Another common assumption about love is that it is experienced not only towards another, but towards a special other. You feel that it’s okay to love your child, your husband or wife, but you don’t think of loving just anybody. You don’t think that you could or should feel love toward all the people driving down the freeway. “What does love have to do with those people?” you wonder. Love is special, you feel; it’s only for particular people. In your mind, the people you love are important and no one else counts much. All those other people have nothing to do with your love. When you think of it this way, there are very few people that you love—just a few people, a few animals, your cat maybe, who you feel are very special. And because they’re special to you, you love them. This implies that you don’t feel love very often. You feel love only when you are with those few special people, or when you are thinking about them. So love is for special people at certain times. It is not something that is there all the time, like air. We have more assumptions about love. One is that you feel love for the other person only if he is being the way you believe he should be. You have certain conditions about how the other person should be, and then you can feel loving. If any of those conditions is not fulfilled, love disappears. The first condition we have for love is that it occur within a relationship. The second condition is that the love be toward specific others in relationship. The third condition is that you love the special other only under specific conditions. The other person rarely fulfills all the conditions, and those conditions restrict the range of love.

When there are no boundaries, what naturally arises is love, abundance, and generosity, because what blocks love are the boundaries. There is no sense then that you are going to love someone, or that you want someone to love you. You are just you; you are natural, you are just living a human life, and there is love in it, naturally You do not say, “I want to do this because I want to be loving.” You just do it naturally. You are loving, without having to think about it. You do not have to feel compassionate to be helpful. You are helpful regardless of whether you feel helpful or not. Compassion might be present; you might not even care about it. You are just helpful. So, in a sense, in the Work, nothing is for you; at the same time, everything is for you because you are everything. Each one of us can come to see that these are not ideas, that this is not a point of view. This is actually the fact, this is the state of affairs; it is how things are when your mind is not interpreting things. The way we usually see reality is determined by the ideas and beliefs and patterns of our minds. When the mind stops, when the ego stops, and you let perception be there, clear and cleansed and pure, then reality is what is seen. Everything else is an interpretation, and there are many levels of interpretation. There are many levels of consciousness, many levels of reality. But ultimately, when you completely let go of that interpretation, of the desire to interpret, it is possible to see things as they are.

Then we proceed to project mother onto others, and try to get their approval so they will love us and help us. That is one of the main motivations for sex, for example. Sex is a physical discharge. We charge up and then discharge; so sex mostly becomes an attempt to discharge our tensions and pain. We can see how deep the motivation for sex is, rooted in the beginning stages of life. It is like wanting your mother to come and feed you and make you feel wonderful, or wanting her to help you spit up your milk. By now you have no confidence that you can do it yourself because of all your blockage. So, it’s always, “If I can just find Prince/Princess Charming, then I can discharge all my tensions and everything will be fine.” In most relationships, the other person is someone to make you feel good. If they make you feel good, you love them. If they make you feel bad, you reject them. Usually we want the other person to regulate us. When you build up tension, you say, “I love you, let’s make love.” It doesn’t mean that sex can’t have other motivations like true love and appreciation, but most often there is a compulsion from accumulated tension and a desire for discharge.

And when love arises, you will see that the love is you, is your very nature. When you see that the love is you, you will see that there are no boundaries, and that love is also everyone else. Love is the consciousness of everyone, and that consciousness, which is love, has nothing to do with boundaries. The moment it is there, there are no boundaries. The other person is love so what does loving them or not loving them mean?

Let’s try to understand in more detail what the word “love” means. What is the specific feeling, meaning and state of love? What are the conditions that allow love? 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 “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.

As long as you believe you are a separate person with boundaries, with the attitude of getting things and protecting yourself, you will block love. Love destroys boundaries. Love has nothing to do with you or me. Love is just the activity of that creativity in that openness. Love is the outcome of non-restriction, of freedom. When the body and the mind are not restricted by that point of view, the harmony of the body and the mind will be expressed in a lovingness, an abundance. The natural movement of our being is to be in love. The expression of that freedom is love, goodness, sweetness, contentment. When there is no point of view, there is complete and real love. When love is present, there is no movement toward getting or protecting. Your body exists as a channel for that flow of love. Love will flow by itself.

Reflect for a minute on what really happens in your process. You may be working on yourself, becoming more aware of yourself, and even trying to help other people. But all the time you are an island. Your mind is full of monologues, dialogues, ideas, feelings, reactions, plans, memories, accusations, all kinds of things. It’s turmoil, a storm which has nothing to do with anything outside. How often do you ever think of someone else, really think of someone else just for who they are? When we think of people, we are concerned with either liking them or not liking them. We’re angry with them or we love them. There’s something we don’t want from them or there’s something we do want from them. We push them away or draw them towards us. Whatever we do, it has to do with ourselves. Very rarely do we actually look at the other person, or any object for that matter, without relating it first and primarily to ourselves. This is a description, not a judgment. This is the state of affairs. Even when we act in humanitarian ways, serving or helping people, isn’t there some turmoil and anxiety over whether or not you’re doing it right, being loving enough, helpful enough? This is the same ego perspective. You are not as concerned with other people as you are with yourself. You are thinking primarily of yourself in the name of love and service.

Yes. If you reject your hatred, split away from your hatred, your love becomes unreal, because it is based on an idealization, an unreality. Usually you will be disappointed at some point. So this is what happens: There is love, it is an idealized relationship, all loving, all wonderful. Everything you see is wonderful: the way your love moves, her eyes, the color of her hair. You can stare at your love for hours and hours. Then one day something happens—the other person does something and you become really hurt and disappointed. You are hurt and disappointed not because of how bad it is that the other person did something, but because that idealized image is destroyed. The other person is not perfect. Then the relationship turns sour. But if you are mature and you have learned how to have a real relationship, you will accept that imperfection. You see that it cannot be wonderful all the time. It was never that way anyway. The person has not really changed. You realize how the capacity for a real relationship is necessary for a long-lasting relationship. There is no long-lasting, satisfying relationship if you can’t have a real relationship. Those mental relationships cannot last very long. They are not real. With the idealized relationship, at some point you will be disappointed. With the negative relationship, at some point it will be too negative and you will have to get out of it. The frustrating one means there is no relationship there anyway; it is just something that you want and cannot have.