There are four common confusions about LOVE which most of us will

assimilate at an early age. They are innocently passed down from

generation to generation, strengthened and magnified by Hollywood
in particular and by marketing in general. They are built into our
language and our culture and yet they only serve to take us further
from love as they create stress within our self and conflict within our
relationships.

1. Love is mistaken for DESIRE

When you go to the movies and watch the classic love story there is
usually a moment when he says to her, Darling, I love you but what
he really ‘means’ is, I want you. I want to be with you. I want you to
be mine...tonight!. And of course she reciprocates with an, I love you
too. Which of then means, I’ve got you! But true love doesn’t desire
or possess. True love doesn’t want anything. Authentic love is
already complete and its only intention is to connect and to give, not
acquire.

2. Love is mistaken for ATTACHMENT

When we say, I love my football team or I love my new car or I love
my garden. It’s not love. What we really ‘mean’ is, I am attached to
my football team, I am attached to my new car. And love is not
attachment, if for no other reason than all attachment causes fear,
and fear in this dualistic world is the opposite of love. Fear is love
distorted by attachment.

3. Love is mistaken for DEPENDENCY

When we say, I love my cocaine. I love my morning coffee. I love the
food they serve this is to confuse love with dependency. Love is not
dependent on anything. We are really saying we believe these things
make us happy. They seem to, but it’s not ‘authentic happiness’, only
a temporary stimulation or relief from suffering.

4. Love is mistaken for IDENTIFICATION

More commonly some say, I love my nation, I love my country. Again,
this is not love it’s identification. We are identifying with a
nationality, which in itself is a mistake. The self has no nationality.
Love does not identify with anything that is not itself, which is
everything! As soon as we identify with something that we are not
the ego takes birth, suffering arises and love is impossible.
It is these illusions that keep us searching for love. In our search for
love we will look in almost every corner of the world. We seek love
as acceptance and approval in our many relationships. We desire the
ideal love in the fiction of the perfect romance. We expect to find
love in what we do, what we acquire and even in the places we go.
There are always temporary satisfactions on these roads, but
disappointment is also inevitable, until we realize they are dead
ends. It may take us a little time to realize that the jewel in the crown
of the human spirit cannot be found anywhere but in our own heart.
It was, is and always will be there, which is ‘here’!

To search for love is to avoid love. And yet how are we to know this
when the habit of searching is so deep and, in many ways, a
perverted comfort in itself. How are we to know love, when we
continue to mistakenly believe that we need to acquire it, earn it or
even win it? Intuitively we know that it is only by opening our own
heart and in the giving of our self, without condition, that love can
start to flow into and through our life.

Only by acts of selfless kindness, unconditional forgiveness and

limitless compassion is love felt. Only by the intention to benefit ‘the
other’ before the self, is love made real and realized. And yet, even
this is only possible when it is not a deliberated act, when motive is
innocent. The motivation ‘to love’ is not love, for love needs no
motive.

It is the satisfaction of all need.

When love is realized, there are no needs. In ‘reality’, there never
was. Only when we can bring an end to wanting, taking, keeping and
even giving in the ‘name’ of love, is the jewel in the crown able to
shine again. And when its light is seen it is found to be in the place
where it cannot be sought and can never leave, which is here, and in
the only time it can ever exist, which is now. In that moment, all the
accumulated mythologies of love fall away. In that moment the words
most used in the affairs of humankind, I love you, are transformed
from an illusion into something closer to the truth, I am love for you.
And then into the deepest truth that words are inadequate to
describe, I am love. And then on to the final enlightenment, free from
the need to describe, free of all concepts, simply I am. And even
then, beyond enlightenment, into the ‘silence of being’, a silence
that both embraces and enjoins all and everything.
Such is the nature of LOVE.
It is what ‘I am’ and it is what ‘you are’.
It is.

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our
original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the
wound of human nature.” Plato's Symposium, 191B-D

Love is ingrained in human beings and each person seeks his other
half; the power of love resides in us and we crave for our other tally.
When one half meets the other one, they are overwhelmed with
affection and passion and never wish to be apart – an ecstasy is
found in the melting of themselves into one another: “The two are
struck from their senses by love by a sense of belonging to one
another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from
one another, not even for a moment.” - Plato's Symposium , 192C