies the act, the body, or the marriage as the source of love. It is why people think they are in love one day and they are not the next. Love is considered to be mostly an elusive thing that we can never capture or rely on. Yet ironically we attempt to do exactly that. And that is because of our belief in a fundamental illusion: that love comes and goes, it comes exclusively and that when we finally have it, we secretly fear it will only depart again.
People are afraid to feel love because they are confusing it with the impermanent events of life. And ironically, without the impermanence of the play of life’s events, we would not experience the expressions of love. We would not delight in our lover’s touch, in our beloved’s words, in the adoration of life’s beauty. Without impermanence, there is no rarity or surprise.
However, love itself is not temporal, not impermanent. Love is the constant essence of the deep conscious self. It is the vital power, the moving energy and the stillness behind the moving fabric of life. It is the essence and quality of the unified field -the all-intelligent source from which, and in which, all of life moves. It is the deep peace, the calm…the infinite beingness and wholeness of the conscious self. It is the sum totality of all energies. It is the embraced as it is the embracer of the self in and as life.
It is when we are open enough to see and feel from this state within us that we feel love. In this state, we are not divided from our object of affection. We encounter the profound fullness of knowing oneness whilst encountering it through the state of the witness: self meeting self, self feeling self. Yet it is because of the appearing play of duality (two ‘separate’ bodies) that the one self – the unified field – can actually experience itself, as the love it is.
When we awaken again to what love truly is, we also awaken to the freedom and beauty of the ephemeral dance of the world. We no longer see endings, but constant renewals. We see the endless rhythm, the coming and going of life’s form. Its affections and events reflect the mystery that transmits life’s profound beauty. We see that all of this is occurring in the constant and endless field of life, which is love. We know that all these fluctuations are never outside of love. They are all held in love. Love never ceases.
It is because a rose blooms in the morning and fades at night that we can celebrate its beauty. It is because a child is born and a man dies that we encounter the rhythm of life’s eternal symphony. Without the appearance of objects and events coming and going, we do not experience the wonder, the newness, the discovery of life’s endless possibilities. And that is what we are in love with -not fixed events or objects. We are in love with life’s transient play. If it remained the same we would die of boredom. In fact, if life did remain the same it would cease. And, if love were an event then love would die. Yet every poet has cried with the beauty of love’s endless power. Even the man, who described feeling love as falling, was pointing to the same thing. In the essence of falling there is no landing -there is no end!
We also fear that the falling will never end. We fear something our mind cannot measure or hold onto. We no longer have a secure reference. And ironically we also fear that when we do land, it is going to really hurt! Yet when we actually let go, and surrender our fixed ideas and cease clutching to a secure reference or identity we encounter a state of wholeness in that endlessness. We encounter true love as the open state it is; a state in which we embrace our infinite being, that which cannot be measured. It is the state of letting in, where we allow our self to fully experience our nature as purely being. And in that being is a vast overflowing… an indescribable bliss.
We usually spend so much time and energy protecting our fears because we think we are going to lose something, when actually we are being given endless opportunities to regain, realise and experience our true state of love: the wholeness, liberation and dance of life that we are.
So maybe you could ask yourself what could be the worst possible thing to happen if you fully let go and surrender to the falling –let into the opening? And what could be the best possible thing to happen if you fully let go and surrender to the falling − let into the opening?
For it is only a false idea that can keep the story of fear alive. When we realign with the source – the essence of our self as love, we realise we never left it. We realise that it can never be taken away from and that, it is so complete it needs no other thing to be added unto it. We then realise that the ephemeral world is the rhythm of love; life’s very own heartbeat sending its waves through the eternal ocean of existence. Like the waves that come and go on the ocean, the expressions of love rise and fall yet the source in which they dance remains whole and never-ending. Love is eternal.
Namaste.
One Love, One Life.
