When you’re young and you fall in love, it may feel like a giddy roller coaster of glee, ice-cream, and giggles. Or if you don't like this characterization, refer to the song lyrics of your choice to get the vibe. Young and in love, or even old and in love, you might experience an intense rush of feelings, perhaps delight, joy, aliveness, bliss, ecstasy even. And it’s all drug-free! Love comes highly recommended.
But these feelings don’t last. They can’t. A month later, a year later, or a decade later those emotions won’t be there, at least not consistently. Unfortunately for the humans among us, there’s a decent chance the love will have turned to heartbreak, or hate, or fizzled out lamely.
The couple may (say they) still love each other. What does that mean? They may enjoy each other’s company. They may have interests in common. Perhaps they just feel reassured having someone beside them. But it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of 'real' love – whatever that is - in these
situations.
Real love is not a feeling. Feelings are transitory. Perhaps that initial rush of love is a feeling, but ongoing sustained love comes from your ‘being’, for want of a better word, not from your feelings. The problem is, most of the time the love that comes from our being is obscured by our accumulated emotional pain, the thoughts that take up so, so (SO!) much of our precious energy and attention, and our ideas and beliefs and opinions. (You may have noticed the proliferation of ideas, information and opinions I referred to the other day has not correlated with more love in the world.) So the Love that is natural to us, the 'True', 'Real' Love, the love that doesn't fade away or turn to hate or pain when things go wrong, remains hidden most of the time - except in children.
'True' Love is a tricky thing, and it is not what we think it is. The romance I'm involved in is messy, difficult and sometimes agonizingly painful. It's also profound, mysterious, impersonal, passionate, delightful, and wonderful despite all the challenges.
Perhaps the most important thing that can be said about it briefly today is that Love is Unity. When you love, really love, a partner, a friend, a family member, a pet, anything, a sports team even, there is a kinship there. A commonality. A oneness. That oneness represents unity, is unity. Unity after all comes from ‘unus / uno / un’ (um, pick a language here, I’m bluffing), meaning ‘one’.
The hopeless lack of unity in the AUSA (Allegedly UnitedStates of America), or any other supposedly united body, is indicative of a lack of love in that collective. There is a lack of love in the AUSA because of the reasons noted above (emotional pain and confusion, and obsessive thinking, opinions, and beliefs), which apply on the collective as well as the individual level. (The levels are – inevitably – interconnected.)
Love is the most important topic in our lives; it is what we want more than anything, whether we realize it or not. True Love, and specifically coming to know it and master it, is a matter of practical intelligence, not emotions, because it involves seeing the need for love, and the obstacles to it, and overcoming those obstacles. But we have a hopelessly confused and narrow view of what intelligence is too; so we disregard the essential practical challenge of addressing Love. In our ‘intelligence’ our scientists & technology will address basically every other topic in existence, but not that one.