A few days ago, we spoke of Love.

The recurring question is often that of the reality of personal love: "What is loving someone?"

We've gotten used to looking at what drives us from an angle which suits us so as to justify our tendencies.

So, when we speak of the couple or even of maternal love, what we're inclined to find there (or expect from it) purity or altruism.

If we ask two individuals who are attached to one another, whether they love each other, they generally say "yes", without hesitating, but without being able to comment upon such a feeling. If we insist, we can often hear the personal effort to give a "clean" appearance to the relationship. And yet, a more candid look would shed some beneficial light on the notion of love, not to soil it but to enable greater discernment so as to recognize the Truth often hiding behind other more practical and comfortable truths.

The couple is a notion that has been built up by the ego. The vision of the ego leads it to the race to fulfil the feeling of separation or the lack of unity. Two individuals get together in the hope of filling a void. To that are added sexual needs, always supposing they weren't the primary reason for getting together in the first place, because being an official couple is an opportunity for fulfilment.

So, nobody loves anybody. We get together with someone for ourselves, even if a certain idea of morality leads us to say or think that this is a good thing for the other person. In reality, personal need is the sole driving force of both affection and the sexual act and the fact that this may satisfy the other person is completely by the way, even if it gives us a good conscience. The couple is a personal arrangement to which we've tried to give an image that is more spiritually or socially correct.

No one ever loves anyone is the ego's reality. But such a reality is unbearable and you may feel this after reading these words if you have never dared look at things this way. The love we say we experience for another person betrays a personal interest, a need which, if it's no longer satisfied, can quickly turn into hostility. We have to see that if we are to recognize what Love really is, beyond any personal arrangement and other spiritualized egocentricities. We have the right to "seek" love but it's to our advantage if we don't give ourselves replies too quickly, since these short-cuts finally take us further away from love.

Love is not an emotion. It's not linked to a person and it links us to no one. Love is the very substance of Life. We recognize the experience of Love by the fact that it reveals for us the essential Nature of Life. Love is a Communion. It's not even a feeling, even if we can translate communion in these terms. The object, situation or being we cross is the support or the target of Love, that moment when personal existence recognizes itself as being Unique and Infinite. In this case, there is no longer anyone for loving another person.

In what we commonly call "love", we find affection. Affection has a physical support which requires contact. It is nurtured by "cuddles" or "kisses". Affection is frustrated when there is less or no contact. This sensation has little to do with Love. This affection requires no judgment, it is the reality of the couple, the reality of the "little man or woman" pursuing his or her quest.

Communion doesn't require contact, even if it doesn't prohibit it either. Someone crosses our field of vision and there's a recognition of Unity, opening up of the heart, welcoming of the Presence in a new, unknown form which we celebrate within. There's no personal interest or future in this encounter which is fleeting. But recognition is eternal. What has been recognized in this fleeting encounter is not linked to it. It's not sensorial recognition. And the next object, being or situation reveals to us, in new attire, another opportunity to recognize the essential nature of Life, which is Love.

This disinterested, "unconditional" love is the only one which leads to the appropriate action vis à vis the other person. The quest for affection veils what may be transmitted or received from one to the other because there is a lack which has to be filled, an expectation. Without that, the flow is free and uninterrupted. Where there is expectation, even if this is spiritual in nature, need intervenes and separation is perpetuated.

It's not a question of ceasing all relationships but of illuminating them with the right look. We won't recognize Love if, out of fear, we strive to find it in places where it isn't present. We don't encounter truth by dressing it up as falsehood.

We accept that the couple is a personal arrangement, that the fact of receiving what we expect of it guarantees its survival and that Love is generally absent from it, unless the ego's empire in this almost impenetrable fortress ceases. Our dreams of a soul mate are resurgences of the Call of Unity which is denied by the ego's separative act, by its expectation, its exclusivity.

The intensity of a relationship is not the "proof" of Love. A passion can carry us into ecstasies and sometimes even fleeting openings but, outside of these fleeting moments that are special for "the little man or woman", expectation reclaims its rights and the potential of Communion is more often than not altered by the pressure of expectation. This is also the reason why the "beginnings" of an affective relationship are often more open, because expectation has not fully asserted itself. It's also why the ego which does not temper itself rationally, instinctively likes to change partners because he knows how relationships are weighed down by expectation (for which it itself is responsible).

Wherever the ego is, Love will be somewhere else. Wherever there is "someone", there is "another", wherever there is "another", there is an expectation to be fulfilled, a potential enemy, and Love is already far away.

We can simply recognize that we sustain ourselves with the other in the personal relationship, the affection (this is also true of a mother and her child), but we must also recognize that such sustenance is fleeting. Communion and Love tolerate physical distance because it has been Seen that the substance of Love does not reside in the "contact" with the "other" but that it can be indifferently recognized at any moment, in any person, regardless of distance, interest or lack of interest that the ego may find in it.

Love is not a relationship but Life in Unity.

This, of course, is both going too far and at the same time not far enough.

© Thierry Vissac, 2008

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After 15 years of a committed spiritual quest, Thierry Vissac experienced a surprising and salutary collapse in which the thousands of hours spent in fervent meditation, the calls never to wander from the straight and narrow, the insistent hope of "someone other than me" and all the artful tricks of the quest vanished into thin air in the batting of an eyelid and were consumed, leaving but ashes and silence.

For some years now, Thierry has been addressing spiritual seekers and inviting them to take part in an extensive and intimate exchange about the driving forces behind their quest, in an encounter with the self where the ground has been cleared of the spiritual ego’s ponderous judgment and eccentric hopes.

He is the author of six books, has published articles in spiritual magazines in France and Switzerland and regularly conducts meetings and workshops. Contact: Editions La Parole Vivante, B.P. 5, 46170 Castelnau-Montratier, France.

Author's English website: www.istenqs.org/English/Englindex.htm.