Where love resides
We are lost from the moment we are born, cast into confusion and a world that preys on our fears, it offers no explanation, no instructions or even a compass. We start life by awakening into consciousness with no guide or destination in mind, we do not even have a notion of self or separation, we are exposed to our raw feelings, a purely sensory experience, we are not born with the complexity for emotion, we just react to base feeling and more exactly to changes in feeling. And whilst babies cry at any change, whether it is temperature, tiredness or hunger, is only the warmth of love that they desire and turned toward, we have the natural sense to seek love from our first moments, and yet some many of us lose that instinct and never get it back.
We forget it except when we look at a baby's face and see eyes that are truly looking for where love resides, that is because when we are so young is when we first look towards the external for our needs, we never have a chance to experience looking inwards and remember being totally direct ourselves towards that place that we want to be. Instead we start looking outside of us for love and we are encouraged to seek what is outside of us, it is the first journey that we take from exposure to the world to the cradle of our mother's arms and chest. It is a mother's instinct to pull their babies towards them surround them as much as physically possible, to enclose them in a protective shield of love, drawing them to a single point of concentration, reducing their stimulus towards their bodies warmth, darkness and familiar heartbeat, however her love is external and that is where we are pulled towards, when love is ultimately inside of us.
As we grow up there is a constant oscillation between experiencing the world and being drawn back again to the safety of your home, and a good parent encourages the expansion of their child's world. However like the rapid expansion of the universe, there comes a time when you collapse back, when the experience of driving out into the world, when you stop experiencing everything for the first time in the world and it becomes a more familiar place. The frequency of our new experiences decreases and we have to start dealing with things as ordinary, we miss that sense of expansion, bewilderment and fascination, and we are left with the nagging feeling that there is nothing inside us except our past and the story of who we are, has been defined by our environment and tribe, family and friends. We have been told so many times who we are, we have been given so many labels that we begin to think that they are true, that they actually have a meaning in themselves.
There is nothing wrong with labels that they are mere signposts towards experiences, blue means nothing without experiencing the beautiful blue of the sky, it is just a word until it is seen. So whilst you can label yourself however you like or de-label if that is your preference, what you really want is to have the experience of being you, because how can you love yourself if you do not know yourself.
Which if it seems like I am trying to present a cruel and impossible conundrum that is designed to torture you, it turns out we have been given an incredible gift, we are the ultimate comparing machine. Given two choices, two contrasting state, we can decide which one we prefer almost instantly, sweet or sour, cold or hot, pleasure or pain, however the most powerful contrast that we can feel is the difference between love and fear, it drives our desires and wants, we can head towards or away from something that we do not even have to express in words. The fear of danger and threats protect us, our bodies pull our hands away from fire without even consulting our minds, fear gives rise to heroics, fight, flight and freezing (which is the first reaction before deciding on whether you going to fight or flight, and one in which people can get stuck).
However it is love that makes life sweet which gives us a direction, that pulls us towards it as opposed to pushing us away as fear does, it is the positive to the others negative, they are opposite forces, both useful, each of them give us energy, propel us into action. Fear might sometimes feel like the stronger of the two, but it is love that is more persistent and ever present, love is what is left when fear disappears. That is why
it is so important to find out where it resides, to investigate it, trust it, rely on it, experience it at every given opportunity, become familiar with it, make it your friend and constant companion. You can sit with love comfortably, fear does not give you rest or put your mind at ease, it calls for action whereas love asks for nothing.
Fear knows the power of love and often tries to hide as it, it uses the clothes of love, the lust, passion and heat of it, it uses love to manipulate, it cares as a form of control, it serves itself rather than the others, it is only concerned with your pleasure and desires as for hiding from that which we fear. That is trying to use love as security, a plaster to hide how we have been hurt, how we have failed to deal with the pain and suffering that is a natural consequence of being sandwiched in between a hostile world and a mind that seeks to protect us with our own fear.
When we seek to find where love resides, it turns out that we are not talking about metaphors, there is an exact location, and it is where a child would point to when you ask them where their heart is, because they have not taught that the physical heart and the emotion of love are two different things. Which demonstrates how powerful the mind is that it can convince us that the truth is not the truth, that love is not exactly where we feel it is, a truth so obvious their child can point it out and adults can think themselves out of it, it can deny its own experience just because someone told it that it was wrong, and the fear of being wrong can overall your own senses.
It is only by returning to your senses, in the most literal sense possible, by using your nose you are far more likely to experience reality than your ever do by thinking your way there, smell the world, see the world, hear it, taste, feel it in every possible way. Do not try to put it into words, rationalise it or turn it into thoughts, intellectualise it, then let it be exactly as it is, let it be experienced without commentary, and if you get the hint of love, the tiniest spark, follow it like a bloodhound on the trail, relentlessly and with singular purpose, and then feel and experience again what you already knew as a child, but with the wisdom of an adult.
Perhaps the most important endeavour is in deciding who it is we wish to share our love with, and it is so difficult because it is so full of fear about ourselves and how others see us. We can sacrifice so much to preserve another person's image of us, give up even the possibility of love, to be a good person rather than an imperfect one, but to get love you have to experience it, feel it, give up your fear and trust it. The most important guide to love is your own heart, listen to it at every opportunity it gives you, when you are on a date, do not try to think your way to how you should feel, do not run a check-list of what you should be feeling, whether someone is good on paper, instead just feel, observe how you feel and then trust it. Then at least if you are wrong, you are wrong for the right reasons.
