WHAT IS LOVE? A SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE ON LOVE

What is Love Ontologically and Phenomenologically?

Our true nature is expressed in the way we love.

What is love? It’s a question that has perplexed philosophers, scientists, poets, and ordinary folk alike for centuries. It’s an emotion, a feeling, an action, and so much more. Yet, from a spiritual perspective, love takes on an entirely different dimension.

• What does love feel like when we experience love?
• How can we recognize it?
• What does it taste like, smell like, look like?

We frequently use the word “love” as if we are fully aware of what it means and encompasses when, in reality, each of us has “our ideas” about love. Let’s look at love from the perspective of the Diamond Approach.

Love is the primary, foundational affect of reality. Love is a quality of Being, like awareness and consciousness. All affect and emotion have their origins in love. Love pervades and is part of every particular manifestation, from a spiraling galaxy to the eye of a fly – love is there. From the perspective of this world with its violence and opposites, it’s hard to see and experience that – “love is all there is,” but from the ground of love, the roots of its origins, it is simple – love is reality.

Table of Contents

• Love is Something We All Crave
• Love is the key
• Have you ever asked yourself: What is love?
• The Essence of Love
• The Universal Connection
• Love as an Energy
• Spiritually Understanding Love
• Love Beyond Emotions
• Love as Compassion
• Love as Forgiveness
• Love as an Action
• Love and Selflessness
• Love as a State of Being
• The Manifestations of Love
• Love in Relationships
• Love for Nature and All Beings
• The Role of Love in Enlightenment
• Love as a Path to Inner Peace
• The Misunderstandings of Love
• The Confusion Between Love and Attachment
• Love vs. Desire
• FAQ

Love is Something We All Crave

In our minds or hearts, we know that love is significant and fundamental. Everyone is on the lookout for it. Everybody is discussing it. When someone says they can live without love, you know that’s not the truth.

Whether we engage in spiritual work or not, we constantly seek love—the fulfillment, sweetness, and happiness of love.

Every aspect of life is based on whether or not we are receiving love and how much and how it should be expressed.

Our true nature encompasses a wide range of other types of experiences and realizations in addition to awareness and consciousness, which many consider the entirety of spirituality. Sufis stress the importance of love, as do bhakti paths, and so do the mystic poets – Rumi, Kabir, Hafiz, etc.

Love is the Key

One of the ways we can experience reality is through love. Love is a pure presence that is heartwarming and sweet. It serves as the soul’s primary food and is equally pure and basic as awareness or pure consciousness. Before humans can even consider awareness or consciousness, they desire and require love. Every human needs to be able to love and be loved.

Love is one way we experience our true nature. Still, it is not only a particular way our being expresses itself in awakening and realization—it is a presence, a pure presence that is sweet and heart-fulfilling. It is a primary food for the human soul, and it is just as pure and as primordial as pure consciousness or awareness. In fact, human beings want and need love before they can even think of awareness or consciousness. To love and be loved is a necessity for each human being. We cannot live without it.

FREE Lecture September 17: The Luminous Heart

Have you ever asked yourself: What is love?

You might be experiencing a state of love, but what is that?” You might feel sweetness in your heart for the first time in your life. But do you question why you feel sweetness in your heart or why you have never felt it before? What does that mean for your beliefs and ideas and how you live your life?

The Essence of Love

Love is an existence, not a reaction, not an activity. It is not a thought or an emotion. It is as substantial as real as essence because it is essence. You cannot have love because you are love. Whenever you feel you have love, there is a contradiction. What is happening is that the “I,” the ego, is saying, “I have essence.” The Mastercard is saying, “I have a person.” It’s a credit card walking around saying, “I own this guy.” That’s what we mean when we say, “I have love.” It’s really the other way around. Your beingness has a tag.

