The search for love and heart is a longing in the soul…
…for the beloved, the heart’s true occupant. The longing for the beloved can feel like a search for a soulmate, a search for unity or oneness, a search for divine love, or a longing for our love and heart to be free, free to express itself without limits, a wild abandon of loving.
Our ordinary thinking mind knows only what it has heard from others, or what it has learned in the process of its own evolution and development. We conceptualize various objects as the Beloved of the heart, as what will bring true fulfillment and contentment. Throughout our attempts to fulfill the longing of the heart, the search for the Beloved is veiled by the concepts of the mind. Although the heart believes it is pursuing the true Beloved that will grant final peace and fulfillment, in reality it is chasing after impostors. The heart, as a result, finds many lovers, one after the other. The heart falls in love from time to time and is happy when it finds a new love because maybe the Guest has finally arrived. Maybe this is the one. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 2
What is heart? What is seeking the beloved?
The heart seems to be the source of emotions, the organ of affect and connection. We need connection. When we know and relate to ourselves as separate individuals and beings. We long for deep connection to resolve the isolation and loneliness that are inherent to a separate self. But, the angst of disconnection and separateness is simply the surface of a deep longing in the soul for her true nature.
Exploring separateness, disconnection, isolation, loneliness, longing, and such is part of the magic of psychodynamic work that leads us back to our love and heart.
What we call heart is not exactly what we usually think of as the heart. More precisely, our usual understanding of heart is a very limited way of knowing the real heart. At the beginning of our inner work, we experience our heart as emotions and feelings. At deeper levels, we experience our heart as the essential heart with love, compassion, joy, and all of the qualities of essence. The essential heart leads to the aspect of truth, the solid gold of truth, which is the source of the essential heart. Beyond the aspect of truth is the heart of nonattachment, which does not distinguish between heart and mind. Knowing and feeling coincide as pure sensitivity. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 6
As I write this, I am in a Starbucks, and a song about love is playing. How many thousands of songs about love are there? Poems? Papers, posts, and articles? LOVE is a very big deal for us. Many love songs these days seem to focus on dysfunctional love, where real love is sacrificed to need, desire, power, instinct, and other dynamics of the ego self.
The most basic thing about love is that love is beingness, essence, existence. When you experience love as a movement, a reaction, an emotion, a fantasy, an action, an idea—it is not love. Love can bring these things about, but love is more basic and more profound than any reaction. Your nature is not your identity tag. It is you, who you are. When love is there, then who you are is love. – Diamond Heart Book Two: The Freedom to Be ch. 10
This is the confusion, the learned ignorance, the worldly conditioning of our average, normal human being – we don’t know that we are the love, heart, and fulfillment we seek. A taste of that wine sets our hearts aflame.
You will see that in a very deep place in you, in the deepest part of your heart, there is a very deep grief, the deepest wound, the wound of the separation from oneness. And there is longing in our hearts, the deepest longing, the deepest yearning. The most powerful desire we have, in the deepest part of our hearts, is the longing to cease as a separate individual; to be united, to see that there is really only one because it is our ultimate nature. If it is cut off from our perception, there has to be a sense of loss, a deep, gaping wound that does not heal, and there inevitably arises an immense longing a very deep ache, so that no matter what you experience or feel, there is dissatisfaction and discontent. Your heart does not allow itself to be completely happy because this oneness is what your heart ultimately wants, and everything else it wants is just a little reflection of this. You might think your heart wants this and that, and it is all true, but these all are superficial wants. What will make your heart dance in happiness is this perception of oneness, your direct knowledge of the unity of yourself and everything in one nature. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 6
The Song of the Reed
Hearken to this Reed forlorn,
Breathing, even since ‘twas torn,
From its rushy bed, a strain
Of impassioned love and pain.
“The secret of my song, though near,
None can see and none can hear.
Oh, for a friend to know the sign
And mingle all his soul with mine!
‘Tis the flame of Love that fired me,
‘Tis the wine of Love inspired me.
Wouldst thou learn how lovers bleed,
Hearken, hearken to the Reed!”
~ Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi