On Love

What if we’ve been misunderstanding love all along?

Whoever said, “Love is blind,” didn’t say it wrong…even better would be to say “Love should be blind”.

All forms of life transcend from the Collective Consciousness. Simplistically put, our souls are like tiny drops of water emerging from a single ocean. Each drop, by itself, is incomplete; collectively, they make the complete ocean. The ultimate purpose of every drop is to return to the ocean, unite with it, and become one with it. Each drop follows a different path, a different process to reach the ocean. And the journey of every drop is unique, filled with its own experiences. Each drop represents a lifetime.

Our souls are like drops evaporated from the Collective Consciousness, going through the process of distillation and precipitation before converging back into their origin. Like water drops, souls too become contaminated depending upon the karmas we accumulate. The learnings and realizations from our karma…our life experiences…purify our souls.

Life is like a distillation chamber. Distilling our memories, traumas, ego and experiences.

What is love, and why should it be blind?

Love is the emotion of oneness. Love is when one drop lets go of everything and unites with another drop. Falling in love is actually rising towards higher consciousness. Ironically, we often restrict our own upliftment because we are spiritually unaware and intellectually conditioned.

Our intellect tells us to find love with open eyes.

Be rational. Along with it comes the collective intellect of society and its conditioned norms. The most natural distillation process gets disturbed, and we lose the opportunity to unite with our true selves.

What happens when one falls in love?

While falling in love is mostly used in the parlance of man-woman relationships, it is not necessarily limited to them.

One can fall in love with a pet, a place, a child, or even a thing. We are constantly falling in and out of love. The love between a man and a woman, however, is undoubtedly the highest form of love, as it is the only form of love that has the potential to be fully complete.

Like magnets facing the correct poles, lovers get attracted to each other. The attraction of souls is oblivious to societal norms, the practicality of relationships, socio-emotional considerations, or any other intellectual filters. Like magnets, they simply get attracted.

Deep inside, one feels blissful and calm. Spiritual distillation begins. This is perhaps the most amazing feeling in the world. If allowed to continue undisturbed, this feeling can lead us to our purest, most divine forms.

The intellectual understanding of emotions is only possible through feelings. And we feel through our senses. This is where the sensory experience of love comes into the picture. The poetic relevance of the fragrance of the beloved, a momentary glimpse worth a four-hour wait, the voice that sounds sweeter than a Beethoven symphony, the tender touch—all are sensual manifestations of the ultimate feeling of bliss.

The highest form of sensory experience is, of course, the experience of making love—the experience that satiates all five senses, and perhaps even the sixth. Copulation without true love is never as satiating because the sixth sense remains untouched.

So what goes wrong?

If love is so natural, why is it so difficult?

Like all other natural processes, human evolution has disrupted the process of love as well. What is meant to be experienced unconditionally has become burdened with intellectual, egotistical, and societal conditions. Some of the poisons that deprive us of blissful love are:

Expectations

A drop of water has no expectations from the world around it or from fellow drops. It simply longs to unite. Divine souls in human form, however, have expectations.

“If you love me, behave like this. Do this. Don’t do that.”

Expectations create conditionality. Pure love cannot be experienced within the confines of conditions.

Societal Norms

Perhaps the biggest impediment to spiritual growth is the creation of societal norms.

Love suddenly becomes about marriage, family, social approval, compatibility of lifestyles, alignment of views, and acceptance by others. In the process, love itself gets sidelined.

Ego

“I” is the biggest roadblock on the path of love.

Union in love requires the melting of the self. Yet the self refuses even to bend. Ego creates its own absurd litmus tests to identify love. Repeatedly, we silence our intuition simply because we cannot logically explain what we feel.

The Need to Own

Whatever gives us pleasure, we want to own.

From natural scenery, plants, animals, fragrances, and music to fellow human beings…we wish to possess all that we love.

“I love you, and therefore you should be mine!”

Ownership then becomes control.

Trying to control another soul is like trying to tame the flow of a river…immense effort with little purpose and often the opposite of the intended result.

Logical Reasoning

“Why do you love me?” , “What’s the hidden agenda?”

Yes, in the name of love, people sometimes take advantage of others. But remember, the reason for true love is all ways ‘illogical’ …love is an emotion not a logic.

We kill love through analysis paralysis.

Pleasing Others

Often, love gets sacrificed because of our need to please our loved ones.

We begin believing that love is worthy only if it is approved by everyone else in our lives. Yet others are merely incidental in our individual journeys toward our true soulmates. That is one of life’s ultimate realities. We even get worried about how ‘random others’ will judge us.

Practical Considerations

We assess the practicality of love before allowing ourselves to experience it, forgetting that the initiation of love often happens in the most impractical of circumstances.

Finally, how does one remain in love?

Being in love is not merely desirable—it is essential for a truly contented life.

Lifetime contentment requires us to:

Be Blind

Whatever we see is Mithya—illusion.

Illusions are created by our conditioning and our intellect.

Be blind to the future. Simply experience the bliss of the present. No eyes can see the future. The moment we begin planning tomorrow, love starts disappearing today.

Just experience love in the present, moment after moment.

Love has to be blind.

No wonder the best kisses are experienced with our eyes closed.

Love Unconditionally

Conditionality is no condition for love.

Love is an end in itself. Don’t expect any benefit from being in love. The journey itself is the destination.

Quiet the Intellect

If you keep thinking while loving, you will never truly love.

What? Why? How? Where?

True love rarely has satisfying answers to these questions.

If it is true, it will take care of itself. Not everything worth experiencing needs to be understood first.

Be True to Yourself

Experience love where you genuinely feel it.

Looking at love through the approval of others will only distance you from it.

True love is like pleasure itself—only you can know why it feels right.

Stop Using Love

Once we experience love, we begin using it for everything—social status, money, family, security, sex, or emotional comfort.

That is not love.

It is emotional bargaining.

And every bargain creates conditions that interrupt love’s natural process of spiritual distillation.

Ironically, most of us do this subconsciously.

Live. Love. Let Go.

Love is not something to be solved. It is something to be experienced.

Love asks us not to possess…but to dissolve. Like sugar leaving its taste in what it dissolves with.

Not to calculate, but to trust.

Not to seek completion in another, but to recognize the same ocean within another drop.

Perhaps, that is why love should be blind.