We can say that the basic feeling of the soul is love. This means that all other feelings, all other emotions of the heart, are derivatives of this basic feeling of love. They are reverberations, reflections of love, and sometimes distortions of love. They are reflections on reflections on reflections on reflections of love. So, our heart produces one feeling—love—and all its derivatives. That is why, if we want to remain connected with the energy of love, we need to allow ourselves to experience all of our emotions, whatever the feelings arise.

We cannot experience love without experiencing our other feelings as well. And because all those feelings are derivatives of love, if we close ourselves to those feelings, we will close ourselves to love. One of the ways that people abuse love is by believing they shouldn’t have other feelings if they want to experience love. They think that if you love, you shouldn’t feel anger, hatred, fear, jealousy. All these feelings should be shunned—there are actual teachings like that. But doing that will decrease love gradually until it shuts down altogether. We can’t shut down our emotional center and expect not to shut off the feeling of love.

The Universal Connection

We often think of love as an emotion we feel towards another person. However, in spiritual terms, love is a universal connection transcending individuality. It’s a profound sense of unity that binds us all.

Essential love has several varieties—different qualities with different phenomenologies and functions. Each quality has its function on the path, in our spiritual practice, and in the fulfillment of our everyday human life. Through directly experiencing these various qualities, we experience the richness of our hearts. We recognize that true nature is not only the true mind but also the true heart.

Love as an Energy

Spiritually, love is seen as an energy. This energy pervades the universe, connecting us in a web of compassion, understanding, and empathy. Love, then, becomes a force that drives our actions and interactions.

Love—the very force of the dynamism of being—is the energy continuously unfolding all of existence. To be in touch with love means to be in contact with this dynamism that allows your soul to grow, develop, and mature. That is why it is so important that you feel love and feel loved, especially early in life.

When love is truly present, it wants to show itself because its job is to reveal. Love is the energy that reveals the truth. But what is it going to reveal? It is going to reveal you. It is going to reveal your heart. And how is it going to reveal your heart? Through all the various modalities. For example, when love is there, your face starts to shine, to radiate love. It radiates the sweetness, the softness, the beauty.

Spiritually Understanding Love

We are exploring love because we want to know love in its most basic and real way. This means coming to know how love relates to our spiritual development. What does love have to do with our spiritual process? We will come to realize that all the ways we need love are simply reflections of the fact that we need love for our spiritual growth.

Love is more than an emotion in spirituality—it’s a state of consciousness. It’s a way of being that recognizes all beings’ inherent worth and interconnectedness.

Not only are the heart qualities aspects of love, but all essential aspects include love. There is no part of essence that is not loving. The action of any aspect of essence is always loving or in the service of love. Your strength is loving, your will is a loving will, the peace you experience is a loving peace, your joy is loving, and your intelligence is a loving intelligence. Love is a quality of all essence, although it is not always experienced as sweet.

Teachers in many traditions call all of essence love. They say that when you know yourself, you know you are love because essence as a whole is a loving presence. Seeing that all of essence has a loving quality and can only act lovingly will help us understand another kind of love I want to discuss.

Knowing your essence is the primary, basic condition for knowing what love is. If you have not experienced essence, you cannot really know what love is, or you will be confused about love. Even if you have felt love, you cannot separate it from needs and emotions.

Love Beyond Emotions

Some people are not only cut off from their Essence, but they are also cut off from their emotions, too. This makes them very far from themselves. They have only their thoughts, which are the results of their emotions. This is how we lose ourselves and identify with our thoughts. First, there is Essence, then the loss of Essence, then the resulting emotions, then the loss of the emotions or the conflict around them, which creates all kinds of thoughts. So, understanding emotions can help untangle the knots of defenses that are attempting to avoid experiencing the holes. Emotions can point to where Essence has been lost.

The ego cannot love, and emotions come from ego; love must not be an emotion. If love is not an emotion, what is it? Is it a thought or an action? Someone might say that love is an energy and that the love energy comes from your heart chakra and enters someone else’s heart chakra like a laser beam.

Love is the most real thing that many people ever experience. It is usually called to mind as a distant memory and becomes emotional love. But even in the experience of emotional love, we can tell when we like somebody or we don’t like somebody. There remains a knowing of some kind. Something happens in the heart. And our body language shows it.

