Love (Being)
What you are before you became someone who needed to be loved.
Classical Definition
A deep affection and connection between beings, considered in its highest form to be unconditional and without expectation of return. Distinguished in this framework from emotional love by the absence of dependency, possession, or fear of loss.
The Spiritual Perspective
Love in its absolute sense is not an emotion, not a feeling that comes and goes, and not something produced by the meeting of two people. It is the ground from which all experience arises. The mystics across every tradition who sat long enough in silence arrived at the same observation: what remains when the self quiets is not emptiness — it is an open, luminous warmth that has no opposite and no object. This is what they called love.
A Course in Miracles states that love is all-encompassing and therefore cannot have a true opposite. Fear is not its opposite — fear is what the mind experiences when it has forgotten love. The clouds that cover the sun are not the opposite of the sun. They are simply temporary obscurations of what was always there.
This is why love, in its deepest sense, cannot be lost. It can be forgotten. It can be covered by fear, by identification, by the noise of the mind. But it cannot be destroyed, any more than awareness itself can be destroyed.
Tyohar named something else about love that no amount of philosophy touches: it is not domesticated. We are fascinated by love precisely because we cannot control it. You do not decide when you fall in love. You do not decide when you fall out. The feeling arrives — or it does not. The heart opens — or remains closed. And no effort of will changes either of these facts.
This is love demonstrating its own nature. It belongs to something larger than the self that wants to manage it. The practice is not to manufacture love or to protect it from change — it is to make yourself available to it. To become, as Tyohar put it, a conscious instrument for what wants to move through you. Not the source. The channel.
Love does not come from you. It passes through you. The difference between these two understandings is the difference between a life spent trying to produce love and a life spent learning how to get out of its way.
How It Unfolds
Love in the absolute does not arise through a mechanism — it is what remains when the mechanisms of the mind soften. It is not produced; it is revealed.
In ordinary experience, we glimpse it in the moments the mind goes quiet: a sudden stillness in nature, a deep meditation, the moment after a long cry when something simply opens. These are not experiences of love being created. They are moments of recognition — the love that was always there, temporarily visible because the mind stopped covering it.
The movement toward it is always the same: less construction, more presence. Less story, more direct experience. Less management, more openness. This is the direction the entire right side of the spectrum points.
Same Wavelength
In the Body
Love in the absolute is felt as an absence of contraction rather than a presence of warmth. The chest, which holds fear as tightness, simply opens. The whole body relaxes into itself. Sometimes there is a warmth at the centre of the chest. Sometimes just stillness — the body no longer defending against anything.
Sources: HeartMath Institute research; contemplative tradition
A Moment of Reflection
Sit quietly. Let the body settle.
For a moment, do not try to feel love. Do not try to generate warmth or open your heart. Simply stop. Let the mind rest.
Notice what remains in the absence of thought. Not emptiness — something warmer than that. Something that was there before the last thought and will be there after the next one.
That openness is not something you created. It is what you are.
Breathe in: I am already here.
Breathe out: There is nothing to find.
Stay there as long as it is honest to stay.
What the Traditions Say
Love is not learned. It cannot be taught. It can only be remembered. What blocks the awareness of love's presence is not the absence of love — it is the presence of fear. Remove the fear, and love is simply there.
Love is not a relationship. Love is a state of being. It can happen only if you are in the now. The longing for love — the ache — is the soul's memory of what it actually is.
Emotions are born in the mind, shaped by thought and experience, while feelings emerge from the core of our being. We can never think ourselves into loving someone, no matter how hard we try to rationalize it. Feelings are the language of the universe.
The spiritual journey can be seen as a journey from the mind to the heart, from separation to connection — a homecoming to love's embrace. If love is our true nature, why does it so often feel out of reach? The mind creates separation. It draws boundaries between 'me' and 'you,' erecting walls that prevent us from seeing the love that already exists. The journey is not to find love. It is to remove what is obscuring it.
The love you have been searching for is not somewhere ahead of you. It is what is reading these words right now — before the next thought arrives, in the space between one breath and the next.
You do not need to earn it. You need only stop believing you don't have it.
🚧 A work in progress
This entry is still being developed and will continue to grow.
Have something to add? →