No wonder Rumi talks about flying. Love has a lightness, a carefreeness, a spontaneity, because the mind that is self-reflective, that is self-controlling, is melting away through that force of love. And that melting away is what we call rending the veils—the veils that are around our heart, around our soul . . . wall after wall after wall. Love is like a wonderful sweet acid that melts those walls in complete pleasure. The effect of love on the soul is to melt its boundaries while the soul feels ecstatic. You're being consumed while you're feeling wonderful. It’s a palpable feeling. 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 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. So 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.

Now this rending of the veils, this process of unfoldment and creativity, can be looked at from different angles. Since the progression of our experience—with its revelations, discoveries, and perceptions—is constant, you could look at it from the perspective of the actual feeling or consciousness of the flow of experience—the taste, the feel, the substance of the energetic flow. Or you could see it in terms of the various forms that the unfoldment is creating, which is the discrimination of the flow: Each perception, each experience, each revelation, each insight, each event, is a new form arising. That is why it is called rending the veils—because every time a veil is rent, you see a form. Another form is revealed to you, and a certain experience arises. Unfoldment means the arising of one form after another, one picture after another, one experience after another. And regardless of the focus of your perspective—the consciousness of the energy, or the forms themselves—they are both there, otherwise there wouldn't be unfoldment.

When we rend the veils there is an increase in our capacity to feel our feelings. Capacity increases through experience. Just awakening to nondual reality does not do it by itself. We can be awakened in that way and still have a stunted heart. I know many people who are like that. It may be that the presence of any kind of feeling is threatening, but painful emotions introduce a particular type of difficulty, so we tend to avoid them more than other feelings. This means that as we go deeper, there will be more pain to feel as it has been avoided in the past.

We have seen now how love is closely related to truth. And the way that love is usually misused is by divorcing it from the truth. One of the main ways this happens in spiritual organizations and by spiritual individuals is by being split in one’s thinking about love. If someone tries to develop love, to feel love, without dealing with the negativity and all the difficulties that arise in relationship, the love that develops is not object love, and is only a limited form of personal love. You might remember I said earlier today that a person can be fully realized on the level of universal love and still not have personal love. So, someone could experience a lot of love and be spiritual but at the same time not have much capacity to relate with other human beings with love. And that situation is quite widespread. To develop love in a real way so that it not only tolerates the truth but is based on truth—this is the true love that Rumi says can rend the veils. It is not the love that tries to put on veils. If love puts on veils, it is not real love yet. Love, by its very nature, tends to rend the veils. That is why love is not only the motive for doing the Work, it is the driving energy for the development of the soul at any stage, whether you are doing the Work or not.

Each time we focus on another characteristic of love, it helps us to see more about the veils that need to be rent. Let’s take a look now at what it means that love not only has a softness and a tenderness and a fluffiness but also a sense of purity to it. This purity is like the purity of the newborn infant, like the purity of the flower when it opens up. The purity of its own nature is newly arising. It's virginal. It hasn't been contaminated by anything. Nothing has touched it. This purity will be experienced as a spontaneous innocence, as though your mind were not there—or at least not relevant. An infant can be full of love, but he’s not thinking "I love you" or whether that feeling is good or bad. There is an innocence, a carefreeness, a lack of self-consciousness and self-reflection. When we feel that type of innocence, that purity, it will feel like an unknowingness. We don't know what is happening. Our thoughts themselves are melting, becoming syrupy. There is a softness, a fluffiness, which melts easily, and could disappear like a cloud. And along with that, there is a virginal innocence and sense of purity.

The deeper we go into ourselves, the more veils we go through, which means the more accurately we see and know the Beloved. Recognizing the sources of our veils is one of the ways of rending them. We need to recognize our love for the Beloved by recognizing our love for ourselves—but we have to start by seeing that we really believe that we are unlovable. We learn in some way at some point that we are unlovable. But that is ridiculous! How can a human being be unlovable? Still, we end up believing that we are unlovable, and that is why we don't love ourselves—and we believe that this is why other people don't love us. That's not it. Can't be. That is not part of the laws of nature. So we will do two exercises about this, one after the other, because this is very important.