One can become more held in and held back when the energetic contraction of dislike exhibits itself. You can notice that the chest is more caved in or protected. In contrast, liking and loving offer more and more generous movement and openness. As you lean slightly toward another, perhaps the chest softens, and the arms release their protective armor. A softer heart and a less defended posture are attributes of love coming through our physical expression. There is a natural movement toward, in every way. And almost glowing.

Love as Compassion

Love in a spiritual sense, often manifests as compassion. It’s not just about feeling good; it’s about caring deeply for others, empathizing with their pain, and doing what we can to alleviate it.

To have a heart means that you no longer put yourself first; your survival and the survival of life elsewhere have become for you the same thing. Compassion becomes important, concern becomes important, and self-sacrifice becomes important. If you feel love in your heart but still treat another person as though she is not a human being, you haven’t got a heart yet. You have a distortion that allows you to experience what you think is love without having developed a heart. This is one of the main abuses that love is subjected to by many individuals and groups that consider themselves spiritual.

Love makes us more sensitive to the other because a new element is added: appreciating the other for whatever he happens to be. If you appreciate the other for yourself, that is still at the animal level, even though you might feel you love the person. In fact, you love him solely because he fulfills something for you. The very nature of love is generous, giving, and selfless. It is not territorial; it is not possessive. When the heart is truly integrated, love works for its own survival—that is, the survival of love becomes just as or more important than our physical survival. Physical survival at another’s expense makes no sense because such selfishness is antithetical to the nature of love.

Love as Forgiveness

True love also implies forgiveness. It means letting go of grudges and resentments, acknowledging our shared human frailty, and offering grace even when it’s hard.

A person who does not have a heart cannot hate, cannot be angry, cannot be hurt, cannot be jealous. Without love, there is no such thing as jealousy, hurt, fear, hatred, or anger. All of these things are reactions to the absence of love, to the blockage of it, to the non-perceiving of it. To be aware of the real relationship means that there is always awareness of love.

There is always lovingness, and love has understanding in it. Love has forgiveness and acceptance in it. Love has compassion, appreciation, pleasure, happiness, strength, and gratitude. All these are elements of love, and it is there all the time; it is part of our nature.

The courageous heart is the heart that is always present, regardless of what happens. If your heart is present only if good things happen, your heart is not yet free, not actualized. You are still a coward, still afraid. You have a heart, but not yet a courageous heart. So, to have a true relationship, a real relationship, means to manifest a courageous heart.

We discover that true understanding requires compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, love, clarity, strength, and will, among other things. Although our personality patterns cut off these aspects of our being, when we work in the dimension of essence, we begin to see things in terms of the interaction between ego and essence. We see that the work of liberating our essence involves understanding both our ego and our essence. This process ultimately leads us to actualize the true self, true individuality, true consciousness, and the actualization of all the essential aspects.

Love as an Action

We frequently think of love as a feeling and don’t include our actions in our definition. And even the feeling of love is seldom full or complete. Knowing love in terms of what love does—the action of love—is a very rare understanding.

Love is something that brings two together. When we move toward another in a positive, open, fulfilling way, we call that love. So, the movement toward union is at the very heart of that love, and it is also the love itself. And the longing for union, in any of its variations, indicates and expresses two things: first, the absence of the union, or the separateness that is felt; and second, the love for that union or the Beloved. Any longing for nearness, intimacy, connection, bond, or union always expresses the separation from the Beloved and the love for the Beloved, manifesting as a desire to unite.

Love and Selflessness

Love is not a passive feeling but an active deed in the spiritual realm. It is selflessness, a willing sacrifice of one’s own comfort for the well-being of others.

The problem is that love is poorly understood. We may resonate with the word on a heart level and assume its meaning is obvious. And yet, in different contexts, “love” can refer to attachment, kindness, goodness, connection, attraction, intercourse, merging, beneficence, bliss, or transcendence. Spiritual wisdom describes love as inherently unselfish, yet many of us act with overt self-centeredness in our search for love, as with internet daters who tick the boxes of what they require from their perfect partner.

