A Radical Awakening by Shefali Tsabary

Author:Shefali Tsabary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Nature of True Love

Love is a powerful feeling toward another. Complex, nuanced, and multilayered, it is chemical, physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. It exists on the level of energy, undeniably passionate, and yet ephemeral and essentially unquantifiable. It’s a force that can only be felt but never really be made solid.

To love someone is to feel for them without our own feelings about ourselves getting in the way. This is extremely hard to do for someone who hasn’t worked on meeting their own needs, and therefore I call it “high” love. This shift from self to other is the mark of the higher nature of authentic love.

Poets and mystics have tried to describe such love for centuries, but all have fallen short of capturing its true nature. The reason is that love exists beyond the limits and boundaries of the form-based world. It doesn’t exist for just one type of person or within the bounds of time, place, race, or creed. One doesn’t just love dark-haired people who have short hair. Nor does one love only between the hours of 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Wednesdays.

At its core, love is a “free” emotion. What this means is that it is impromptu, unpredictable, accidental, and unintended. It occurs naturally and spontaneously. It cannot be forced, suppressed, planned, or organized. It cannot be contained. Because it’s alive, it constantly changes, as do all living things. It simply doesn’t stay the same but evolves. To bottle it up in a formula is to kill its essence and void its true spirit. To tell it how to express itself, when and with whom or for how long, is to suck the beauty of love’s essential nature and convert it to another feeling—maybe still a worthy feeling but not the one we associate with love.

Because true love exists beyond the mind and the duality of “you and me,” it can only be experienced in its transcendent state by those who recognize that love doesn’t emerge from checklists or deadlines. It has nothing to do with logic, reason, or will. It’s something that spontaneously combusts. While we need to use discernment, for sure, the feeling of love cannot be turned on or off like a switch.

Those who experience this kind of love often use exalted adjectives to describe it, such as big, high, deep, transcendent, otherworldly, and spiritual. Simply calling it love feels limited, because this kind of love is limitless, existing beyond self or other. Those who have been touched by this kind of love feel as if they have experienced the mystical magic of the heavens. They understand that they are living in the rarefied air of the privileged.

Love is the ultimate energy. It is the self fully actualized.

Not everyone is ready to experience this kind of love. It’s reserved for those who have done the work of releasing their ego such that they are able to enter a space where they live unbound and untethered. It’s only when the self has left its own self-absorption behind that this kind of love can enter one’s consciousness.

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