By: Mike George
Source: The Daily Guardian https://epaper.thedailyguardian.com/view/1684/the-daily-guardian/14
Dated: November 23, 2024
1. Love is Required Are you sure? We often hear it said, “We all need to be loved and know that we are loved.” But true love is never incomplete. It cannot be added to. It, therefore, seeks nothing nor needs anything. Love is not an object. It is not something separate for you. It is you. To give love simply means to give of oneself because love is what each one of us is! We have just temporarily lost our awareness of it.
2. Love is Acquired Is that true? The only real energy in life that cannot be acquired is the energy of love. Why? Because you are that energy. You cannot acquire your own self. You cannot acquire your spiritual heart. You cannot acquire what you already are.
3. You fall in Love Why not? This is tough to ‘see’ as this myth has permeated almost all forms of romance for centuries. But the truth is you cannot ever ’fall’ in love. True love is never a fall; it can never be a descent. Infatuation, obsession, and attachment are usually what happens in reality, and then given the term ‘falling in love’. You cannot ‘fall in love’ as you are already, and always ‘in’ love, because you always are already ‘in’ yourself!
4. Love is Exclusive How can this be? This is the belief that, somewhere out there, there is ‘a’ special ‘one’ for me, my ‘soulmate’, the one who I am fated to be with for the rest of my life. This is truly the stuff of Hollywood movies. We learn to limit the idea of love to one other special person or to some very exclusive relationships. We make love small and appropriate only to those whom we believe and perceive as special people in our life and therefore more deserving of our love.
5. Love is Attachment If not, what is it? One of the most common mistakes that stalks the world today is the idea that love means attachment. What is seldom ‘noticed’ is that where there is attachment there is fear. Fear of loss or damage to the object of attachment. And fear is not love. Fear is love distorted by attachment. Whenever you are attached to anything, an object, person, place, or just an idea, your heart is blocked. That is why detachment is essential to ‘healing the heart’. You cannot love unless you are detached.
6. Love hurts How could it? The opposite is true. If it hurts, it is not love. You may experience a ‘lover’s tiff’ and think it is love, but anger is not love. Anger is anger, like fear, anger is a sign that love is absent. Anger is emotional pain. It is true to say relationships will have their ups and downs. There will be moments of conflict and personal suffering, but this has nothing to do with love and more to do with judgement and blame, expectation and attachment, dependency and jealousy. Love cannot create hurt; it is the healer of hurt.
7. Love is Lost If so, where could it go? Love is what you are, and you can never lose yourself. The illusion that love is ‘lost’ simply occurs when you forget your self and believe you are some thing other than your self. This tends to happen every time you mistake your self for what you see in the mirror. You wear a face and you inhabit a body, but true loveliness cannot be reflected in a mirror. True loveliness is invisible to the naked eye.
Mike George is an author of 16 books
around emotional and spiritual intelligence,
including ‘The 7 Myths about LOVE’.