And for all of its positive associations, love is also inextricably linked with uncontrollable desire, jealousy, envy, vulnerability, betrayal, loss, heartbreak, humiliation, and even hatred. It is possible to see that love is, in fact, at the root of all emotions—positive ones when we are enjoying the presence of love or negative ones when we are feeling cut off from it. It is so all-encompassing that it is hardly surprising we are hard-pressed to see it clearly and define its nature.

To experience divine love is to recognize the presence of divinity everywhere—divinity as love, as a presence, as radiance.  It’s like the soft, golden light you see when sunlight enters a room in the late afternoon. Take that quality of golden light and then imagine it actually shining out of all the objects around you, including people’s physical bodies, so that they look as if they are nothing but the substance of this light. They are glowing with its beauty.

Love as a State of Being

To love is not just to do something but to be something—to be a source of kindness, understanding, and support.

When we know ourselves and our nature and recognize our essence, we see that love is also part of our essence. It is a way our beingness manifests itself. Love is also beingness. When you are experiencing love, love is who you are. It is not something you feel toward someone. Love is your beingness, too, a certain aspect of your beingness, a certain facet of that being, manifested as love.

Love, by its very nature, tends to bring you nearer to the unity of Being. That means love tends to eliminate the duality. More accurately, love opens us to the other world, the invisible world of spirit. The soul not only loves the ultimate nature—whether we call it God, the absolute, the ultimate self, or something else—but it also loves it to the extent of dissolving into it, uniting with it.

The Manifestations of Love

The human being is nothing but the manifestation of the heart of God. So, if there were no love, we would not exist. Love is that basic. The heart is that basic. All that you see is a manifestation of love. When you finally let yourself see it, you see that you are a particularization of loving energy. Your atoms are made out of love. Your body is made out of love. Your mind is made out of love. Your surroundings are made out of love. Everything is made out of love. If there were no love, you would see nothing. Beyond love, there is just God. Out of that love that manifests from the God state or the supreme reality emerges all of the particularizations. We are the final fruit of that particularization, and because we are the final fruit, we have the microcosmic heart that reflects the universal heart.

Love in Relationships

In relationships, spiritual love transcends the boundaries of the self, creating a bond based on mutual respect, understanding, and shared growth.

Personal love is when I say, “I love you,” and it means the capacity to love you, not just “I am full of love.” That is one thing; “I love you” is another. They are two different capacities. Personal love means you love a person for being who they are. Each person, each soul, is a unique manifestation of the totality, and you love the beauty and the uniqueness of that beauty. In personal love, you not only love everyone in general but also see each person’s unique manifestation, which invokes your appreciation. If you have universal love, you can see that everything is beautiful, but uniqueness is not as important.

Whether you are in a love affair, in a marriage, engaging in your favorite activity, or being with the things or people you most enjoy—whatever it is that you love—it is good to ask, “What am I truly loving?” And love, if it is there, will rend veils. If you are in a loving situation with somebody, you will see that person more and more for what he is. And if you are outdoors, loving nature, you will see whatever is around you more clearly for what it is. You will be able to penetrate the surface, to go beyond the appearance of things, “to look beyond the range of the eye.”

When you are loved, you feel all kinds of things, but what feels good about being loved is that it stirs up loving feelings in your heart—you feel your own beauty and your own love. That is the pleasure, the joy, and the happiness we find when we feel love.

Receiving love means connecting with your heart; your heart opens up, and you start feeling your own love. And when you are connected with your own love, you are connected with the dynamism of being that is bringing about the evolution of your soul so that your soul can ultimately complete itself by uniting with the Beloved.

