Become aware of your individuality, aware of your sense of being an individual that is bounded by skin and a body, and aware of how that individual has a whole world, a whole history, a whole universe that is full of action, interaction, suffering, fear, and desire. If you can become aware of all that, what is aware of all that is your consciousness, which is the love.

There is the sweet, fluffy kind of love, the merging and contented kind of love and then there is a third kind of love: passionate, powerful, consuming and ecstatic. You feel you've been taken by storm. Your mind is gone. You feel power and lustiness, passion and zest. You feel your whole being is burning like a flame and that flame is full, and that fullness is the love. You feel ecstasy, passion and no difference between desire, wanting, giving, receiving. It is all one consuming thing. I call it ecstatic, passionate love. This love is not only directed toward a person. It is again your beingness. You are the passion. It is true passion, not the passion of the emotions, which is fake passion. When you are passionately longing or passionately wanting, you are being your passion itself. But as true passion of love, you feel like a consuming force of life. When you look at life and existence, you're not wanting something from it; you simply appreciate and love it passionately because life and existence are so beautiful. Beauty is a part of the passion. What ignites that passion is beauty, the exquisite, luminous beauty of existence.

Another way of seeing this fact is the direct perception that everything is made out of Love. The body, the walls, the air, the space, the atoms, all seem to be made out of the same continuum, which is this Cosmic Consciousness. There is unity and oneness, although there is variety and difference.

Fluffy love has a feeling of lightness and of liking someone or something; merging love has a feeling of giving and sharing with another person; passionate love has a feeling of whole-hearted participation in the world. Other kinds of love, such as fulfillment, satisfaction and gratitude, are different in that they have nothing to do with relationship, with other.

An emotion is an activity, a charge and discharge pattern. The Essence is there regardless of the charge or discharge. There is an existence, a beingness that can be experienced, and that is you. If you don't know this beingness, you can't know what love is because love has to do with you're being, your Essence. It has nothing to do with your personality, your emotions or your ideas, your self-concepts, your self-image, your accomplishments, your preferences, your likes and dislikes, your relationships. These things have nothing to do with your beingness.

What we call love is the same as consciousness, but it is experienced in the heart rather than in the mind, in the chest rather than in the head. It is also the same thing as will, which is experienced in the belly. Essential Presence in the mind is often felt as a Diamond, in the heart it is often experienced as a pearl. It is the same consciousness, seen from an objective, clear conscious level or from a personal heart level. If it is perceived as a universal, objective level it is seen as Diamond consciousness. In the heart it becomes Personal Presence, the pearl beyond price, and rather than being seen as consciousness it will be seen as 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 is, because it is Essence. You cannot have love as you are love. Whenever you feel you have love, there is a contradiction... 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.

Love is actually more than one aspect of Essence. When love is first discovered, one often feels it as a certain sweetness, as a sweet Presence which feels fluffy and light. This is one of the simplest and easiest aspects of love to experience, love which feels fluffy and pink.

Love is really nothing but a synthesis, the union of truth and pleasure. When there is truth, when you are the truth, when you are the pleasure -- together at the same time -- then you are love. When truth is sweet, it is love. When pleasure is true it is love. Love has both the pleasure and the truth. In love there's no separation between truth and pleasure.

There are many different kinds of love. One is an aspect of love which has a melting quality, which we call merging love. It has to do with the loss of boundaries between you and your environment; you experience merging with your environment. Your boundaries melt away, and you have no shields around you. You experience yourself as a delicateness, an exquisiteness that does not feel itself separate from anything else. This experience brings about a sense of contentment, and a deeper letting go, a deeper satisfaction. It feels like you are your own nourishment, and actually that you and the nourishment are the same. This is the kind of love people want when they desire closeness or oneness with someone else.

For a long time throughout the inner journey, we tend to think that there are two kinds of experience, as if there were two realities, two worlds. Even when we have a spiritual experience, we imagine that it came from somewhere else, from the “other world,” from spirit, or from the spiritual dimension. So there is a division in our mind, a duality. We believe in a duality between the world and the spirit, between matter and spirit, between the body and spiritual nature. This is a deeply held belief, very profound. It is not a matter of conscious, mental conviction. You may study and believe in the teachings of nonduality, but the way you are in the world will exemplify your actual underlying convictions. Every thought we think, every feeling we feel, every action we take implies the position we hold about this world and the ways we perceive it. For most people, nothing else exists beyond the visible; there is only this world, and you try to survive and make the best of it. Those who are involved in spiritual practice usually think there is more than what appears to us as physical reality. Regardless of what we believe, including our notions of nonduality or unity, we still think and behave as if there were two worlds. And this belief splits our heart in two, so that we end up with two loves. We love the world, but we also love spiritual freedom—we love the spirit and its harmony, its blissfulness, its sanctity, its majesty and beauty.

When you are complete, the action is love. Just as your body needs food and safety when you're taking care of it, your environment needs care when you're complete. From the perspective of completeness, the whole universe is your body. There is no separation, so you take care of it as an action of love. There is no sense of isolation, of feeling you are separate from other things and not caring about them. Love arises for everyone and everything.

The first thing you need to know is that your personality or ego does not know how to love. It cannot love. When you say, "I love you," it is always a lie, because the person who says, "I" cannot love, and doesn't know what love is. The personality does not know how to love. The personality is the product of the lack of love, so how can it know love? The personality is what you usually think is you, what you call "I," "myself." When you say "I," it is a lie. "I" doesn't love. "I" doesn't know how to love. "I" is there because you don't know how to love. "I" is there from the beginning because of the loss of love. The very existence of an "I" is the absence of love, the blockage and distortion of love. The "I" knows how to need; the "I" does not know how to love. It is not possible. What we call "I," our separate identity, is our self-image. Even if the self-image knows what love is, it does not have the love and cannot be a source of love. In fact, when there is love, love tends to melt away the "I." The "I" relaxes and gets out of the way.