Mysticism and Love

How can one love? What is love? Will I ever find love in my life? These simple questions keep coming to our mind every day. Because we feel that love is essential to our life. It seems to be just as necessary for our health as good nutrition, a good house and warm clothes. For love is one of the basic conditions of our life. But still it's a great problem for us. Because most of the time we seek love in the wrong direction.

Most of the time we look for love outside ourselves. We are looking for a partner in our lives, who will offer it. We want children, to be forever loved until death, because children will never leave us and will love us till we are old and weary, so we think. We feel a great longing and a great want for the love of another human being. The reason behind all this is the fact that we are missing something inside of ourselves. Something is missing and it has to be procured from the outside. If it is not being procured, we become angry and indignant: 'why am I not loved? I have every right to be loved! If they are not loving me, they are so wrong.'

When you want love to be coming from the outside prepare yourself for some great disillusions in your life. People will leave you. People will feel the marrow being soaked out of them. They will feel fettered and captured in the chains of all your love claims. They will want to come out of it and be freed. They will even define love as to be free from you! Because your love is really no love at all. It's nothing more than self interest. Some bargain you want to make with great advantages for your sake. This kind of love has great demands and expectations. This love is not trustful but demands vows and contracts written down. This love is a love stemming from fear, which drives people to the town hall to take their vows in front of a public minister, as if their love will not endure if they haven't sworn in public.

This is the love of fear, the love of loneliness, the love of long evenings waiting beside the telephone, the love of anger. It is really no love at all. It's the misery and sorrow of the heart, which needs to be distracted from its wretchedness. It's a lack of self assurance, which wants another person to say that we are good and worthy humans. Love in this case is nothing more than an attempt to boost up the ego.

When we start loving out of fear and loneliness, out of a need for help, out of a feeling of being incomplete, then our love will always be impure. We can only love one another if we have reached a certain amount of completeness in ourselves. First we have to love ourselves, because we cannot love if there is no love in us. We first have to find the well of love. But this 'loving ourselves' is most of the time misunderstood by most people. They think that they have to love their ego first before they can love another. They think that they first have to built up a strong ego. They think that they first must get a clear picture of all their needs and demands, before entering a love affair. They first want to be strong in 'having their say'.

This is a wrong attitude towards love. Love means surrender. It means giving yourself over. It's not about building up the ego, but on the contrary, it's about losing it. Pure love doesn't ask 'what am I to gain?' but will only seek what's good for the other. Pure love is always objective and looks at the other in complete objective detachment. There is no ego involved but on the contrary it tries to dissolve its ego into the other person. That's why we are always thinking about our loved one when we are in love. This is a very beautiful and a very mystic tendency of nature, that we are every moment of the day preoccupied with our beloved when we are in love. It's as if nature says: 'Be your loved one if you want to be happy! Forget your old ego, it was nothing but a sorry business full of desires, greed, anger and all sorts of disillusions. Step out of yourself. Melt your soul with the soul of your beloved, because in melting you will feel yourself becoming part of the Atman of all persons. You will feel godliness and ecstasy, if you let yourself be taken over by your beloved. Get rid of yourself, as soon as possible!'

This is the great wisdom of Tantra, the mystic science that teaches us how to fuse two opposites into one, how to transcend the apparent duality of the sensual world that is only illusory. For the opposites male and female are nothing but an illusion, a wrong identification with a limiting adjunct. In the very depth of our soul there is only God, only Brahman. When we reach the core of our being, then the masculine and the feminine melt into one. There we have become inseparable again, like we were at our conception when the male and the female became one. Real love is about this tantric vision. Real love is about becoming one again.

So let me draw a picture of a mystic kind of love, starting with the love between man and woman (or, if you prefer, a homosexual love that is genuine and profound, having its roots in spirituality, like the one described by Plato in his dialogues), because this kind of love is the deepest and the most serious. For nature is very serious about propagation and has secured it by creating a very intense bond of affection between the two love partners. For only in love has propagation the greatest chance to succeed (or in the case of homosexuality: only in love will two persons find true happiness). The picture is this: imagine yourself a woman, who is to the very depth of her heart in love with a man. She thinks about him day and night. He never leaves her heart. Her only purpose in life is to make him happy, to make him feel comfortable and secure. Because she wants him to be the father of her children. She wants to be with him day and night. If he wants to be alone she will respect him in his solitude, for she never doubts her love. She knows that her lover will always come back to her. Because she knows her love, this love, such a profound and spiritual love, to be irresistible for any human being.