Love is the primary way the bliss of being expresses itself. Love is the perfume of union, of the unity of reality, when seen beyond external divisions and separateness. However, because we ordinarily know ourselves as separate beings, love is needed to unite us and unify reality in our perception. In that process, we begin to see how love is the force that permeates the natural state of the world. Love is what causes walls and boundaries to disappear, and love is what fills the space that is left. Love draws us toward one another and allows us to see the other as they are.

Love for Nature and All Beings

Spiritual love isn’t just for people; it extends to all beings and nature, reflecting a deep reverence for life in all its forms. It’s about recognizing the inherent beauty and value in everything around us.

We are here to live in a real world, in a real way. The Redemption recognizes that the world, including all of humanity, is life; the world itself is alive. We recognize that the whole world is made of living consciousness. And we realize also that the nature of the consciousness is love. When we realize the nature of the soul, we see that it is infused with potential, with all the essential aspects and all the dimensions. We realize that the soul is the cohesion, integration, and totality of Essence. From this perspective, we realize that the universe is like a universal soul containing all essential qualities. We look around and see the redeemed world, the actual resurrected universe, which means that the world is one and indivisible. The world is not illusory, not a construct, and not a dream. It is a real-world that shines with truth, overflows with love, that transforms with limitless intelligence.

The Role of Love in Enlightenment

In many spiritual traditions, love is seen as the path to enlightenment. It’s the act of transcending our egoistic concerns, embracing the

For a soul to have heart, it must have become clarified and purified enough to have this affectionate perception of the other. This gives us an understanding of how love is inseparable from the perception of the truth. It gives us some sense and intuition of what love is, what it does for the soul, and why we need it. Like the development of the heart, the development of love is inseparable from the refinement and development of the soul. The interconnectedness of all life, and experiencing a profound sense of oneness with the universe.

When we truly understand the nature of love, we understand the truth as love. Love, an essential manifestation of being, is the expression of nondual truth within the world of duality. In other words, love is how the inseparable unity of reality expresses itself in the world of separate objects and entities.

Because of this, love is the force in the world of duality that can take us to the nondual. Why? Because love, by its very nature, tends to melt away duality and bring about union and unification. We usually see love in dualistic terms of the lover and the Beloved. However, reality is not ultimately like that. When we see reality in our usual dual universe, if love arises, we recognize it as love because we are seeing it through the forms of the lover and the Beloved. But if the love intensifies, it leads you to union. What does this mean? It means that love can eliminate the duality of the lover and the Beloved, exposing love’s true nature as the non-dual truth. That is one of the functions of love.

Love as a Path to Inner Peace

Love, in its purest form, leads us to inner peace. By practicing love and compassion, we can let go of our petty concerns and anxieties, finding serenity in our connection with everything.

You will find that issues about love manifest in many degrees, in many ways, and forms. An issue might arise of wanting to be loved, as the desire to be loved, to be the object of love for someone or some people. That might progress to wanting to love, wanting to be able to love. That may further progress to wanting an intimate loving relationship where there is mutual love. This might raise the question of loving oneself, which might raise the question of what it means to be love. Loving oneself entails knowing love, which leads to being love.

The Misunderstandings of Love

You might say that you understand yourself. But this is not a description of who you are. It’s not the understanding. Understanding is not “I am such and such. I am joy.” A statement is not understanding. Understanding is the actual embodiment of the state, the insightful beingness of it. Understanding is the unity of Being and insight. Understanding love, then, doesn’t mean knowing love is this or that; love is good, love is sweet, love affects you in this warm way, and love nourishes you.

Understanding love is to be love in the moment, to feel what it’s like. If you understand this completely, which means that you are completely and totally love, with a discriminating consciousness of the state, understanding automatically moves the state to a deeper level. The moment there is completeness in that state, the insight is there—insight is the union of your mind and your Being at that moment.

The Confusion Between Love and Attachment

Many of us mistake attachment for love. Attachment is about possession and fear of loss. Love, on the other hand, is about appreciation and letting go. It’s about acknowledging the other’s freedom and individuality.

