“The whole world sings of desire, and confuse it with that which is called love. Only those who have incarnated their Soul know what love is. The “I” does not know what love is. The “I” is desire.” – Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
Many songs have been sung about love, and many poems have been written about it. There are countless stories about romance, all full of drama and turmoil. The more tempestuous the story, the more we enjoy it. The reason we love such stories is because they speak to us – we see our own heartbreak, our own sorrow and hope reflected in them. Yet rarely do we ever ask ourselves: Is true love really supposed to feel like this? Is it supposed to be full of difficulties and storms?
If we asked the world, then the answer would be a resounding “yes”. After all, we’ve been fed this narrative about love since Shakespearean times. A great love story must be one of great challenges and tragedies. Is it any wonder we all have the same failed experiences when it comes to romance, when culture tells us that suffering is par for the course?
We put ourselves through hell for someone whom we swear we are in love with, and it never occurs to us that maybe what we feel isn’t love at all; that maybe what we feel is desire disguised as a virtue. We go through life never experiencing the truth of love but believing we have.
That’s because the truth of love is not easily digestible by the ego. The ego only knows desire, lust, codependency, and attachment – it can’t comprehend the unconditional nature of true love. The ego deludes itself that it is in love, but it could never actually experience love’s profound essence.
The truth of love would shock the ego because it’s too unconditional, too forgiving, too allowing, and too full of surrender. The ego can’t understand this because all it wants to do is to possess, to control, to indulge, and to cling. All the ego knows is insatiable desire. Desire and love are polar opposites, and they cannot coexist. One has to prevail, and in most cases, desire will kill love every time:
“Love cannot exist where there is desire, because love and desire are incompatible. It is necessary to know that desire produces deception. Whoever desires, believes himself to be in love, feels himself to be in love, could swear he is in love. That is the illusion of desire. How many times have we seen couples who claim they adore each other? After marriage, the house of cards falls, and the sad reality remains. Those who believed they were in love hate each other deep down, and once desire is satisfied, failure is inevitable. Then we only hear complaints and regrets, reproaches and tears. Where was the love? What happened to love? It is impossible to love when there is desire.” – Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
How many times have we witnessed this narrative, or even experienced it for ourselves? How many times have two people fallen in love, only to find themselves on the other side of it, dejected and disappointed? This is what happens when the ego starts to interfere with the newfound, pure feeling of love – it distorts it; it turns it into lust, into jealousy, into neediness and greed. Eventually, there is no trace left of what could’ve initially been a true recognition of love. The spark quickly gets swallowed by the darkness because the ego takes over, and the ego isn’t capable of love.
Only the Soul, the Essence, the Being has the ability to experience true love. If we haven’t worked on disintegrating the ego and integrating more of our soul’s essence into our consciousness, then we simply don’t have the ability to love. If we live entirely from the ego, we live in delusion and lust, and we think that this is what love is. We aren’t aware of the deeper nature of love as the cosmic force that permeates all of existence. All we know is attachment, jealousy, passion, possession, and manipulation.
The ego is a black hole – it is never satisfied; it always wants more. It always wants to take, because it has nothing to give. It wants to keep everything for itself, to feel in control at all times, because it is fragile and it could be destroyed by anything that happens in the external world. How can someone who is completely identified with their ego feel or give love when their whole existence is a hopeless void?
There is a lightness in the soul, an ability to flow and let go that the ego doesn’t have. The soul is always at peace. The ego rejects peace. The ego finds peace boring because it is addicted to drama. To live from the soul is to know true freedom, peace, and love. To live in ego is to be forever in slavery to our lower desires; to never touch the sublime force that is love.
In order to get even a remote sense of what true love is, we must awaken our consciousness through the disintegration of the ego. The more we awaken our consciousness, the deeper the love we can experience. The deeper the love we experience, the more we realise that love is all around us; that it’s woven into the very fabric of existence, and that it is our natural state.
Once we have this realisation, it becomes easy to love every bird, every tree, and every passerby. Loving and taking care of ourselves becomes our second nature. We forgive everyone who’s hurt us in the past, because we know there is nothing to forgive. We let go of the people who aren’t meant to be in our lives because we love ourselves, and we love them. We surrender to whatever unfolds in our lives, because we know that everything is happening for our greatest good. We become more present with ourselves and with others, because there is a deeper appreciation for our experience and everyone who is a part of it.
In this state, desire and lust are no longer interesting to us. We start to see the sacredness in the other. We fall in love with the essence of a person, not with their ego personality, their possessions, or how they look. We just love them because they exist. And even if they betrayed us or left us, we wouldn’t stop loving them. Even if we must let go of them, we can still do so with unconditional love, because we understand that everything in this life is transient. We surrender to the fact that we all have our unique path, and not everyone can walk with us till the end of the road.
We no longer cling to or put all of our happiness on the person we love. We don’t feel like we have to take their love by force. We don’t fear losing them because the love we feel goes beyond whether they love us back or not. We have realized that we are our own infinite source of love and all we want to do is give it away to the other. We love them just for the sake of loving – because it’s natural to us, because it’s who we are.
This kind of unconditional love is incomprehensible to the ego, which knows only lust. When faced with this kind of love, the ego will inevitably be annihilated. And so, it runs as far away as possible from true love. It shuts it out because it fears it, it hates it. The ego doesn’t want to die, and nothing kills it faster than the force of unconditional love.
Love is the secret to disintegrating the ego and awakening the consciousness. A great kind of love can awaken us from the deepest sleep. It can make us see the truth that lies beyond the illusions of the ego. That’s why love is the most powerful force in the Universe. We can’t awaken without opening our heart, and we can only perceive the essence of love if our heart is open to receive it.
Most of us keep our hearts closed and our feelings numb. We go through life with a sense of emptiness because we are too afraid to feel. And for good reason, because opening the heart is the most painful thing we will ever experience. When we start opening our heart, all the pain, grief, and despair we have been suppressing come to the surface to be purged. They come out to be felt, acknowledged, and released, so they can make space for higher states of being. This process is incredibly painful for the ego.
That’s why opening the heart can feel like death sometimes – because it’s the death of the ego. When we are completely identified with the ego, opening the heart feels like we are the one who is dying. It feels like the world is closing in on us, like all there is in existence is despair and grief.
This is just an illusion. The ego is the only thing suffering when the heart opens. The true You, the Soul, can never be harmed or altered by anything that happens on the surface of existence. It can never be moved by any feeling or thought, because it is Consciousness itself; it’s the neutral, silent observer deep within, the eternal part of us that knows All and is All.
This is important to remember when we are in the midst of emotional chaos or when the mind is spiralling out of control. Once we realise that we are not the feelings or thoughts of grief, despair, regret, guilt, loneliness, or shame, we start to get glimpses of who we truly are – an infinite soul and a source of unconditional love; a limitless multidimensional being enjoying the dream of life.
Eventually, as our consciousness begins to expand, we start seeing through the fear of the ego, and we surrender to the heart. What felt like the end of the world before now feels like it’s exactly what we needed, and we are eternally grateful for it. No matter how terrified the ego mind might be, we realise that if there is anything worth doing in this life, it’s to open ourselves up and connect to our heart, where our true self lives – unhurt and eternal.
No matter how many times we must go through this process, if we know that it’s the greatest thing we can do for ourselves and for others, then it’s not that scary anymore. The ego starts to lose its pull, and the Being takes over. We start to see the beauty of this process, its divine purpose, and the profound effect it has on our lives and on our state of consciousness. We start to see through the delusions of desire, and we start choosing love every time, because we have seen it’s the only truth.