In this deep and overwhelming love the woman is possessed by her lover. She is taken over. There are no more thoughts about her self. She has become the man she is in love with. She has grown fond of the words he uses. She loves the way he talks and the way he moves. It has started to show. Her words have changed. Her movements have changed. She is not the same person anymore. Something very mysterious has happened to her. She has found her love.

The same with the man who is in love. He is not the same man as he was before. His thoughts have changed. He has become more gentle, more loving, less egoistic. He feels himself to be more responsible for his fellow men, more caring. He has lost his harsh traits. Because he is always filled with love. Every minute of the day he feels her caring and selfless love protecting and strengthening him. He is so grateful in his love ('who am I to deserve this?') that he wants to do everything in his power to make her feel happy.

Imagine these two people making love to each other. Wouldn't their mutual love make them a spiritual unity? Will this not be sheer ecstasy, their souls having mingled into a mystic union? With this kind of love their sexuality has become religion. Because their love is the love of God.

One may object that this is a very hypothetical and idealistic kind of love I am picturing here. In daily life love always has some egoistic traits. We never want to surrender our selves completely. And better we don't, we say to ourselves, because love is only a temporary emotion. It's good to be always on guard and not to lose oneself in it. Lest we may end up frustrated, cheated and misused. 'Don't let yourself ever be possessed by anyone. You will be dominated and you'll lose all your dignity.'

This is the kind of thinking that prevents us from having mystic love. It's fear that prevents us from totally giving ourselves to our loved one. In the past we've had some traumatic experiences in our former love relationships. We have formed ourselves some theories based on these presumptions. So now we think it is better not to give our self completely. We've become hardened by our past. We do not want to make the same mistake. But by doing so we are missing the joy and the ecstasy of love.

We must open up our hearts. We must live in the here and now. We must enjoy life by not letting our past or our future interfere with our happiness of the moment. Who is to say that this love will be like our former loves? One must have confidence that love is meant to be. If one doesn't have the confidence love will never happen. Real love starts with two people knowing the importance of self surrender in their relationship. This self surrender will give fuel to their love. It will diminish their fear and by doing so it will increase their ability to surrender themselves. But first the insight must dawn on them that love is nothing more than self surrender, than letting the ego go.

But it must always be remembered that love between man and woman (or any love between human beings) is nothing but a deduction from a higher type of love. This is the love spelt with a capital. It's according to Plato the highest Idea in the universe. It's the form at which all the objects in the world, be they material or immaterial, partake. It's the basic energy from which the world originates. It's God dwelling in the depth of things. For Love is God (rather than vice versa). So in order to know sexual love, one first has to know spiritual Love. One first has to develop the roots of the tree in order to have beautiful branches and fruits.

So every student of love (and aren't we all?) must first, before he enters a love relationship, study the root Idea from which all love stems. In this case a mere objective study won't do, because love is something existential. Love is a matter of life and death. It's the issue that will decide if one's going to be happy in his life or not. One now has to study love subjectively. A mere book won't do. Because a mere intellectual knowing of love is not enough. In order to have love in his life one has to be love. One has to fuse his whole being with divine Love first. His subject must become one with the object. Only then will one radiate pure love. Only then will his love be selfless.

The question in the beginning of this essay can now be answered: 'how can one love?' One can only love, if love has become a basic trait of one's character. This is not very hard to accomplish, but at the same time it is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. It's not very hard because love is the original state of your character. So the only thing you have to do is be yourself. You don't have to work hard to become someone. Just be what you have been all along. If you could have a glance at your character in its purest, most natural form, you would see that your character is love. Just be it.

But what makes it so difficult to accomplish? All sorts of veils are covering up your true state. There is the veil of your upbringing, there is the veil of your culture, of your desires, of your fears, of your opinions and prejudices, in short of all the conditioning that has taken place in your lifetime. You have never listened to your true self. You have always 'worked on yourself'. You have never let go. You've never floated along with the Great River. That's why you haven't found love yet. Once you'll find your true inner state, love will come your way.

Sign our guestbook!