The problem with not being loved as a child is not the external condition of no love from the environment. The problem is that the absence of external love becomes an internal absence—you become disconnected from love

itself. And when you become disconnected from love, your soul can’t grow, develop, or mature. Thus the absence of love, the distortions of love, and the limitations of love from our parents are all significant because they created limitations and distortions in our own love, in our heart.

In our adult life, the particular ways in which we refuse to see and experience love largely depend on our experience of love in early childhood. If love had been abundant from the beginning, it would be easy now to see, accept, and appreciate it. But, if a large part of our experience was of love being limited or distorted one way or another, it is difficult to experience love when it is here now—especially if it is distorted and mixed up with other things. So, the limitations on the presence of love in our early childhood lead to limitations in our perception of and receptivity to love now, which limits the openness in our hearts to the love that is actually there for us.

Love vs. Desire

Desire often masquerades as love. But desire seeks to take, while love seeks to give. Desire clings; love frees. Understanding this difference is crucial in our spiritual journey.

What does it mean that the human soul has a heart? “Heart” means love, more than anything else because love is the foundation for the heart. When we think of heart, we think of love and its derivatives. In contrast, a person who is living on the animal level is motivated by what is called the first chakra, which is the energy center that is focused on survival. At that level, a person is more animalistic and tends to be selfish and territorial, thinking of himself first; this focus leads to a way of living that is called survival of the fittest.

You see, love is not a strong desire; it’s not a longing. Nor is it “I know I love you.” These things can be there; they can mix with love—but they cannot be love. They are actually the limitations of love. Love itself is the wonderful, beautiful sweetness that makes you happy. And when you feel it, you can’t help but want the other person to be happy. That’s because love eliminates boundaries. As it is melting your boundaries, it’s natural that you feel happy when you make the other happy. That’s because you are getting nearer. The soul is doing its thing. It’s getting ripe. It’s bearing its fruits.

People naturally want to spend their lives doing what they feel most passionate about. That is the desire of the heart. But whatever they want to do is an external reflection of the deep longing of the heart to unify with its ultimate source. The passionate love we have been discussing propels the soul on its search for the ultimate ground of love.

Love is more than we think, more than we know.

Love, in a spiritual sense, is more than an emotion. It’s a force, an energy, a state of being that connects us all. It’s about compassion, understanding, forgiveness, and selflessness. It’s about transcending the self, recognizing our unity with all beings, and finding peace within this realization. To truly understand love, we must look beyond our conventional ideas and explore its deeper spiritual dimensions.

Love makes you luminous; it makes you radiant with happiness, delight, lovingness, liking, and appreciation.

Perhaps it is obvious now that we do love our nature very deeply. If we don’t love it, there must be some barrier, some veils for us to rend veils to see and penetrate and dissolve.

When we love ourselves, we can love our beingness, the fact of our isness, the fact of our existence, the facticity of our being—that we exist, that we are. That is basic. This amounts to loving our essence, since when we are being, we are being our essence. When we recognize that we love it, we recognize it for what it is. When we recognize its beauty and exquisiteness, that’s beingness—which is the perfume of the Beloved.

FAQ

1. How is spiritual love different from romantic love?

Spiritual love is about a universal connection and goes beyond individual relationships. It’s about compassion, forgiveness, and selflessness towards all beings.

2. How can we practice spiritual love?

Practicing spiritual love can start with cultivating compassion, understanding, and forgiveness daily. It’s about being present, kind, and aware of our interconnectedness.

3. Can spiritual love exist in romantic relationships?

Absolutely. In fact, spiritual love can deepen and enrich romantic relationships by fostering a bond based on mutual respect, understanding, and shared growth.

4. What’s the role of love in spirituality?

Love is often seen as the path to enlightenment in many spiritual traditions. It helps us transcend our egoistic concerns and experience a profound sense of unity with the universe.

5. How does understanding love from a spiritual perspective affect our lives?

Understanding love from a spiritual perspective can bring greater depth and meaning to our relationships and interactions. It can lead us to inner peace and enlightenment.