Love

It's funny, this question of love. On the evolution list somebody posted the question "What is Love?"
To that I replied, "I love this question about love and what it is. what am i loving when I love love? Can love love itself?

I think that a lot of people identify love with attachment unconsciously, that NEED feeling. "don't go, I NEED you." I need your particular type of affection, carress, the sound of your voice. I think the essence of love is that state of union where two beings recognize themselves and are relaxed into a space of oneness. For me, that often looks like looking into another person through their eyes for a long period of time, deep soft, penetrating gazes where we don't really have to blink; where i "witness" them as timeless consciousness and i myself am timeless consciousness. That is love for me. Usually my attention is on my third eye (ajna chakra) and there is nothing to think about, say, do or be. and I feel an incomparable bliss-state in my brain, my body.

Then today, Eknath's Thought for the Day is:
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? -- George Bernard Shaw
Often we try to build relationships on what is pleasing to us, particularly on physical attraction. But if there is anything sure about physical attraction, it is that it has to change. We cannot build on it; its very nature is to come and go. Physical attraction is a sensation -- here one minute and gone the next. Love is a relationship. It is pleasant to be with someone who is physically attractive, but how long can you enjoy an aquiline nose? How long can you thrill to the timbre of a voice when it doesn't say what you like? It's very much like eating: no matter how much you are attracted to chocolate pie, there is a limit to how much of it you can enjoy. Beyond that limit, if somebody merely mentions chocolate, your stomach stages a revolt. If you want to build a relationship, build it on what endures. To build on a firm foundation, we have to stop asking, "What do I like?" and ask only, "What can I give?" Then there is joy in everything, because there is joy in the relationship itself -- in ups and downs, through the pleasant and the unpleasant, in sickness and in health.


This reminds me of another passage I have kept close to me about admiring beauty, but not taking beauty home and putting it on the shelf.
Awhile ago I had this thought about how to say something or someone is beautiful to them or to really even acknowledge a person (this is big in our community) is to pay service to their ego and is a disservice to honoring that place where we are all the same. Not to say ego is bad, it serves a purpose, but I know that I have accepted acknowledgement and referred back to it, held on to it as though it would be a true statement the next time I plucked it out of my memory. "So and so said I was sweet and grounded, this must be true again and still." My practice for awhile when I was still pretty active in the community was to let the acknowledge pass right through me. Not let it attach itself anywhere to my being. Just receive it. i still like that model, and it is a continual practice.

If love really is available in the opening into oneness and I experience that regularly what is the reason or intention behind investing in a romantic relationship. And i have come up with: merging deeper and more consistently "through the two-bodied interplay" as Deida might say. I'd say 'experiencing a deeper expression of God through the connection of two souls.' it seems like the more intimately I know someone the more difficult it is for me to continue to bare my soul, but the more I do, the deeper I can be to God, to love.