What is the implication of this insight? If love is our beingness, our essence, and the very substance of our soul, then what is going on when we have love only in a relationship? It means you are yourself only in certain relationships. If you say that love can exist only with specific others, you’re saying, “I can be myself, my beingness only with specific others and only under certain conditions.” The conditions of the personality will restrict love, will restrict you, and you’re saying then that you can only be yourself under those conditions. If you say, “I only love this person,” what does it mean? What are you saying about yourself? To really see that love is beingness, is-ness, is not easy. You cannot understand it intellectually. The way to understand it is to experience it, to taste it, to be it. You will be able to understand its qualities only when you experience it. Love is not an idea or a concept. If you’ve never seen a coconut, never tasted a coconut, someone could explain to you the taste of a coconut forever, but you would never really know what coconut tastes like. If you taste essence, you know it. If you don’t taste it, you don’t know it. Everything is like that. When people say essence or Being or love is something mysterious, it means they have never tasted it. It isn’t any more mysterious than anything else.

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.

When you experience the absence of love, what will arise first will be the various feelings and reactions to the absence—the anger, the frustration, and all the other affects. Along with that may come the experiences of rejection and abandonment. If you can stay with those reactions, you will begin feeling the hurt, the wound, underneath. If you stay with those, they will reveal the emptiness, which is the disconnection from love. It is as though the wound and the emptiness are two sides of the same thing. ;

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.

As we look into the nature of how love functions on the different paths to realization, we see that in the more devotional types of spiritual practice, at some point the heart explicitly becomes an ecstatic expression of the union with God, or the Beloved. This ecstasy becomes erotic at times, as in the case of some Christian and Hindu mystics. The spiritual paths of mind and knowledge do not tend to bring in this type of erotic and juicy feel; knowledge and its precision open our experience to new realms, but the love is implicit more than explicit. Similarly, when love is present in a devotional and respectful form, it rarely expresses itself as erotic love. In the way we usually work, we use the mind’s discriminating capacity, the Heart’s loving nature, and the body’s precious vehicle of life to go beyond all of these without leaving any of them behind. We do not emphasize one over the other, nor does deeper refinement through our work mean that we transcend these centers of our being; we simply see the natural potential hidden within them all. In the course of our spiritual maturation, each becomes more capable and more fully realized, not less.

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.

We are unfolding a story. As you fly, the thread of love weaves this story together. We have seen that love is basically the magnetism between the soul and its ultimate Beloved, between you and the mystery. That magnetism, that pull, we call love. And that magnetism is a sweet, pleasurable liking and appreciation. The magnetism is what we experience in our ordinary condition, which is the relative world where duality between the soul and the Beloved still exists. But love, of its own nature, of its very nature, tends to bring you nearer to the Beloved. That means its tendency is 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—it loves it to the extent of dissolving into it, uniting with it.

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.

When we truly understand the nature of love, what we are understanding is the truth as love. Love, which is an essential manifestation of Being, is really 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, then 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 nondual truth. That is one of the functions of love.

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.

When you give or love selflessly, it means you are no longer bounded by a rigid point of view. It doesn’t mean you stop existing as a person. Instead, you exist as an openness to experience, rather than as boundaries constructed by your mind. This is a very radical perspective compared to the ego’s point of view. We have lived all our lives from the point of view of ego. All our ideas, our dreams, our anxieties have developed from the perspective of having a self that needs to continue, a self dependent on particular boundaries. We are being. We are essence. Being does not need boundaries and is not separate from the basic energy. It is true that physically we are separate from each other, we are not identical, we have different bodies. But on a fundamental level we are not separate: our bodies are nothing but expressions of the basic energy, of the basic consciousness. We are different waves of the same ocean. If you see this, you cannot help but love. Love is not seen as a loss. Love is what there is. We usually think of love as a loss, a loss of ourself. It is a loss of boundaries that define this self. Love means you’re not thinking of yourself as contrasted to somebody else.

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.

Many of us know that sometimes it is difficult to let love in. Love might be there, but we don’t want it. We think things like, “Get away. Don’t be so mushy. You are suffocating me.” Or we assume that the person loving us must want something from us. Or perhaps we wonder what their love will cost us. These are just a few of the many ways we say no to love, reject it, push it away, try to hurt it or get rid of it. There are also many ways we don’t see love when it is there—we misinterpret it, believing that it is something other than love. 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 for us to see it, accept it, and appreciate it. But if a large part of our experience was of love being limited or distorted one way or another, then 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.

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.

Without love there will be no fuel to follow the path toward union with our depth, the depth of our spiritual nature. But this love, as we have seen, comes in several varieties. It can be sweet, appreciative, soft love—that's the pink, fluffy personal love. Or it can be melty, surrendering love, which is the merging gold. Now we are looking at a third aspect of love, passionate pomegranate love, which is a more exotic kind of love than what we usually tend to experience. Passionate love is the expression of the specific attraction between the soul and the Absolute—the inner magnetism inherently present between the soul and her source. And it is an inherent magnetism because the Absolute is really the depth dimension of the inner nature of the soul. So the magnetism exists because of an identity, an inherent identity between the soul and her source, and since our mind isn't aware of this identity—the fact that the two are one and the same—we live as if there is a duality between the two. When we begin to move towards that identity, we experience it as a pull that can become very intense, pleasurable, passionate and ecstatic.

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.

Why is this so significant for your work on the inner journey? Because how much you were loved, how fully you were loved, and how attuned the love was to you determine your original connection with love. And this connection with love significantly determines the unfoldment of your soul. So 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, can’t develop, can’t 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 own conception of love, in our own connection with love. And without the experience of love, our soul can’t rest in her true nature, which is needed for her to complete her journey. This means that our soul doesn’t turn the way it is supposed to turn—toward the Source. It turns in all kinds of strange ways, going in many different directions on time-consuming detours. We need to correct these distortions, to see through them in order to connect ourselves again with love in as full a way, as complete a way, and as accurate a way as possible. This means rending the veils that were created in our early childhood.

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.